Business Commons^™

The Effect Of The Dodd-Frank Act On Risk In The Financial Sector, Beatrix S. Haddon

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, commonly known as the Dodd-Frank Act, was passed in 2010 in an attempt to increase transparency and accountability in the financial system. The purpose of this thesis is to discover what effect, if any, the Dodd-Frank Act had on both systematic risk and total volatility in the financial sector. My study shows that while the legislation significantly reduced systematic risk in only one out of the seven industries within the financial sector in the time period I analyzed, it successfully reduced total volatility in all seven industries.

An Applied Credit Scoring Model And Christian Mutual Funds Performance, Esther E. Castro

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation comprises two different financial essays. Essay 1, “An Applied Credit Score Model,” uses data from local credit union to predict the probability of default. Due to recent financial crisis regulation has been enacted that makes it essential to develop a probability of default model that will mitigate charge-off losses. Using discriminant analysis and logistic regression this paper will attempt to see how well credit score can predict probability of default. While credit score does an adequate job at classifying loans, misclassification of loans can be costly. Thus while credit score is a predictor, there is danger in relying …

Retirement Planning Decisions Using The 2013 Survey Of Consumer Finances, Yun Doo Lee

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

This dissertation consists of two essays. The first essay analyzes financial preparation for retirement of American men and women, using the 2013 Survey of Finances. Specifically, for retirement plan, income is an important factor for men and women aged 35-45 because of their insufficient income, health (excellent) for men and women aged 46-59 because of continuing work, number of weeks worked per year for men and women aged 60-67 because they have already retired or will retire and many of them are participating in a part time job. Also, health has significantly positive effects on the share of the …

Predictability Of International Stock Returns With Sum Of The Parts And Equity Premiums Under Regime Shifts, Mahtab Athari

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This research consists of two essays. The first essay entitled” Stock Return Forecasting with Sum-of-the-Parts Methodology: Evidence from Around the World”, examines forecasting ability of stock returns by employing the sum-of-the-parts (SOP) modeling technique introduced by Ferreira and Santa-Clara (2011).This approach decomposes return into three components of growth in price-earnings ratio, earnings growth, and dividend-price ratio. Each component is forecasted separately and fitted values are used in forecast model to predict stock return. We conduct a series of one-step ahead recursive forecasts for a wide range of developed and emerging markets over the period February 1995 through November 2014. Decomposed …

Two Essays In Finance And Economics: “Investment Opportunities In Commodity And Stock Markets For G7 Countries” And “Global And Local Factors Affecting Sovereign Yield Spreads”, Selma Izadi

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

In chapter 1, I investigate the return links and dynamic conditional correlations between the equity and commodity returns for G7 countries from 2000:01 to 2014:10. The commodity futures include BCOM Index which contains the futures and spot price of 22 commodities, Brent and Crude oil futures, gold and silver futures, Wheat, Corn and Soybean futures and CRB index. The finding indicates that during the full sample period GOLD, WHEAT and CORN have the smallest dynamic conditional correlations with all the Equity indexes. In addition, the correlations between the GOLD/Equity pairs are negative during the financial crisis. This fact indicates the …

Vulnerability And Resistance: An Evaluation Of Hostile Takeover Defenses Proposed By: Carissa Wilson, International Business & Business Economics, Carissa Laurel Wilson

Senior Theses

Within the context of mergers and acquisitions (“M&A”), hostile takeovers comprise a complex and pivotal area of study. It is hostile takeovers, rather than friendly ones, that give rise to the need for most buy- and sell-side tactics related to strategic M&A. This paper focuses primarily on sell-side tactics, or “target defenses,” used to deflect undesired takeover attempts and prevent changes in corporate control. It will attempt to present a high level, comprehensible, and comprehensive listing of defensive tactics in the target arsenal, with references to related case law.

