Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of operating leverage, and the subsequent abandonment option available to managers, on the relationship between corporate earnings and optimal financial leverage, thereby providing an alternative (rational) explanation for the...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate how several key risk factors, including capital-to-asset ratio (CAR), franchise value and lobbying, affect various measures of risk in the US banking industry before, during and after the financial crisis. The empirical analysis covers the...

The increase in the price of gold between 2002 and 2011 appears to be a candidate for a potential asset price ‘bubble’, suggesting that chartists (feedback traders) were highly active in the gold market during this period. Hence, this paper develops and tests empirically several models...