Before you read any how-to investment books or seek financial advice, read Unexpected Returns, the essential resource for investors and investment professionals who want to understand how and why the financial markets are not the same now as they were in the 1980s and 1990s. In addition to explaining the fundamentals, this book takes you on a graphic journey through the seasons of the market, tying together economics and finance to explain the stock market's cycles. Using comprehensive full-color charts and graphs, it offers an in-depth exploration of what has changed over the past five years - and what you can do about it to avoid disappointment with your investments. This unique combination of investment science and investment art will enable you to differentiate between irrational hope and a rational view of the current financial markets. Based on years of meticulous research, it provides the sensible conclusions that will drive your future investment choices and give you the confidence to rely on your investment outlook, whatever your financial strategy. Book jacket.

Real estate finance is a fast-developing area where top quality research is in great demand. In the US, the real estate market is worth about US$4 trillion, and the REITs market about US$200 billion; tens of thousands of real estate professionals are working in this area. The market overseas could be considerably larger, especially in Asia. Given the rapidly growing real estate securities industry, this book fills an important gap in current real estate research and teaching. It is an ideal reference for investment professionals as well as senior MBA and PhD students.

Mathias Külpmann presents a framework to evaluate whether the stock market is in line with underlying fundamentals. The new and revised edition offers an up to date introduction to the controversy between rational asset pricing and behavioural finance. Empirical evidence of stock market overreaction are investigated within the paradigms of rational asset pricing and behavioural finance. Although this monograph will not promise the reader to become a millionaire, it offers a road to obtain a deeper understanding of the forces which drive stock returns. It should be of interest to anyone interested in what drives performance in the stock market.

Although much consideration has been given to the relationship between a corporation and its stakeholders, less attention has been given as to who those stakeholders might consist of. In this book we take the widest definition of stakeholders and consider aspect of the corporation’s responsibility to this community.

Investment strategies relate to an extensive range of aspects and have attracted the attention of investors and students, academics, researchers, financial executives, portfolio managers, security analysts, financial engineers, practitioners, including at the level of Nobel prizes (Tobin, 1981, for the analysis of financial markets; Markowitz, Sharpe, 1990, for modern portfolio models; Black, Scholes, Merton, 1997, for option pricing; Akerlof, Stiglitz, Spence, 2001, for markets with asymmetric information). Even common people talk daily about investments, investment tactics and strategies, and how to obtain success. In the absence of an investment philosophy, they try to copy celebrities or professional advisors without understanding the mechanics of markets, their core beliefs, strengths, or weaknesses. Beyond the traditional stocks and bonds, there are many other types of assets and alternative investments, and investors are overwhelmed by the huge number of portfolio architecture and management options. Regardless of the types of investors, portfolios are no longer a simple list of assets, and their management requires impressive skills. Decision models have significantly evolved from the Markowitz portfolio model toward capital market paradigms in the context of managing unrealistic assumptions or adding the treatment of market imperfections, multiperiod objectives, and transaction costs. The index of portfolio risk provides an intuitive image of diversification. There is an interest in the integration of new visions in investment strategies: determinism, complexity, nonlinearity, self-organization and chaos, trading rules, evolutionary games, real-options games and artificial markets, bounded rationality, heterogeneous agents, and behavioral investments. From the evolutionary perspective, investors interpret information by encoding and categorization, trying to simplify the strategies by using rules of thumb and heuristics. The present work contributes to the understanding of current investment processes by offering the tactical and strategic elements specific to global markets as well as emerging ones in a multilayer approach useful to decision-makers, investors, students, and researchers in the field.

Strategic management has been increasingly characterized by an emphasis on core competences. Firms are advised to divest unrelated businesses and return to core business. Moreover, competitive advantage is now increasingly seen as a matter of efficiently deploying scarce knowledge resources toproduct markets. Much of this change in emphasis has occurred because of the emergence of a unified and rigorous approach to strategy, often called the resource-based approach. This Reader brings together extracts from the seminal articles that created this dominant perspective in strategicmanagement. It includes the pioneering work of Selznick, Penrose, and Chandler and more recent writing by Wernerfelt, Barney, Teece, and Prahalad and Hamel.

The imbalanced, yet mutually beneficial, trading relationship between the United States and Asia has long been one of international finance’s most perplexing mysteries. Although the United States continues to post a substantial trade deficit—and China reaps the benefits of a surplus—the dollar has yet to sink in the face of ever-increasing account disparities. International Financial Issues in the Pacific Rim explains why the United States enjoys a seemingly symbiotic relationship with its trading partners despite stark inequities in the trade balance, especially with Asia. This timely and well-informed study also debunks the assumed link between economic openness and low inflation in the region, identifies the serious gap between academic and private-sector researchers’ understanding of exchange rate volatility, and analyzes the liberalization of Asian capital accounts. International Financial Issues in the Pacific Rim will have broad implications for global trade and economic policy issues in Asia and beyond.