Target defenses developed preemptively, or before an official takeover offer has …

The Historical Role Of The Use Of Derivatives For Speculation, Charles Austin Boyd Ii

Senior Theses

As long as humans have had a concept of possession of items and a means of trading for them, there have been speculative position in the form of derivative contracts. The first instance of a written code of laws contains protection for farmers leveraging their future crops. Aristotle writes of an instance of the equivalent of call options being used to secure a monopoly on olive presses. Many features of contemporary derivative markets were developed in Europe during Medieval trade fairs or Renaissance bourse marketplaces. The development of the first modern stock exchange brought with it further development in the …

Financial Crises And Government Regulation, Yusef Trad

Honors Thesis

In the midst of turmoil, regulation is “a rule or directive made and maintained by an authority” to maintain order. More often than not, the authoritative figure that imposes and upholds regulatory standards, following its introduction to the specific industry or firm, is the government of the respective country or region. However, politicians, like the rest of us, are unable to predict when a crisis will occur and what appropriate regulation should be imposed to prevent that crisis. Thus, an inevitable concern with regulation is the fact that it is unable to thwart an unforeseeable future crisis but is instead …

Technical Analysis Under Knightian Uncertainty, Andre Mouton

Student Theses and Dissertations

Technical analysis, or the forecasting of asset price movements using past prices, is commonly practiced in financial markets but poorly explained by mainstream economic theory. I show that a technical rule can have predictive power when an asset’s payoffs are subject to Knightian uncertainty, defined as variation that cannot be described probabilistically (Knight, 1921). I present an asset-pricing model in which asset payoffs undergo periodic shifts in trend, and agents form expectations about these payoffs using a constant gain least squares (CGLS) rule. I investigate whether a second CGLS rule, operating on price, can provide a more accurate forecast of …

Pubhub: A Mobile Application Business Plan, Zachary T. Washam

Finance Undergraduate Honors Theses

PubHub is a mobile application designed to address point-of-sale inefficiencies at bars. This business plan details our strategy for product design, marketing, financing, and eventual acquisition. We address key legal and competitive risks and project five years of pro-forma financial statements based on comparable firms.

Evaluating The Impacts Of Respondent Errors In Arms: A Case Of Farm Service Agency Loans, Louise Nicole Mcminn

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Many studies have used the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Agricultural Resource Management Survey (ARMS) to research various aspects involving the agricultural sector in the United States. Since nonresponse and inaccurate reporting may cause significant bias in statistical analysis, research was conducted to determine the magnitude of response error on the farm debt section of the ARMS Phase III. A multinomial logit model identified demographic, structural, and financial characteristics of FSA Farm Loan Program (FLP) borrowers who refused to indicate if they had end of year farm debt, or who accurately or inaccurately classified their farm operations as having end …

How Relevant Is The Disclosure Of A Ceo Pay Ratio?, Addison Stanfill

Accounting Undergraduate Honors Theses

An aftershock of the so called “Great Recession” in 2008, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act effective July 21, 2010 aimed to increase the transparency of public companies. Section 953(b) of this act is targeting the transparency of executive and employee compensation by requiring the disclosure of a CEO to median employee pay ratio. This disclosure requirement, set to affect all filings with a fiscal year beginning after January 1, 2017, was a response to the public outcry against excessive CEO compensation. Although it does promote the transparency initiative of the Dodd-Frank Act, this disclosure may be …

The Future Of Community Banks And Their Role In The Changing Economy, Alisha R. Defatta

Honors Theses

This paper is a survey of the current literature concerning community banks, the current challenges faced by community banks, and the role community banks play in the economy. Currently technological and regulatory changes are creating challenges for community banks. To combat these issues many community banks are increasing their merger and acquisition activity to avoid closing. This objective of this paper is to discuss the reasons community banks are so important to our economy and to define the hardships they are currently facing. It is also important to identify the next steps we should take to ensure the stability of …

An Examination Of The Residential Mortgage Systems In The United States And Canada During The Great Recession, Katelyn B. Vittatoe

Undergraduate Honors Theses

In 2007, the United States suffered what is known as the "Subprime Mortgage Crisis". This took an enormous toll on the United States Economy. However, nearby country, Canada did not experience this situation. The objective of this thesis is to determine why such different outcomes were seen in order for future economic stability. This research will examine mortgage processes, mortgage management, foreclosures on mortgages of both countries. It will then paint the economic picture that each country faced in 2007, while providing an explanation as to why the United States fared much worse than Canada during this time.

