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The purpose of the Finance group is to contribute to the research on two main areas of finance: (1) investments and (2) corporate finance.  

(1) At the level of investment management activities, the research is developed along three lines:

• performance evaluation of managed funds,
• risk analysis,
• investors' behavior in capital markets.

In relation to performance evaluation, particular emphasis is given to the conceptual and methodological issues that arise when conditional performance evaluation models are used instead of the most traditional models that ignore time-variation of expected risk and returns. Also, some research has been focusing on the impact of social screening on mutual fund performance by investigating the performance of socially responsible funds that invest globally and/or in the European market.  Relatively to the issue of risk analysis, the aim is to investigate new measures of risk developed theoretically and/or other measures that have arisen as a consequence of new data available to researchers, such as the recent availability of intradaily data for international markets. Finally, concerning the behavior of investors, in capital markets, the objective is to provide evidence about Portuguese individual investors, with respect to patterns of gains and losses realization and its consequences to investor portfolio performance.  

(2) At the level of corporate finance, this research activities aim to achieve the following objectives: to contribute, theoretically and empirically, to the valuation of multiple real options embedded in investment projects, namely research and development projects; to develop a model in order to determine the value and timing of shared real options under competition and maturity randomness and to extend the previous model by relaxing some assumptions, namely assuming a random investment costs, a non-homogenous markets, and considering that companies can, both, enter and leave the market. Furthermore, this project has also been analyzing some international corporate governance issues. In particular, the main goals are (i) to test whether the reputation of underwriters is a possible mechanism of the Bonding Hypothesis (in the context of U.S. cross-listings) and (ii) to measure the impact of underwriter reputation on the quality of the information environment of U.S. cross-listed firms.