Adam Smith's moral foundations of self-interest and ethical social order

This article draws on textual evidence from The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations to address mistaken interpretations of Adam Smith's fundamental concept of self-interest as greed that has been said to have had a corrosive influence on markets, commercial behaviour, and widening inequality. To the contrary, Smith's complex set of human motivations, including self-interest, his economic system that is based on free markets, and institutional frameworks governing productive property rights and the rule of law are argued to increase aggregate wealth, improve the position of those least well off, and maintain ethical social order.     

A bibliometric review of dividend policy literature

This study systematically reviews the dividend policy literature, combining quantitative and qualitative techniques. We screened a sample of 270 articles retrieved from the Scopus database from 1981 to 2022. We contribute to the literature by identifying six research streams based on bibliometric co-citation analysis: (1) Dividend payment practices, (2) Price–dividend relationship, (3) Capital market valuation, and dividend policy, (4) Risk governance and dividend policy, (5) Taxes and dividend policy, and (6) The dividend disconnects and catering incentives. For each of these streams, the central research theme is outlined, allowing us to recommend potential directions for further investigation. We provide influential journals, authors, topics, articles, and institutions from our analyses. We also contribute 77 research questions that can be explored in future research to develop the field of dividend policy. Our findings should be of value to academics, financial executives, policymakers, investors, and other practitioners.     

Idiosyncratic volatility puzzle exists at the country level

This paper reexamines the idiosyncratic volatility puzzle using 47 stock market indices from 1995 to 2016. We find that country-specific idiosyncratic volatility is significantly and negatively related to subsequent returns in the international markets, confirming the existence of the idiosyncratic volatility puzzle at the country level. Our results show that the positive relationship between idiosyncratic volatility and country-specific index returns documented by Bali and Cakici, 2010, Hueng and Yau, 2013 is not robust to sample selections and model misspecifications. We show that the country-level idiosyncratic volatility puzzle consistently exists after controlling for different model specifications and market segmentation in various subsamples.     

Investor flow-chasing and price–performance puzzle: Evidence from global infrastructure funds

Despite the importance and peculiarity of the infrastructure fund, determinants of infrastructure fund flow and the relation between fees and fund performance were poorly understood. This paper documents two new findings using a unique dataset for global infrastructure funds from January 2005 to June 2019. First, investor flow-chasing exists at the level of infrastructure fund companies, which is intensified by the opacity of information and uncertainty of returns. Second, infrastructure funds charge higher fees even when their before-fee performance is worse, which is explained by fund characteristics and year effects. Based on these findings, we put forward countermeasures from the perspectives of investors, regulators, investor protection managers, and fund managers, with incentive mechanism reforms to alleviate the price-performance puzzle, thereby improving the efficiency of infrastructure fund portfolios.