Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

Building Financial Peace: A Conflict Resolution Framework For Money Arguments, Sarah D. Asebedo

Journal of Financial Therapy

This paper presents a well-known and highly utilized conflict resolution framework from the mediation profession and demonstrates how to apply this framework to money arguments. While conflict resolution skills have been identified as important to communication within the financial planning context, an integrated conflict resolution framework has yet to be recognized and understood within the financial planning literature. This paper aims to fill this gap. Ultimately, both mental health professionals and financial planners can benefit from an interdisciplinary approach to resolving money arguments by combining training in personal financial strategies and conflict resolution principles.

Spend Your Student Loans On A Vacation. No One Is Watching., Raul A. Hernandez, Morten Buttler

Capstones

Student loan debtors who spend their loans on non-educational expenses   increase the likelihood of financial hardship once they begin repayment. Contributing to the financial struggles of student loan debtors is an overly-complicated student loan system which can entangle borrowers with unclear financial statements and a glut of federal loan repayment programs.

Link to capstone project: https://medium.com/@raul.hernandez/spend-your-student-loans-on-a-vacation-no-one-is-watching-a71834ed6f45#.vj61hhxig

The Assurance Market Of Sustainability Reports: What Do Accounting Firms Do?, Belen Fernandez-Feijoo, Silvia Romero, Silvia Ruiz

Department of Accounting and Finance Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The assurance of sustainability reports is a relatively new service offered by different providers such as accounting firms and consultants. The percentage of sustainability reports assured and the weight of the four largest accounting firms (Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PWC) in this new market are evolving in time. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to a better understanding of the role each one of the four major accounting firms (Big4) play in this assurance market. Using a generalized linear mixed model in an international sample, our results confirm that each Big4 accounting firm leverages its network of financial …

An Analysis On The Growth Of Student Loans And Its Implications On The U.S. Economy, Jensine Voon

Honors Theses

Student loan debt is an issue facing the United States of America today. More and more people are enrolling themselves into college, hoping that a college degree would increase their chances of employment and improve their standard of living. However, the rise in demand for tertiary education has an effect on the amount of student loan debt accumulated in America. A hike in college tuition fees has caused a rise in default rate among student borrowers. More borrowers are entering repayment plans because they are not able to make their monthly loan payments. This phenomenon has altered borrowers’ decision on …

Do Credit Ratings Matter? An Examination Of The Relationship Between Sovereign Ratings And Capital Flows Pre And Post Financial Crisis, Greg Violante

Economics Department Student Scholarship

This paper examines the relationship between sovereign credit ratings and international capital flows to emerging market economies (EMEs). More specifically, it analyzes how ratings impact capital flows (FDI and portfolio investment) before and after the 2007-2008 financial crisis. This study breaks the data into two samples, pre-crisis (1995-2006), and the post crisis (2007-2015). After using a System GMM method for 20 EMEs, the paper compares the pre- and post- financial crisis credit rating coefficients. The results indicate that the ratings have become more impactful overtime, for both FDI and portfolio investment, although the coefficients are not statistically different. Interestingly however, …

Understanding The Retail Investor: Technical And Fundamental Analysis, Ben Davis

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

The Impact Of Leverage On Hedge Fund Performance, Wansoo Choi

Financial Analyst

In this paper, the effect of leverage on hedge fund performance is measured. TASS data from 1994 to 2016 are used to measure the impact of leverage on hedge fund performance. Three hedge fund performance measurements are regressed on degree of leverage with eight control variables including fund size, strategies, and use of derivatives. The results show that for strategyadjusted return as a performance measurement, hedge fund leverage has a negative impact on fund performance. Also there is evidence of diseconomies of scale where funds with medium-sized assets under management (AUM) tend to show better performance than funds with high …

Trade Networks And Cross-Border Acquisitions: Evidence From United States Acquiring Firms, Seung Hun Han, Eun Jin Jo, Dong-Kyoon Kim, Duk Hee Lee

Department of Accounting and Finance Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This study examines the impact of the trade networks of target firms' nation on the announcement returns of the cross-border acquisitions of United States acquirers. By using a sample of 818 cross-border acquisitions during 2000–2007, we find that the centrality measure of trade networks has a positive impact on announcement returns, after controlling for Hofstede's cultural distance measure between the acquiring and target nations and various firm- and deal-specific factors. In sum, trade network analysis, based on strength centrality, better explains the performance of acquiring firms than does the bilateral trade openness measurement used in previous studies.

Bridging The Gap Between Religion And Business: A Conversation, Michael E. Cafferky, Doug Jacobs

Faculty Works

This article explores some of the tensions that congregational pastors experience in terms of business and religion. It is a dialogue regarding the perceived gap between pastors and business professionals.

“Bridging the gap between religion and business: A conversation" by Michael Cafferky and Douglas Jacobs published in the December 2016 issue of Ministry,® International Journal for Pastors, www.MinistryMagazine.org. Used by permission.

