It is argued that construction is an important sector of the Welsh economy in terms of employment, wages and growth. Key competence and capacity issues have arisen, however, due to large contracting firms concentrating on core activities and subcontracting peripheral activities to Small...

[...]We recommend that a study incorporating our suggested refinements should now take place into a furthergroup of sectors of interest to policy makers to test further the framework and any improvements builtinto it.[...]

Exchange Traded Funds (ETF) were established in Europe in 2000 and have grown to a sizeof over 200 bn US$. Some issuers use a full replication strategy while others prefer a swapbased approach. The ETF are dealt parallelly in the primary and in the secondary market, asnew ETFs can be created at...

Hedge Funds are often considered as a possibility for optimizing traditional portfolios due to their alternative risk factors and sources of return. But as the return distribution of hedge funds shows negative skewness and excess kurtosis, using portfolio optimization techniques, based on the...

The paper deals with the evaluation of Collateralized Debt Obligations forinvestment purposes. CDOs are classified in the asset backed environment. Itsspecific risks (market, timing, recovery, agency) are discussed. To understand theportfolio aspect, the concept of the diversity score is...

This paper shows that Economic Value Added (EVA) can be used to optimize theperformance of european share investements. Investing in the top third relative EVAperformers, leads to a significant outperformance. This is true for market and sektorinvestments. The best results were found for growth...