Arbitrage, State Prices and Portfolio Theory / Philip h. Dybvig and Stephen a. Ross / - Intertemporal Asset Pricing Theory / Darrell Duffle / - Tests of Multifactor Pricing Models, Volatility Bounds and Portfolio Performance / Wayne E. Ferson / - Consumption-Based Asset Pricing / John y Campbell / - The Equity Premium in Retrospect / Rainish Mehra and Edward c. Prescott / - Anomalies and Market Efficiency / William Schwert / - Are Financial Assets Priced Locally or Globally? / G. Andrew Karolyi and Rene M. Stuli / - Microstructure and Asset Pricing / David Easley and Maureen O'hara / - A Survey of Behavioral Finance / Nicholas Barberis and Richard Thaler / - Derivatives / Robert E. Whaley / - Fixed-Income Pricing / Qiang Dai and Kenneth J. Singleton.

The book compiles a comprehensive set of case of studies in business and accounting from the MENA region. These case studies consist of practical research studies with strong theoretical foundations. Hence, the book is a guide to the industries in various sectors regarding the best practices for efficient business and accounting management. In addition, the book will serve as an important teaching reference for business and accounting courses in the MENA region.

This review lays out a research perspective on earnings quality. We provide an overview of alternative definitions and measures of earnings quality and a discussion of research design choices encountered in earnings quality research. Throughout, we focus on a capital markets setting, as opposed, for example, to a contracting or stewardship setting. Our reason for this choice stems from the view that the capital market uses of accounting information are fundamental, in the sense of providing a basis for other uses, such as stewardship. Because resource allocations are ex ante decisions while contracting/stewardship assessments are ex post evaluations of outcomes, evidence on whether, how and to what degree earnings quality influences capital market resource allocation decisions is fundamental to understanding why and how accounting matters to investors and others, including those charged with stewardship responsibilities. Demonstrating a link between earnings quality and, for example, the costs of equity and debt capital implies a basic economic role in capital allocation decisions for accounting information; this role has only recently been documented in the accounting literature. We focus on how the precision of financial information in capturing one or more underlying valuation-relevant constructs affects the assessment and use of that information by capital market participants. We emphasize that the choice of constructs to be measured is typically contextual. Our main focus is on the precision of earnings, which we view as a summary indicator of the overall quality of financial reporting. Our intent in discussing research that evaluates the capital market effects of earnings quality is both to stimulate further research in this area and to encourage research on related topics, including, for example, the role of earnings quality in contracting and stewardship.

Seize the competitive edge through intelligent, differentiated capital allocation The intelligent deployment of capital is one of the most effective ways to create long-term value. But despite this, there are very few capital allocation experts on the boards of the largest publicly traded companies, and academic research consistently finds that most firms deploy capital sub-optimally. Capital Allocation aims to educate senior leaders, board members, investors, students, and anyone interested in business on this important topic. Until now very little has been written on capital allocation outside of academia, even though the strategic deployment of excess capital is an increasingly significant source of competitive advantage for many companies. David Giroux, Chief Investment Officer for Equities and Multi-Asset and Head of Investment Strategy at T. Rowe Price, covers the entire gamut of capital allocation issues, including optimal capital structure, capital allocation alternatives, mergers & acquisitions, and special situations. Capital Allocation walks you through this critical topic from beginning to end, including: Stories of companies that allocated capital in ways that created significant shareholder value Several real-life decision-making models you can use for strategically allocating your firm’s capital Guidelines for generating high returns in the long term to build sustainable shareholder wealth Giroux uses academic research, personal experience, and uncomplicated mathematics to reveal approaches and actions that create long-term value. He provides case studies from Kodak, Comcast, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Danaher, General Electric, Microsoft, and others showing how capital allocation has―and hasn’t―worked in real-life situations. And he shows how to use capital allocation to head off possible activist investors. Capital Allocation offers everything you need to know for deploying capital wisely to outperform your competitors over the long term.

Academic finance has had a remarkable impact on many financial services. Yet long-term investors have received curiously little guidance from academic financial economists. Mean-variance analysis, developed almost fifty years ago, has provided a basic paradigm for portfolio choice. This approach usefully emphasizes the ability of diversification to reduce risk, but it ignores several critically important factors. Most notably, the analysis is static; it assumes that investors care only about risks to wealth one period ahead. However, many investors—-both individuals and institutions such as charitable foundations or universities—-seek to finance a stream of consumption over a long lifetime. In addition, mean-variance analysis treats financial wealth in isolation from income. Long-term investors typically receive a stream of income and use it, along with financial wealth, to support their consumption. At the theoretical level, it is well understood that the solution to a long-term portfolio choice problem can be very different from the solution to a short-term problem. Long-term investors care about intertemporal shocks to investment opportunities and labor income as well as shocks to wealth itself, and they may use financial assets to hedge their intertemporal risks. This should be important in practice because there is a great deal of empirical evidence that investment opportunities—-both interest rates and risk premia on bonds and stocks—-vary through time. Yet this insight has had little influence on investment practice because it is hard to solve for optimal portfolios in intertemporal models. This book seeks to develop the intertemporal approach into an empirical paradigm that can compete with the standard mean-variance analysis. The book shows that long-term inflation-indexed bonds are the riskless asset for long-term investors, it explains the conditions under which stocks are safer assets for long-term than for short-term investors, and it shows how labor income influences portfolio choice. These results shed new light on the rules of thumb used by financial planners. The book explains recent advances in both analytical and numerical methods, and shows how they can be used to understand the portfolio choice problems of long-term investors.