Financial markets

They care about society at large.

To the list of reasons to resent Wall Street, now add another: It’s a wet blanket on innovation. A new study by Mary Benner of the Wharton School (published this year in Organization Science) examines the way securities analysts research and report on incumbent firms in industries undergoing disruptive change. She finds that analysts tend […]

It's hard to call yourself a green company if your cash assets are underwriting global warming.

Companies are increasingly paying for acquisitions with stock rather than cash. But both they and the companies they acquire need to understand just how big a difference that decision can make to the value shareholders will get from a deal.

Start with pay flexibility, budget management support, and retirement planning.

A survey showed that CEOs worldwide are making exponentially more money than people think they should.

What the argument against stock repurchases gets wrong

Some people—in particular, panicky policy makers at the Fed—fear that the new economy is a bubble about to burst. They’re dead wrong. Barring any government interference, the new economy is rock solid and here to stay.

In financial markets, as in many human endeavors, there’s a battle between reason and madness. On one side are the disciples of the efficient-markets hypothesis: the notion that markets fully, accurately, and instantaneously incorporate all relevant information into prices. These adherents assume that market participants are rational, always acting in their own interest and making […]

When investor expectations are impossible to meet, bad behaviors ensue.

World financial assets are growing faster than the world economy. Confronting that and other modern realities of global finance requires more than regulatory...

Research reveals how activist investors help and hurt.

Investors don't weigh reputations equally.

Digital financial companies are making big claims about financial inclusion - but are failing to disclose data that backs up their efforts.

Activist investors and mistaking M&A for strategy.

Krugman - a professor at Princeton University, the most recent winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, and a columnist for the New York Times - talks...

Promising corporate blueprints are often hard to understand—and too few market analysts are willing to make the effort.

What the referendum is really about.

Why do large corporations sell off business units to PE firms that make a fortune by selling them a few years later? The author, a former Rotman School...

The way we deal with risk depends on how we define it. This is often a more complicated task than appears. Risk is such a many-headed monster that selecting the right head to strike at can be a big challenge. Corporate executives have traditionally defined pension fund risk in terms of the trade-off between risk […]