Business Commons^™

Essays In Empirical Asset Pricing, Landon James Ross

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines several empirical questions regarding the determiniation of asset prices. The first chapter studies the effect of firm characteristics’ interactions on the cross-section of expected returns via a modified Fama-Macbeth regression suitable for estima- tion problems involving thousands of firm characteristics. The second chapter estimates eco- nomically significant risks from legally required risk disclosures in public companies annual filings via a novel regression specification designed for the estimation of firm characteristics that are both aligned with expected returns and semantically meaningful. The third chapter examines the aggregate financial consequences of firms’ cash holdings for shareholders.

Stock Market Manipulation Detection Using Continuous Wavelet Transform & Machine Learning Classification, Sarah Youssef

Theses and Dissertations

Stock market manipulation detection is important for both investors and regulators. Being able to detect stock manipulation and preventing it gives investors the confidence in the market fairness and integrity. It also helps maintaining liquidity of the stocks and market efficiency. Implementing data mining algorithms in manipulation detection is a relatively recent technique but in the past few years there has been an increasing interest in it's applications in this domain. The benefit of monitoring manipulative trade behavior is that it can be implemented on live feed of stock data, which saves a lot of time in detecting stock price …

An Intelligent Market Cycle Detection System, Michael Azer

Theses and Dissertations

The detection of stock market cycles has attracted the attention of finance scholars and market practitioners. Accurately identifying the direction of a market can significantly increase the returns of investors. Despite this importance, conventional methodologies in the literature have predominantly attempted to evaluate the effect of subsets of factors as precedents to stock market cycles and with little agreement on what constitutes critical factors. There seems to be a lack in the literature for a comprehensive study that examines a multitude of factors at the same time on the S&P500 as the laboratory. Factors are categorized into: political events, economic …

Essays In Corporate Finance And Machine Learning, Manish Jha

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation focuses on two broad questions. First, why do shareholder’s preferences vary, and how various agents persuade them? And second, how public perceptions about the financial sector and regulations affect economic outcomes? While my research plan contributes to the two distinct fields of literature, a unifying theme of my research is the use of innovative machine learning techniques to overcome the empirical challenges that would typically prevent measuring these sentiments objectively.

In my Chapter 1, I use a supervised machine learning model on mutual fund family’s proxy voting choices to estimate their preferences. I find that hedge fund activists …