Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

Effectual Versus Predictive Logics In Entrepreneurial Decision-Making: Differences Between Experts And Novices In The State Of Maine, Rebecca Lynn Hatt

Honors College

This study is a replication of research done by Dew et al. (2009) that aims to confirm that expert entrepreneurs use effectual logic framework as opposed to the casual, or predicitive, logic utilized by novices. In order to test this theory we provided 5 expert entrepreneurs and 5 novices with a case statement that provided information of an imaginary new venture and asked them to think aloud continuously as they solved decision-making problems relevant to this, and any, new venture while we recorded them. We coded the transcriptions of these recordings according to the scheme of the Dew et al. …

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 …