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Develops a new objective measure of the levels of investment/performance in information technology (IT) by companies from different industries. This measure, called the Relative Information Technology Index (RITI), is then utilized to examine the relationship between IT investment, on the one hand, and company′s control, governance and ownership structure on the other. The empirical results suggest meaningful relationships between IT investment/performance and management ownership and the ratio of outside to inside directors on the board.

The relative performance of five popular nonzero-investment strategies, including Size, book-to-market ratios, earnings-to-price (E/P) ratios, cash flow-to-price (CF/P) ratios and dividend-to-price ratios, and their corresponding zero-investment strategies (also known as premiums) are first examined altogether for equally weighted (EW) and value-weighted (VW) methods to check whether a certain strategy (or some strategies) could be recommended to portfolio managers as the best (better) strategy (strategies). The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper uses the stochastic dominance (SD) approach, a non-parametric test, to investigate the relative performance among various strategies and help investors search for the best or better strategy (strategies).

The main results show that both the highest E/P and CF/P strategies (and their corresponding premiums) generally produce higher returns than the other three strategies (and their corresponding premiums) through allocating investors’ capital between the risky and risk-free assets for the EW and VW methods, respectively.

This study only examines US stock markets by SD approach, whether the results are consistent with non-US markets still needs further investigation. The findings imply that investors can benefit by investing in the highest E/P or CF/P stocks (or their corresponding premiums) to make more profit or less loss for US stock markets.

First, the SD findings suggest that investors or portfolio managers can allocate their funds between risky and risk-free assets to maximize their profits. Next, the simulation results again prove that the profits of each nonzero-investment or zero-investment strategy for EW portfolios are higher than those of each corresponding strategy for VW portfolios. Finally, the findings imply that portfolio managers or investors can invest in the highest E/P or CF/P stocks (or their corresponding premiums) to make more profit or less loss.

This study first uses an extensive data set (1952-2009) to examine the relative performance of nonzero-investment strategies and their corresponding zero-investment strategies for the five popular indicators altogether for the EW and VW methods with the SD approach for US stock markets. Moreover, the results reveal that the investors or portfolio managers can invest in the highest E/P and/or CF/P portfolios (or their corresponding premiums) to make more profit or less loss.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of the public pension governance practices on the public defined benefit pension (DBP) fund performance.

To provide a holistic evaluation of public DBP performance, this study first employs the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach to construct a relative performance measure that simultaneously takes into account the association between investment inputs and performance outputs across DBPs in our sample. A DEA regression model is then constructed to empirically examine the impact of pension governance on public DBP performance.

Using 1,544 hand-collected observations in the USA from 2002 to 2013, the findings show that the public DBP plans with a small board, appointed board trustees, and a separate investment council exhibit better performance.

The effectiveness of pension governance has increasingly drawn public attention, as it affects the performance of the public DBP plans that especially matter to public employees. The empirical findings of this research offer insights into recent calls to reexamine public DBP management practices and to carry out related public pension fund policy reforms.

The examination of public DBP governance practices in this study enriches the governance literature, particularly research on public pension funds, by using public sector data. Second, by applying the DEA method to evaluate the relative performance of public DBP funds, this study obtains a more comprehensive analysis of the public pension governance.

The purpose of this paper is to expand the peer effect analysis to investments in the stock market, where neither direct competition nor interaction with other investors exists.

A total of 772 subjects dwelling in six countries completed a questionnaire about their satisfaction with the performance of their hypothetical investment in the stock market. They were informed about the performance of the local stock market and the performance of their peer group, referred to in the questionnaire as their “friends.”

Only 5 per cent of subjects are indifferent to their friends’ investment performance, as advocates by expected utility paradigm. Most subjects are happier when their friends earn lower rather than higher returns. On average, subjects are better off losing rather than gaining money as long as their friends lose more money, which violates the univariate monotonicity axiom. A negligible number of subjects exhibit a consistent favorable response, which is a necessary condition for pure economic altruism. Hostility is greater in less-wealthy countries. No link is found with regard to economic inequality.

This paper shows that when a conflict between absolute wealth and relative wealth arises, the latter dominates, even when the comparison is not with an opponent or a colleague but with the subject’s friends. The astonishing result is that subjects prefer having less wealth as long as their friends lose more, despite no direct competition between subjects as in ultimatum games and despite the performance being equal to market performance.