Predicting Intraday Financial Market Dynamics Using Takens' Vectors; Incorporating Causality Testing And Machine Learning Techniques, Abubakar-Sadiq Bouda Abdulai

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Traditional approaches to predicting financial market dynamics tend to be linear and stationary, whereas financial time series data is increasingly nonlinear and non-stationary. Lately, advances in dynamical systems theory have enabled the extraction of complex dynamics from time series data. These developments include theory of time delay embedding and phase space reconstruction of dynamical systems from a scalar time series. In this thesis, a time delay embedding approach for predicting intraday stock or stock index movement is developed. The approach combines methods of nonlinear time series analysis with those of causality testing, theory of dynamical systems and machine learning (artificial …

An Examination Of U.S. Restaurant Firms' Internationalization In A Risk Context, Soyeon Jung

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The purpose of this dissertation is to advance the theoretical and practical understanding

of the relationship between publicly traded U.S. restaurant firms’ internationalization as a

corporate strategy and risks using a comprehensive set of risk measures: 1) market-based risk (i.e., systematic and unsystematic risk) and 2) accounting-based risk (i.e., standard deviation of return on assets (ROA), return on equity (ROE), and earnings per share (EPS) during the period of 2000-2013. This dissertation further investigates linear, nonlinear, and lagged effects of internationalization on restaurant firms’ risks. In summary, the findings of this dissertation reveal that internationalization tends to mitigate systematic risk, …

Three Essays On Bank Liquidity Creation And Funding Liquidity Risk, Feng Tu

Doctoral Dissertations

According to the modern theory of financial intermediation, liquidity creation is an essential role of banks. Chapter 1 investigates the relationship between diversification of activities conducted by banks and bank liquidity creation. We show that despite the passage of GLBA act in 1999, banks increased their specialization in the traditional loan market and thus became less diversified from 2004 until the end of 2008. In addition, we find evidence that more specialized banks tend to create more excess liquidity during normal times, suggesting too much specialization in mortgage and other types of loans created abundant liquidity leading up to the …

Behavioral Finance: Its History And Its Future, Robert Christopher Hammond

Selected Honors Theses

The field of behavioral finance has attempted to explain a litany of biases, heuristics, and

inefficiencies present in financial markets since its creation in the 1980’s. This paper is structured as a comprehensive literature review of behavioral finance, and includes both the seminal works as well as more recent papers. The various subtopics of behavioral finance will also be analyzed, which include loss aversion, corporate finance, and momentum/contrarian investing. Finally, this paper will draw unique conclusions across behavioral finance and hypothesize about what topics within behavioral finance are likely to yield the most interesting research in the near future.

The Impact Of High-Order Risk Attitudes On Bank's Loan Policy, Yuchen Luo

Theses & Dissertations

It is well known that prudence plays an important role in the process of decision making under uncertainties. However, how prudence affects a bank's decision on extending fixed rate or variable rate loan has not yet been fully examined. In this dissertation, I use definition of second-order expectation dependence to further identify conditions for the risk prudent (imprudent) bank under state-dependent framework to refrain from extending fixed rate loans. Furthermore, using a set of actual data, I apply a recent developed inference procedure for testing positive expectation dependence to demonstrate the significance of my work in empirical applications. In the …

Essays On International Risk-Return Trade-Off Relations, Liang Meng

Finance Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation consists of two essays on the international risk-return trade-off relations. The first essay is titled “The Role of the US Market on International Risk-Return Trade-Off Relations” and the second essay is titled “The Role of Investor Sentiment on International Risk-Return Trade-Off Relations”.

In our first essay, we study the intertemporal risk-return trade-off relations based on returns from 18 international markets. Our main contribution is that we find the US market plays an important role affecting the international risk-return trade-off. We present striking new empirical evidence that the inclusion of US market variables significantly changes the estimated risk-return trade-off …

Examining Social Desirability Bias In Measures Of Financial Behavior, Nicole L. Kelly

Theses and Dissertations

Surveys that investigate the financial lives of consumers consist of direct questions about financial behavior, with college students being a heavily surveyed and convenient sample (Gutter 2013). However, the subjective nature of survey data is not bias-free, indicated by the presence of disparities between the respondents' reported and actual behavior. Due to the fact that many students begin to acquire loans, establish credit, and initiate saving behaviors in college, it is important that we have a complete understanding the financial behavior of college students.

The goal of this study was to investigate the role of socially desirable responding (SDR) in …

Essays On The Impact Of Ceo Gender On Corporate Policies And Outcomes, Nilesh Sah

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the first essay I examine the cash policies of female-led firms. Recent research finds that female CEOs eschew riskier corporate policies, but it makes contradicting claims whether this is due to risk aversion. Benchmarking risk aversion by the management of firms’ cash, I find that female CEOs are risk averse relative to male CEOs. Specifically, they hold significantly (18%) more cash, even for the same level of dividend payout as male CEOs. Further, they have significantly higher speed of adjustment for cash deficits, are more likely to use excess cash to increase dividends, but are equally likely to use …

