The Wharton Financial Institutions Center provides a multidisciplinary research approach to the problems and opportunities facing the financial services industry in its search for competitive excellence. The Center's research focuses on the issues related to managing risk at the firm level as well as ways to improve productivity and performance. The Center fosters the development of a community...

This study provides new estimates of systematic risk and the cost of equity capital for the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device sectors using data for firms with publicly-traded stock on U.S. exchanges during 2001-2005 and 2006-2008. Two frameworks are employed for estimating firms’ risk and the cost of equity capital: (1) the capital asset pricing model, and (2) the Fama-French t...

As a sustainable construction method, prefabrication has become popular in many nations. However, there are many challenges for prefabrication, especially in terms of cost. Previous studies have revealed that higher capital cost was the most important barrier to the implementation of prefabrication. Thus, the objective of this study is to explore and evaluate the critical factors affecting the ...

Article history: Received 7 October 2013 Received in revised form 7 March 2014 Accepted 10 March 2014 Available online 17 March 2014 We re-examine two complementary views of international capital mobility using data for 25 OECD countries over the period 1970–2011. Estimation of the original Feldstein–Horioka and Sachs' equations provides mixed evidence of capital mobility, though we do not dete...

Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) is a process that manages all risks in an integrated, holistic fashion by controlling and coordinating offsetting risks across the enterprise. This research investigates whether the adoption of the ERM approach affects firms’ cost of equity capital. We restrict our analysis to the U.S. insurance industry to control for unobservable differences in business models...

This is the non-confidential version. Confidential information has been redacted. Redactions are indicated by [  ]. Pay TV statement – Annex 3 – non-confidential version Contents Section Page 1 Introduction 1 2 The use of IRR in profitability analysis 7 3 Have Sky's returns exceeded its cost of capital? 12 4 Why have Sky's returns exceeded its cost of capital? 16 5 Are Sky's returns likely to ...