Accounting Commons^™

The Effective Return Of Biblically Responsible Exchange Traded Funds, Stacie Rhodes

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This dissertation research study was designed to contribute to the growing body of knowledge regarding the efficacy of a recently popular investment vehicle (ETFs; Ben-David et al., 2017) and the impact of values-based investment strategies on performance (Bidisha et al., 2017). Specifically, this research examined the risk-adjusted returns of biblically responsible ETFs, a subset of the larger category of socially responsible investment funds. The results of this study indicated there was no statistically significant difference between the intraday risk-adjusted return yields of the mid-cap and world large stock BRI ETFs and their respective benchmark indexes or the average intraday risk-adjusted …

Pay For Performance: Do Higher Expense Ratios Of Levered And Inverse Etfs Lead To Lower Tracking Error?, Grant Carrier

Honors College

Levered and inverse Exchange Traded Funds (LETFs) are a recent and controversial innovation in financial engineering. These ETFs set out to achieve daily returns that are a multiple (2x, 3x) or negative multiple (-1x, -2x, -3x) of an underlying index. Since their inception in 2006, research has overwhelmingly concluded that these ETFs fail to meet their stated objectives over long holding periods. However, there has been debate over the causes of this error, and the holding period at which the tracking begins to break down.

This thesis sets out to analyze the relationship between the expense ratios of LETFs and …