A startup or start up is a company initiated by individual founders or entrepreneurs to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. Founders design startups to effectively develop and validate a scalable business model. Hence, the concepts of startups and entrepreneurship are similar. However, entrepreneurship refers all new businesses, including self-employment and businesses that never intend to grow big or become registered, while startups refer to new businesses that intend to grow beyond the solo founder, have employees, and intend to grow large. Start ups face high uncertainty and do have high rates of failure, but the minority that go on to be successful companies have the potential to become large and influential. Some startups become unicorns, i.e. privately held startup companies valued at over $1 billion.
Status quo bias is an emotional bias; a preference for the current state of affairs. The current baseline is taken as a reference point, and any change from that baseline is perceived as a loss.
Status quo bias should be distinguished from a rational preference for the status quo ante, as when the current state of affairs is objectively superior to the available alternatives, or when imperfect information is a significant problem. A large body of evidence, however, shows that status quo bias frequently affects human decision-making.
In finance, particularly corporate finance capital structure is the way a corporation finances its assets through some combination of equity, debt, or hybrid securities.
The equity premium puzzle refers to the inability of an important class of economic models to explain the average premium of a well-diversified U.S. equity portfolio over U.S. Treasury Bills observed for more than 100 years. The term was coined by Rajnish Mehra and Edward C. Prescott in a study published in 1985 titled The Equity Premium: A Puzzle,. An earlier version of the paper was published in 1982 under the title A test of the intertemporal asset pricing model. The authors found that a standard general equilibrium model, calibrated to display key U.S. business cycle fluctuations, generated an equity premium of less than 1% for reasonable risk aversion levels. This result stood in sharp contrast with the average equity premium of 6% observed during the historical period.
Sudoku is a logic-based, combinatorial number-placement puzzle. The objective is to fill a 9×9 grid with digits so that each column, each row, and each of the nine 3×3 subgrids that compose the grid contain all of the digits from 1 to 9. The puzzle setter provides a partially completed grid, which for a well-posed puzzle has a single solution.
A puzzle in economics is a situation where the implication of theory is inconsistent with observed economic data.
A market anomaly in a financial market is a price and/or rate of return distortion that seems to contradict the efficient-market hypothesis.
A home equity loan is a type of loan in which the borrower uses the equity of his or her home as collateral. The loan amount is determined by the value of the property, and the value of the property is determined by an appraiser from the lending institution. Home equity loans are often used to finance major expenses such as home repairs, medical bills, or college education. A home equity loan creates a lien against the borrower's house and reduces actual home equity.
An investment strategy or portfolio is considered market-neutral if it seeks to avoid some form of market risk entirely, typically by hedging. To evaluate market-neutrality requires specifying the risk to avoid. For example, convertible arbitrage attempts to fully hedge fluctuations in the price of the underlying common stock.
Stax Ltd. is a Japanese company that makes high-end-audio equipment. Stax is best known for their electrostatic and electret headphones, which they call “earspeakers.” Electrostatic headphones work similarly to electrostatic loudspeakers, but on a smaller scale.
Cumulative prospect theory (CPT) is a model for descriptive decisions under risk and uncertainty which was introduced by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in 1992. It is a further development and variant of prospect theory. The difference between this version and the original version of prospect theory is that weighting is applied to the cumulative probability distribution function, as in rank-dependent expected utility theory but not applied to the probabilities of individual outcomes. In 2002, Daniel Kahneman received the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for his contributions to behavioral economics, in particular the development of Cumulative Prospect Theory (CPT).
The dividend puzzle is a concept in finance in which companies that pay dividends are rewarded by investors with higher valuations, even though, according to many economists, it should not matter to investors whether a firm pays dividends or not. The reasoning goes that dividends, from the investor’s point of view, should have no effect on the process of valuing equity because the investor already owns the firm and, thus, he/she should be indifferent to either getting the dividends or having them re-invested in the firm. Another reason for economists to be puzzled is that equity holders pay a higher tax rate on dividend payouts compared to capital gains from the firm repurchasing shares as an alternative payout policy.
Rajnish Mehra is an Indian American economist. He currently holds the Deutsche Bank Luxembourg Chair at the University of Luxembourg and is a research associate of the NBER. His research interests include capital markets, asset pricing and growth theory.
The Feldstein–Horioka puzzle is a widely discussed problem in macroeconomics and international finance, which was first documented by Martin Feldstein and Charles Horioka in a 1980 paper. Economic theory assumes that if investors can easily invest anywhere in the world, acting rationally they would invest in countries offering the highest return per unit of investment. This would drive up the price of the investment until the return across different countries is similar.
In economics, the Backus–Kehoe–Kydland consumption correlation puzzle, also known as the BKK puzzle, is the observation that consumption is much less correlated across countries than output.
The real exchange-rate puzzles is a common term for two much-discussed anomalies of real exchange rates: that real exchange rates are more volatile and show more persistence than what most models can account for. These two anomalies are sometimes referred to as the purchasing power parity puzzles.
In economics, a rare disaster is a collapse that is infrequent and large in magnitude, having a negative effect on an economy. Rare disasters are important because they provide an explanation of the equity premium puzzle, the behavior of interest rates, and other economic phenomena.
