Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1969. / Typescript. Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 188-196).

Thesis (Promotionsarbeit)--Universität München, 1929. / Includes bibliographical references ([v]-vii).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1970. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M. Inst. Agrar.)(Agricultural Economics)-University of Pretoria, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references. Available on the Internet via the World Wide Web.

Working capital management assists a firm in achieving improved liquidity through management of the components of receivables, inventory and payables. Previous studies have established that working capital has a strong positive correlation to profitability. These studies have also shown that the components of receivables and inventory have a positive correlation to profitability, while payables have an inverse relationship. The inverse correlation of payables in relation to profitability is contrary to the theory that advocates extending payables’ payment terms as a means of managing working capital and improving liquidity. This study attempted to ascertain whether, by applying a style-based test, to an extensive database of Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) listed South African companies, there is evidence to support a positive relationship between returns to investors and payables days. The study further applied the style-based test to the relationship between returns to investors and the management of payables in the form of change in payables days. Further data stratification was applied to industries that are more significantly invested in payables as well as to companies of increasing or decreasing momentum to differentiate the payables strategy of an increasingly profitable company versus an increasingly unprofitable company. The results of the study indicated that for those companies in industries that have significant investment in payables, management of their payables will achieve superior returns. The study also revealed that this relationship is significant for companies in the top 40% momentum return and that higher change in payables could be applied as a means of obtaining a competitive edge. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2014. / zkgibs2015 / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / MBA / Unrestricted

published_or_final_version / abstract / Asian Studies / Master / Master of Philosophy

Two essays on the stock preference and performance of institutional investors are included in the dissertation. In the first essay, I document that mutual fund managers and other institutional investors tend to hold stocks with higher betas. This effect holds even after precisely controlling for stocks’ risk characteristics such as size, book-to-market equity ratio and momentum. This is contrary to the widely accepted view that betas are no longer associated with expected returns. However, these results support my simple model where a fund manager’s payoff function depends on returns in excess of a benchmark. For the manager, on the one hand, he tends to load up with high beta stocks since he wants to co-move with the market and other factors as much as possible. On the other hand, the manager faces a trade-off between expected performance and the volatility of tracking error. My model thus shows that the manager prefers to choose higher beta than his benchmark, and that his beta choice has an optimal level which depends on his perceived factor returns and volatility. My empirical findings further confirm the model results. First, I show that the effect of managers holding higher beta stocks is robust to a number of alternative explanations including the effects of their liquidity selection or trading activities. Second, consistent with the model predictions of managers sticking close to their benchmarks during risky periods, I demonstrate that the average beta choice of mutual fund managers can predict future market volatility, even after controlling for other common volatility predictors, such as lagged volatility and implied volatility. The second essay is the first to explicitly address the performance of actively managed mutual funds conditioned on investor sentiment. Almost all fund size quintiles subsequently outperform the market when sentiment is low while all of them underperform the market when sentiment is high. This also holds true after adjusting the fund returns by various performance benchmarks. I further show that the impact of investor sentiment on fund performance is mostly due to small investor sentiment. These findings can partially validate the existence of actively managed mutual funds which underperform the market overall (Gruber 1996). In addition, when conditioning on investor sentiment, the pattern of decreasing returns to scale in mutual funds, recently documented in Chen, Hong, Huang, and Kubik (2004), is fully reversed when sentiment is high while the pattern persists and is more pronounced when sentiment is low. Further results suggest that smaller funds tend to hold smaller stocks, which is shown to drive the above patterns. I also document that smaller funds have more sentiment timing ability or feasibility than larger funds. These findings have many important implications including persistence of fund performance which may not exist under conventional performance measures. / text

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Typescript. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1988. / Bibliography: leaves [312]-332. / Photocopy. / Microfilm. / xi, 332 leaves, bound 29 cm

Mémoire (M.A.-Gestion en P.M.O.)- Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, 1982. / Document électronique également accessible en format PDF. CaQCU