Quite a substantial number of academic papers have examined the performance of both direct and indirect real estate relative to other investment assets. While these studies are valuable in the field of real estate investment performance measurements, a gap still exist in the literature on the comparative performance of investment assets in the various sectors of the stock markets of most emerging economies. This paper aims to fill the gap by providing analysis of the historical performance of real estate and other securities in the Nigerian capital market.

Annual open and closing market prices of shares and dividend of sampled listed companies in addition to data on all share index (ASI), consumer price index (CPI) and yield on 90‐days T‐Bill were obtained for the period 1999‐2005. These were then analysed using descriptive, risk‐adjusted measures and regression models.

The empirical evidence suggests that while real estate outperformed the market on a nominal basis, it underperformed the market stock on a risk‐adjusted basis over the time period of analysis. Unexpectedly, real estate security did not provide a good protection against inflation and is also uncorrelated with the stock market.

This paper provides empirical evidence of the investment characteristic of indirect real estate investment in Nigeria. The results suggest that real estate security does not after all provide a good substitute to direct real estate investment.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the relationship between an individual investor’s personality trait and his perceived investment performance. It proposes a novel conceptual framework that integrates social influence (as a moderating construct) and outlines the role of personality in determining the perceived investment performance during the investment decision-making process.

A questionnaire-based survey was conducted to collect responses from 396 individual investors through stratified and quota sampling approach. The collected data were then analysed using both hierarchical regression analysis and structural equation modelling to evaluate the strength of the relationship between the constructs, namely, personality trait, perceived investment performance and social influence.

This study suggests that social influence positively moderates the relationship between extraversion-perceived investment performance, whereas it negatively moderates the relationship between agreeability-perceived investment performance.

This study has certain limitations. First, this work follows a modelling approach which is more centred towards the prediction of relationships. Second, because of choosing a research approach (since the study has been conducted in one country, i.e. India), the results of the study may lack generalisability. Therefore, further studies could be encouraged to test the proposed hypotheses.

Insights from this study suggest that investors should look in for their personality traits while making an investment decision. In fact, psychologically modified portfolios should be developed as per the personality traits of the investors.

The study, perhaps, is the only study to apply social influence in a framework using Big Five personality traits as a possible factor to understand the individual differences in terms of perceived investment performance.

The purpose of this paper is to examine individual level property returns to see whether there is evidence of persistence in performance, i.e. a greater than expected probability of well (badly) performing properties continuing to perform well (badly) in subsequent periods.

The same methodology originally used in Young and Graff is applied, making the results directly comparable with those for the US and Australian markets. However, it uses a much larger database covering all UK commercial property data available in the Investment Property Databank (IPD) for the years 1981 to 2002 – as many as 216,758 individual property returns.

While the results of this study mimic the US and Australian results of greater persistence in the extreme first and fourth quartiles, they also evidence persistence in the moderate second and third quartiles, a notable departure from previous studies. Likewise patterns across property type, location, time, and holding period are remarkably similar.

The findings suggest that performance persistence is not a feature unique to particular markets, but instead may characterize most advanced real estate investment markets.

As well as extending previous research geographically, the paper explores possible reasons for such persistence, consideration of which leads to the conjecture that behaviors in the practice of institutional‐grade commercial real estate investment management may themselves be deeply rooted and persistent, and perhaps influenced for good or ill by agency effects.

This paper seeks to examine the extent of real estate investment concentration in institutional industrial portfolios at these same two points in time.

To examine this issue two datasets are used at two dates, 1998 and 2003. The analysis is confined to England and Wales because of data considerations relating to the availability of comparable data for the rest of the UK. The first dataset relates to floor space and rateable value statistics for the so‐called “bulk classes” of commercial property at Unitary Authority and District (local authority area, LA) level. The more specific institutional real estate investment data for the study come from the IPD analysis “UK Local Markets”. This provides a detailed view of the performance of institutional real estate investment, by sector, in a number of localities across the UK. For the purposes of this study, IPD made data available showing (but with much less detail) other LAs where the number of properties held was greater than zero, but fewer than the four required normally for disclosure. The approach taken is to map the basic data and the results from a standardising measure of spatial concentration – the Location Quotient.

