Sustainable debt has become a key issue in rating of private as well as sovereign debtors. The problem of how to estimate sustainable debt has also been at the center of debate over theAsian 1997-1998 financial crisis. If the external value of the currency depends on the external debt of a...

Empirical investigations of analysts forecast surveys concerning earnings realizations find significant time varying biases usually attributed to the analysts liability to cognitive limitations. For example, a positive autocorrelation of analysts forecast errors is commonly explained by...

The k Nearest Neighb or (kNN) density estimator first for-malized by Loftsgaarden and Quesenb erry (1965) is central to a broad range of the literature on density estimation. It is knownto b e strongly uniformly consistent if k increases appropriatelywith the sample size. The contribution of...

This paper analyzes the independence of boards of directors as an optimally chosen, non-contractible behavior. A board behaves loyally to a CEO when it agrees to a negative NPV-pro ject, giving the CEO private benefits. While the CEO benefitsfrom competent directors because they help him make...

An agent shows loyalty to his manager by bearing personal costs to the superiors benefit. In return, the manager may offer various forms of rewards. If this exchange is not contractible, typically repeated interaction will be required to sustain it. Beyond loyalty, the manager is interested in...

Recent organizational theories suggest that there is a tradeoff between loyalty and competence. This paper tests several such theories in the context of public agencies. Prime ministers, chancellors, and kings alike need to secure the (efficient or inefficient) loyalty of their agencies, such as...

In recent years, tradeable permits (TP) have become widespread in use. One noteworthy point is that the international experience is rather small. Europe has only relatively recently begun to develop such programs. There is a wealth of resources available that comment on the rise of these...

As early as 1934 Graham and Dodd conjectured that excess returns from value investment originate from a tendency of markets to converge towards fundamental values. This paper confirms their insights theoretically within the evolutionary finance model of Evstigneev, Hens, and Schenk-Hopp (2006)...

We apply the recurrent reinforcement learning method of Moody et al. (1998) in the context of the strategic asset allocation computed for sample data from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany. It is found that the optimal asset allocation deviates substantially from the fixed-mix...

This paper shows that in financial markets with endogenous asset supply and demand, both rational and noise traders do coexist in the long run. The finding implies that financial markets are neither informationally nor allocationally efficient. While rational traders have a consistently higher...