Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

Are Stock Prices Related To New York's Climatic Conditions?, Matthew M. Cullen

Honors Theses

The past five years has shown tremendous growth in a new wave and style of investing strategy. This new style, known as behavioral investing, attempts to analyze financial markets through the eye of a social scientist rather than a financial professional. Its followers try to see market movements as affected not necessarily by the business or economy but by the cognition and mood of buyers and seller. This paper analyzes the effect of climatic conditions on mood and the effect that has on market movements and volume. For the most part, it was found that there is no significant relationship …

The Value-Relevance Of Asset Write-Down Regulations In China : The Roles Of Information Relevance And Measurement Reliability, Ziyun Yang

Lingnan Theses and Dissertations (MPhil & PhD)

At the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century, China implemented several new asset write-down regulations. This study addresses the claim that these regulations significantly enhanced the usefulness of financial statements for investors in China. The effect of the regulations on usefulness of financial statements has implications for financial accountants, standard-setters, educators, and auditors. This study derives and tests some of the empirical implications of the claim.

I operationalize usefulness of accounting information in terms of the valuerelevance framework, in which information usefulness is construed as a tradeoff between relevance and reliability. These two dimensions are …

The Dimensions Of Customer Satisfaction In The Financial Services Industry, Jose Salvador Lopez-Alarcon

Graduate Student Dissertations, Theses, Capstones, and Portfolios

The objective of this study was to collect and interpret data on the areas that influence customer satisfaction in the financial services industry. Specifically, the research defined and explored the ten dimensions that provide the customers with the product perceived value of the product or service. A survey of 230 customers in the Boca Raton area was conducted; data generated through the survey was analyzed descriptively, as well as subjected to regression analysis.

The study found congruence of customer satisfaction and the dimension: tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, competence, courtesy, credibility, safety, access, communication, and empathy. The study also determined that the …

Profit Maximization In The Banking Industry: Early Adoption Of Technology And Its Effects On Efficiencies, John Gulnac

Business and Economics Honors Papers

Technological innovation has restructured the marketplace creating cost advantages in many industries. One industry that has experienced significant change is the banking industry. The widespread applications of Information Technology (IT) complemented with the adoptions of Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) have changed the face of the banking industry: by providing banks with the opportunity to improve certain operational efficiencies IT is giving them a competitive advantage in a consolidating industry. Brick and mortar banks are no longer an operational necessity. The banking industry through recent deregulations now has the ability to enter new and previously untapped markets with relatively low entry …

The Role Of Anticipated Wealth In Risk Preferences, Kristofer Allen Gibbs

Honors Capstone Projects and Theses

No abstract provided.

Testing The Effectiveness Of Deregulation In The Electric Utility Industry: A Market-Based Approach, Manfen Wang

Doctoral Dissertations

In this paper, I investigate one stated purpose of deregulation in the electric utility industry—to make utility operations more responsive to news releases, a proxy for market forces. My premise is that utilities providing electricity to highly deregulated states will be more responsive to market forces than those providing electricity to non-deregulated states. I employ intraday data from April to June 2001, the year after deregulation, and from 1994, the year before deregulation. I also employ the Brown-Forsythe-Modified Levene (BFL) test to determine the volatility differences between days with released news and days without released news. The results of BFL …

Corporate Diversification And Stock Returns, Tatiana Isakovski

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

There are considerable empirical evidences in favor of and against the corporate diversification. A number of previous studies have found that industrial and geographic diversification have a negative effect on the value of the firm and the stock returns. In contrast, a growing stream of literature provides evidence in support of the diversification premium. There is no consensus on whether the documented discount can be attributed to corporate diversification per se or to the firms' characteristics other than diversification. In this study, we re-examine the impact of industrial and/or geographic diversification on the stock returns.

The investigation of the comprehensive …

Determinants Of Internet Banking Adoption In Thailand, Bussakorn Jaruwachirathanakul

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Increasingly competition in the financial services sector is forcing service providers to develop and utilise alternative delivery channels (Daniel, 1999). Within the sector, banking has always been a highly service intensive activity that relies heavily on technology to acquire, process, and deliver services and information to consumers (Tan & Teo, 2000). The emergence of the Internet has provided a way for banks to improve the efficiency of their service delivery and to gain a competitive advantage by reducing the number of brick-and-mortar branches. The study investigated the adoption of lnternet banking services in Thailand and is based on the premise …

The Service Delivery Process : An Examination Of How Consumers Evaluate Technology-Assisted Service Encounters In The Retail Banking Industry, Catherine W. Munene

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This study examined consumers' perceptions post-adoption of technology and how these perceptions affect their levels of dis/satisfaction and their continued use of technology·assisted service encounters. To this end, this study investigated the criteria that consumers in Western Australia's retail banking industry are likely to use when evaluating banking transactions involving EFTPOS, ATM, telephone, and Online banking modes. II examined whether these criteria changed with the mode of electronic banking in use and whether the significance of the criteria changed with

consumers' demographic characteristics. In addition, this study explored whether consumers who use these modes of electronic banking experience the paradoxes …

Overreaction, Heteroscedasticity, And Spillovers In Stock Returns: Evidence From The Kuwait Stock Exchange, Mohammad Yousef Al-Hashel

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

This research examines stocks' returns and volatility in the Kuwait Stock Exchange (KSE). The research is organized in five chapters. The first chapter provides an introduction of the research, its importance, and its main goals. The second chapter presents a historical background of the KSE and the stages it experienced to reach its current situation. The main goal of this chapter is to pave the road for the subsequent chapters. Then, the third chapter tests the overreaction hypothesis using monthly data for stocks listed on the Kuwait Stock Exchange over the 1993–2002 period. Similar to the findings of De Bondt …

Market Valuation Of Corporate Diversification In The Presence Of Internal Capital Markets In Emerging Countries, Supannee Buasook

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

This study examines the valuation of corporate diversification in three emerging countries: Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines. Over the period of study (1992–2001 for Thailand and 1994–2001 for Indonesia and the Philippines), it is found that there is evidence of diversification discount in all three countries. The largest amount of discount exists in the Philippines (60.1%), followed by Indonesia (25.5%) and Thailand (15.1%).

Then, the sample is divided into two sub-periods: before the crisis (1992–1996) and after the crisis (1997–2001). Before the crisis, the diversification discount existed only in the Philippines, with the average of 49%. There is not enough …

Two Essays On Corporate Hedging: The Choice Of Instruments And Methods, Pinghsun Huang

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines corporate use of derivative instruments and multi-period hedging methods. It studies the use of linear (e.g. futures) and nonlinear (e.g. options) derivatives in a sample of 382 U.S. non-financial firms (920 firm-year observations) between 1992 and 1996. It also measures the performance of stacked hedge techniques with applications to three investment assets (heating oil, light crude oil, and unleaded gasoline) and to three commercial commodities (British Pound, Deutsche Mark, and Swiss Franc). In a stacked hedge, corporations hedge the long-term exposures by repeatedly rolling nearby futures contracts until settlement. Analyzing the 382 firms, I find that both …

Market Timing And Cost Of Capital Of The Firm, Kyojik Song

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Graham and Harvey’s (2001) survey evidence and Baker, Greenwood, and Wurgler (2003) indicate that firm managers try to time debt markets based on term spreads or excess bond returns when choosing the maturity of new debt issues. Whether debt market timing increases firm value via a reduced cost of capital is an empirical question. I examine differences in firm value across non-timers and timers, where timers are defined as firms that follow either a naïve strategy of choosing long-term debt when the term premium is low or a complex strategy from Baker et al. (2003) based on the predictability of …