The Impact Of Credit Default Swaps On Corporate Investment Policy, Xinshu Xue

Theses & Dissertations

Credit Default Swaps (CDSs) play an important role in the financial markets. The introduction of CDSs has impacts on the bond market, and the financial characteristics and creditworthiness of the underlying reference entities. When financing is not frictionless, the investment policies of firms are related to their financial conditions. However, whether or how the introduction of CDS will directly affect the investment policy of the firm has not been examined empirically in the literature. To shed light on this issue, my study investigates the relation between credit default swaps trading and corporate investment policy for the listed firms in the …

Management Earnings Forecast Decisions In A Regulated Regime : Evidence From China, Jingyu Yang

Theses & Dissertations

Since 2000, China has required publicly listed firms to issue management earnings forecasts when they expect extreme changes in earnings or are likely to become loss-making. This study examines managers’ forecast decisions under this unique regulatory environment. I find an increase over time in the proportion of firms issuing voluntary earnings forecasts when they do not expect extreme changes in their earnings or losses. I also find an improvement in the quality—in terms of the precision, accuracy and bias—of both mandatory and voluntary forecasts over time. Further detailed analysis shows that the introduction of the regulation on management earnings forecasts …

A Study On The Legal Issues Of Ship Finance Lease In China, Lei Sun

Maritime Safety & Environment Management Dissertations (Dalian)

No abstract provided.

Information Asymmetry, Agency Cost And Stock Liquidity : Evidence From The Split Share Structure Reform In China, Tao Yuan

Theses & Dissertations

The coexistence of tradable and non-tradable shares in Chinese firms has caused severe agency problems and has been the subject of much criticism. In 2005, the Chinese Securities Regulatory Commission launched a reform to eliminate the dual-class share structure and convert non-tradable shares into tradable shares. My thesis examines how the Split Share Structure Reform in China affects the level of information asymmetry of listed firms. The regression results show that the firm-level information asymmetry, measured by the probability of informed trading (PIN), is positively associated to the firm’s proportion of non-tradable shares before the reform, and the PIN decreases …

Two Essays In Finance: “Selection Biases And Long-Run Abnormal Returns” And “The Impact Of Financialization On The Benefits Of Incorporating Commodity Futures In Actively Managed Portfolios”, Ramesh Adhikari

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of two essays. First essay investigates the implications of researcher data requirement on the risk-adjusted returns of firms. Using the monthly CRSP data from 1925 to 2013, we present evidence that firms which survive longer have higher average returns and lower standard deviation of annualized returns than the firms which do not. I further demonstrate that there is a positive relation between firms’ survival and average performance. In order to account for the positive correlation between survival and average performance, I model the relation of survival and pricing errors using a Farlie-Gumbel-Morgenstern joint distribution function and fit …

How Do Choice Of Major And Industrial Structure Influence College Graduates' Unemployment Rate In China, Xiuwen Shi

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Recently, the higher education market is developing very fast, and China’s universities and colleges are increasing their enrollment. More and more college graduates with higher education backgrounds enter the labor market and the college graduates have to face higher unemployment pressure when they find jobs. For the college graduates’ unemployment problem, many literatures and research are focusing on over-enrollment problem, the influence of the major differences, and the influence of the industrial structure development.

This thesis examines the consequence of the over-enrollment problem with a group of data set and linear regressive analysis model. The finding indicates that there is …

Essays On Corporate Finance Issues, Chanho Cho

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of two essays on corporate finance issues. In the first essay (Chapter 1), I explore whether business group affiliations affect the covariance structure of stock returns in Korea. I find that the stock returns of firms belonging to the same business group show positive and significant comovement. The strong comovement between group returns and firm returns is explained by correlated fundamentals. I find strong comovement among business group affiliate earnings. Moreover, variance decomposition of returns shows that cash flow news plays a relatively more important role in explaining group comovement than discount rate news, suggesting a link …

The Effect Of The Introduction Of The Euro On The Stock Price Volatility In The Belgian Equity Market, Hanne Zmierczak

Theses

This study serves to research the effect of the introduction of the Euro as a currency on the volatility in the equity market in Belgium. It particularly looks at the Bel20 index volatility, which includes the twenty largest companies listed in the Belgian stock exchange. This study incorporates ordinary least squares regressions with a time series component. Various models with a timeframe between January 1992 and December 2013 are run. The dependent variable of this research is Bel20 volatility, while the independent variables include inflation, consumer confidence, change in industrial production, GDP growth, Euro dummy variables, and a financial crisis …