Finance: Banking, Corporate Finance, Capital Markets, Financial Management, Investment Management, Investment Banking

How are capital markets a gateway to facilitating business enterprises? How do we determine the value of assets?  How should investment decisions be made? What is the role of the financing function in operating the firm’s capital? How can organisations develop and manage hedging strategies that enable efficient risk transfer between parties?

This research area concerns the processes and practices of decision-making in a truly global and increasingly convergent business environment, given advances in technology and the integration of financial markets. It also examines the diversification activities of investors who embrace international asset classes as part of their portfolio decisions.

Industry participants in the field include investment and retail banks, fund managers, insurance companies, securities exchanges, regulators, superannuation funds, securities analysts (brokers), asset consulting intermediaries, and both exchange-listed and private corporations.

Research Streams

Research focuses on the following streams:

Corporate Finance

This area involves capital structure, dividend policy, cost of capital and corporate governance.

Capital Markets

This broad research area examines the ways assets are traded. Traded assets may include, but are not limited to: stocks, stock indices, fixed income instruments, commodities, real estate, and derivative securities based on these assets. Given the multitude of tradable assets and ways in which we can trade them, market microstructure aims to answer two questions:

• What are the determinants of liquidity (trading interests) and trading costs in markets?
• What is the optimal market structure for each tradable asset?

This stream of research overlaps with microeconomics and investment management. Investment managers play a significant role in forming markets and trading assets, so it is impossible to consider market microstructure without an appreciation of the activities of fund managers. On the flip side, the performance of fund managers would be a function of trading costs and liquidity conditions, both of which are an integral part of market microstructure. Market microstructure also impacts a listed company’s cost of capital (through liquidity), which traditionally belongs to the area of corporate finance.

Financial Management

This area involves ensuring firms can grow sustainably and manage their financial positions in a way that enables them to be ‘going concerns’.

Investment Management

Investment management involves understanding investment objectives and the risk profile of investors in setting, designing, and monitoring investment performance and risk outcomes. This risk profile varies according to preferences and objectives, and throughout the life cycle. Given large pools of savings are generated via the superannuation system, institutional investors dominate the fund management landscape. 

These institutional investors include superannuation funds, hedge funds, investment banks, endowment funds, insurance companies and sovereign wealth funds.  Individual high net-worth individuals, self-managed superannuation funds, and foreign investors also participate significantly in securities markets in managing their portfolios. 

Research activities in the fund management field include examining the trading behaviour of investment managers, the design of portfolios, asset allocation dynamics, the performance measurement of managed funds, and the delegated portfolio management that arises through using external fund managers to execute an investor’s investment objectives.

The School’s research partnerships with Capital Markets CRC Limited as well as sponsorship arrangements with large pension funds and investment management intermediaries are critical to our ability to offer applied, relevant and high-impact scholarships.  Our mission is to conduct leading investment management research and build innovative technologies for the global investments industry; providing institutional investors, regulators, custodians, and advising intermediaries with improved intelligence services for examining investment performance outcomes.

Investment Banking

This area involves capital raisings, mergers and acquisitions.

 

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