The findings show that industrial investment concentration is between that of retail and offices and is focused on LAs with high levels of manual workers in areas with smaller industrial units. It also shows that during the period studied the structure of the sector changed, with greater emphasis on the distributional (logistic) element, for which location is a principal consideration. Historically, the sector has provided consistently good total returns with low risk, and was the only sector to expand in terms of numbers of institutionally invested units over the study period. While industrial real estate assets generally do not attract as much capital growth as other sectors, especially in boom periods, rents continued to grow in the period under study. Taken together with the relative resilience in the sector's performance seen over successive cycles, it is not surprising that significant institutional enthusiasm was evidenced.

Using data sets that account for the entire “population” of observations at these two dates the paper demonstrates the relationships between economic theory and the market performance of the sector. The comparisons with the other main sectors also show the differences that would be expected between the sectors, emphasising the point that these markets are dynamic and that their structure, form and content can change dramatically even over quite short periods.

The purpose of this paper is to address the importance of cultural values, the organizational culture and management style for innovation. It also comparatively evaluates the actual performance of European countries in innovation.

In this paper, the theoretical frameworks of the well-known scholars Hofstede, House, Schwartz, Boisot and Cameron and Quinn are critically evaluated and compared with each other. In addition, the authors compared the cultural rankings and the actual performance in innovation of selected European countries. Before addressing the impact of culture on the innovative strength of nations, different definitions of innovation are being described. The theoretical framework developed on the basis of the six Hofstede dimensions is composed; the nine House dimensions are supplemented and the Schwartz values for innovative strength of nations are also being discussed. Culture as a knowledge asset, the positioning in information space and its influence on innovation following the theories of Boisot and the different cultural types as defined by Cameron and Quinn have been studied and evaluated. The performance of European countries in innovation has been evaluated on the basis of the Global Innovation Index, the patent applications to the European Patent Office and the European Innovation Scoreboard.

Based on literature review, one can conclude that there is a strong positive relation between several cultural characteristics of countries in question and their innovative strength. The results of this paper point out the importance of cultural values for innovation.

This research has assessed the relation between national culture in general on the innovative strength of nations. Future research on which cultural characteristics and management styles have the strongest correlation with the innovative strength of nations could provide valuable insights for both scholars in this research field and for institutions and companies that wish to improve their innovative strength.

The results of this study provide us with the insight that the innovative strength of a nation or organization can be altered by changing (parts of) its culture. A practical implication of this finding is that a government can, for example, increase its nation’s innovative strength by encouraging cooperation between different institutions and by limiting rules and regulations which could cause barriers in the innovation process.

A social implication of the findings of this study is the knowledge that to improve the innovative strength of a nation, a government needs to pursue a pro-active policy of transforming national culture, for example, by changing the educational system and decreasing the power distance between teachers and students. Such an effort to influence the national culture addresses interesting issues regarding the concept of social engineering.

By critically evaluating the qualitative cultural frameworks of several well-known scholars and relating them to quantitative statistical data about the innovative strength of nations, this study has combined the strengths of both qualitative and quantitative methodologies and produced non-trivial findings in an original manner.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the sources of direct real estate portfolio returns and their relative performance against Investment Property Databank (IPD) benchmark returns. Active property management consists of the concepts of property transaction execution and operational management, which can be classified as the main drivers of excess return sources.

Using a sample of three different portfolios managed by two institutional investors, the paper is able to estimate the relevant factors of active property management on annual excess returns for commercial and residential property sectors via a panel regression technique.

Empirical evidence shows that property‐specific effects exhibit significant sources of excess returns, but property management cannot be identified as their main driver. Furthermore, the sources of excess returns do not differ significantly across sectors; when controlled for property age and size, it is found that their influence is rather limited.

Information about the drivers of excess returns and their variations among property types may lead to superior investment decisions during portfolio rebalancing, and thus promote more efficient capital allocation. Information about return factors, i.e. about property and operational management, can substantially improve property selection and market timing in the asset allocation process. Hence, investors basing their property investment strategies on the impact of selected return factors could enhance the risk‐adjusted performance of their property portfolios.

This paper aims to contribute to the existing literature by identifying and quantifying the excess return sources of a given property portfolio over a predefined benchmark. Due to the lack of property‐related data, there is only limited research on the sources of direct property returns, such as property characteristics or active property management. The authors explore three main questions in this paper. First, they examine sources of excess returns over a benchmark index for several property sectors. Second, they analyze whether the drivers of excess returns vary significantly across these sectors. Third, they determine to what extent excess property returns are influenced by the “economic age” and “rentable area” of a building.