Business Commons^™

Can Students Studying Abroad Use Forward Exchange Rates As A Tool For Better Budgeting Their Semesters?, Emalee Dunbar

Honors Projects in Finance

Traveling abroad requires an immense amount of planning and attention to detail. Budgeting is a difficult task in one’s own country, but when planning across borders, that task becomes even greater. Differences in exchange rates and buying power have the potential to adversely affect the budget set ahead of time, placing more stress on the traveler. Financial tools available in the foreign exchange market, if used strategically, may provide a reliable method to budgeting travel abroad as accurately as possible. There are many individuals, students especially, that plan on traveling or studying abroad yet are on tight budgets. Having a …

Can Tweets Predict Intraday Stock Price Movements?, Diwas Puri

Honors Projects in Finance

Twitter is a microblogging platform where over 320 million people post about things that matter to them in less than 140 characters. People post about their happiness, sadness, pride, disappointments, love, hate, expectations and other feelings. Nowadays, a popular trend has come up in which data from Twitter, can be gathered and analyzed in real time to see how people react to a particular situation including changes in stock markets. This research focuses on looking into the relationship, if any, between public mood from Twitter and the stock market returns by analyzing the Tweets about four major companies in consumer …

Relationship Between Interest Rate And Bank Common Stock Return: Evidence From The Top 10 United States Banks And Financial Sector Index, Hieu Trung Tran

Honors Projects in Finance

This research paper investigates the effect of changes in long-term interest rates on the returns of the top 10 US banks included in the Financial Sector Index. There are three main parts of this paper.

The first part uses the Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) test to test the “Random Walk” of banks’ common stock returns. Based on the test’s results, returns of banks’ common stock do not solely follow the “Random Walk”.

In the second part, the Two-Factor Arbitrage Pricing Theory is employed to test the effect of changes in long-term interest rate on the return of banks’ common stocks. The …

Possible Solutions To The Rhode Island State Government’S Unfunded Pension Liability, Derek Blunt

Honors Projects in Finance

This paper examines the possible causes of the nationwide unfunded public pension liability problem in the U.S., and what solutions are being proposed to combat the issue. After examining the general problems associated with multiple states’ pension systems, a specific analysis of the Rhode Island public pension system will be conducted. Through this investigation, the factors that led to the crisis in Rhode Island will be unveiled, and possible solutions to the state-specific problem will be developed. In order to arrive at a set of final recommendations for the government, a model will be used to evaluate the effects of …