This paper takes a systematic look at the portfolio choice problem faced by investment banks or funds investing in transition economies. We relate the performance of projects in the transition economies to the broader macroeconomic and international environment, which affect the project through...

Money managers are rewarded for increasing the value of assets under management, and predominantly so in the mutual fund industry. This gives the manager an implicit incentive to exploit the well-documented positive fund-flows to relative-performance relationship by manipulating her risk...

Money managers are rewarded for increasing the value of assets under management, and predominantly so in the mutual fund industry. This gives the manager an implicit incentive to exploit the well-documented positive fund-flows to relative-performance relationship by manipulating her risk...

Recent empirical work suggests a strong connection between the incentives money managers are offered and their risk-taking behavior. We develop a general model of delegated portfolio management, with the feature that the agent can control the riskiness of the portfolio. This represents a...

There is now extensive empirical evidence showing that fund managers have relative performance objectives and adapt their investment strategy in the last part of the calendar year to balance their performance in the early part of the year. However, emphasis was put on returns in excess of some...

This Paper constitutes a first attempt to analyse the impact of the emergence of new funds on portfolio decisions of mutual fund managers who are evaluated on the basis of relative performance. Recent theoretical literature has pointed to the inefficiencies in portfolio selection caused by...

We examine the risk-return characteristics of a rolling portfolio investment strategy where more than six thousand Nasdaq initial public offering (IPO) stocks are bought and held for up to five years. The average long-run portfolio return is low, but IPO stocks appear as ‘longshots’, as...

In this Paper, we provide a novel rationale for credit ratings. The rationale that we propose is that credit ratings can serve as a coordinating mechanism in situations where multiple equilibria can obtain. We show that credit ratings provide a ‘focal point’ for firms and their investors. We...

IPO initial returns reached astronomical levels during 1999-2000. We show that the regime shift in initial returns and other elements of pricing behaviour can be at least partially accounted for by a variety of marked changes in pre-IPO ownership structure and insider selling behaviour over the...

We examine deal-level data on private equity transactions in the UK initiated during the period 1996 to 2004 by mature private equity houses. We un-lever the deal-level equity return and adjust for (un-levered) return to quoted peers to extract a measure of "alpha" or abnormal performance of the...