Investors rely on analyst recommendations when making investment decisions. Over the last few years, however, sell-side analysts have caught the attention of the supervisory authorities given their vulnerability to numerous conflicts of interest. In this paper, we empirically examine relevant...

"Understanding the determinants of real estate investment performance is a necessary precondition for successful portfolio management. In particular the relationships between real estate returns and key economic factors such as GDP, total investment as well as unemployment, bank and inflation...

Purpose – Intangible assets are regarded as the future value drivers of company performance. However, hardly anything is known about the actual importance and influence of intangible assets. The purpose of this paper is to fill this gap, so the authors analyse the German stock market index DAX...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze whether key investor information documents (KIDs) provided by suppliers/issuers help retail investors to understand the key characteristics of financial products. KIDs are fact sheets composed to describe the characteristics of financial...

Tests and comparisons of products can provide useful information on both quality and value of goods and services for consumers, suppliers, and for consumer policy, for example watchdogs. In a market economy like Germany, where consumer markets are not fully transparent and functioning, testing...

Diversification in real estate portfolio management can be mainly differentiated in geographic or property-type based strategies. Within geographic diversification, risk reduction can be achieved through different strategies. Diversification benefits through international diversification have...

Consumer policy analysis and practice is largely embedded in the economic paradigm of neoclassical economics and its more recent forms (institutional economics, economics of information). However, there is increasing evidence that consumers not only fail to make optimal choices because of...