Equity shareholders and creditors are not protected with the same effectiveness around the world. In general, a common law country provides better investment safety than a civil law country. You can check the Wikipedia article to get a better understanding on this division.
If you want to build a global quantitative equity portfolio, you might want to control for this effect.
Reference will follow.
When I was in grammar school, I read an article saying that some airports installed giant loud speakers on the residential buildings nearby, and they played noise through the loud speakers to counteract the roaring sound of airplanes. I found it quite fascinating. (Thanks to high school physics, I understood why later on.)
Recently I came across a couple of neat websites that produce environmental friendly noise for working and studying ambiance: RainMood.com and SimpleNoise.com. I especially like RainMood, for its natural sound. I leave this website on while working on my research projects, teaching preparations, book reading… and the rest of the world just drifts away.
Today a group of new Ph.D. students joined our business school. As the program director said, this is a special day that new students start their academic career across the nation. I remember a similar moment from the film “A Beautify Mind”. The chair of the Princeton math department asked, “Who among you will be the next Einstein?” Looking at those fresh faces, I can’t help thinking one day maybe one of them will indeed advance human knowledge in a significant way, and how lucky and proud I will be to witness the day when it all begins… =)
There is not much ambiguity when it comes to the “top” finance journals; here is the almost unarguable A-list:
Journal of Finance
Journal of Financial Economics
Review of Financial Studies
Journal of Business
Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis
However, assigning a ranking to all of the journals out there is no easy task. Luckily we have several researchers answer this question for us. To name a couple:
Edwin D. Maberly and Raylene M. Pierce, “Citation Patterns Within the Leading Top-Tier Finance Journals: Implications for Journal Rankings and Other Issues“.
Carl R. Chen and Ying Huang, “Author Affiliation Index, Finance Journal Ranking, and the Pattern of Authorship“, Journal of Corporate Finance, Vol. 13, pp. 1008-1026, 2007.
Thomas Reuters’ Journal Citation Report, which is accessible through many schools’ library subscription to the Social Science Citation Index, is also a good resource.
So, why care about ranking? There is one reason you can’t ignore: “…depending on professorial rank, the present value of the first top finance journal article is between $19,493 and $33,754…”
Steve Swidler and Elizabeth Goldreyer, “The Value of a Finance Journal Publication”, Journal of Finance, Vol. 53, Issue 1, pages 351-363, 1998.
Hmm, $19,493 to $33,754 from 12 years ago. Excellence really pays off.
I can hardly remember the last time I wrote a hundred words with a real pen. Our penmanship has almost entirely gone digital. As a finance researcher, you probably end up with two options to show off your work: Word, or LaTeX.
There is not much to say about MS Word. WYSIWYG. Even if you have Microsoft Office, it still might worthwhile to use Writer from the OpenOffice.org. It is free and it does bibliography.
Need to write a lot of mathematical formula? You should use the almighty LaTeX, also for free. Professor David S. Stoffer from the University of Pittsburgh lays out the blueprint for you: Installing LaTeX for Free on PCs.