An Economic Evaluation Of A Biofuel Supply Chain Utilizing Multiple Feedstocks, Huaqi Zhang

Masters Theses

Biomass is considered as one potential feedstock for biofuel production. However, the high cost of biomass-to-biofuel supply chain, attributed to biomass’s low bulk density and resulting harvest, storage, and transportation challenges, has been a major hindrance to the success of biomass-based biofuel industry. In addition, the issue of dry matter losses during storage for a feedstock has affected biomass quantity and quality if the feedstock is stored for several months after a single harvest in a year. One potential way to improve the economics of biomass supply chain is to reduce storage need and enhance the utilization of harvest equipment …

Gender Effects In Hedge Funds Performance, Karen Yoke Wah Gan

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This paper shows that after controlling for total risks (as funds do not typically hold a completely large diversified portfolio) across different funds, female-managed funds appear to perform better in certain circumstances. For example, female-managed hedge funds perform better during post-crisis times, for investments using the Relative Value Style and also when investments are in the Asia excluding Japan region. However, there are still many conditions in which male-managed funds seem to perform better. Namely, male-managed funds performed significantly positive in the Relative Value, Security Selection, and Multiprocess Styles, notably during the pre-crisis period and also when investments are in …

Options Pricing Through Computational Methods, Robert Petty

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

The purpose of this paper is to show the practical application of computational methods to price options. Emphasis is especially given to the use of the Longstaff-Schwartz method for pricing American and exotic options. An implementation of these pricing methods in a computer program are demonstrated. The advantages of using object-oriented programming design patterns to make pricing programs more flexible and useful is also discussed.

Limited Attention, Marital Events And Hedge Funds, Yan Lu, Sugata Ray, Melvyn Teo

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We explore the impact of limited attention by analyzing the performance of hedge fund managers who are distracted by marital events. We find that marriages and divorces are associated with significantly lower fund alpha, during the six-month period surrounding and the two-year period after the event. Busy managers who manage multiple funds and who are not part of a team are more affected by marital transitions. Inattentive managers place fewer active bets relative to their style peers, load more on index stocks, exhibit higher R-squareds with respect to systematic factors, and are more prone to the disposition effect.

The Effect Of Monetary Policy On Bank Wholesale Funding, Hyunsoo Choi, Hyun Soo Choi

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We study how monetary policy affects the funding composition of the banking sector. When monetary tightening reduces the retail deposit supply due to, for example, a decrease in bank reserves or in money demand, banks try to substitute the deposit outflows with more wholesale funding in order to mitigate the policy impact on their lending. Banks have varying degrees of accessibility to wholesale funding sources because of financial frictions, and those banks that are large or that have a greater reliance on wholesale funding increase their wholesale funding more. As a result, monetary tightening increases both the reliance on and …

Public Hedge Funds, Lin Sun, Melvyn Teo

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Hedge funds managed by listed firms significantly underperform funds managed by unlisted firms. The underperformance is more severe for funds with low manager deltas, poor governance, and no manager co-investment, or managed by firms whose prices are sensitive to earnings news. Notwithstanding the underperformance, listed firms raise more capital and harvest greater fee revenues than do comparable unlisted firms. The results cannot be explained by endogeneity, backfill bias, serial correlation, or manager manipulation, and are consistent with the view that, for asset management firms, going public weakens the alignment between ownership, control, and investment capital, thereby engendering conflicts of interest.

The Effect Of Monetary Policy On Bank Wholesale Funding, Hyunsoo Choi, Hyun Soo Choi

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We study how monetary policy affects the funding composition of the banking sector. When monetary tightening reduces the retail deposit supply due to, for example, a decrease in bank reserves or in money demand, banks try to substitute the deposit outflows with more wholesale funding in order to mitigate the policy impact on their lending. Banks have varying degrees of accessibility to wholesale funding sources because of financial frictions, and those banks that are large or that have a greater reliance on wholesale funding increase their wholesale funding more. As a result, monetary tightening increases both the reliance on and …

Short Selling Meets Hedge Fund 13f: An Anatomy Of Informed Demand, Yawen Jiao, Massimo Massa, Hong Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The existing literature treats the short side (i.e., short selling) and the long side of hedge fund trading (i.e., fund holdings) independently. The two sides, however, complement each other: opposite changes in the two are likely to be driven by information, whereas simultaneous increases (decreases) of the two may be motivated by hedging (unwinding) considerations. We use this intuition to identify informed demand and document that it exhibits highly significant predictive power over returns (approximately 10% per year). We also find that informed demand forecasts future firm fundamentals, suggesting that hedge funds play an important role in information discovery. (C) …

Capital Structure In The Family Firm: Exploring The Relationship Between Financial Sources And Family Dynamics, Diego G. Velez

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

How a company structures its capital greatly affects its strategic options and its strategic decisions according to contemporary thinking. However, while there is ample literature on how publicly held companies’ capital should be structured, less is known about private companies. Additionally, one or more members of a single family typically own the majority of private companies, and unlike public companies, family dynamics influence these firms’ non-financial and financial goals and strategic decisions. This overlap of family dynamics into the business arena complicates conventional approaches or at least makes conventional approaches more difficult to apply.

This dissertation focuses on privately held, …

Three Essays On Hedge Fund Investments And Investment Banks, Xiaohui Yang

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on studying how investment banks affect hedge fund equity investments through acting as prime brokers for hedge funds. The first chapter studies how the relationships between hedge funds and investment banks are maintained through equity issuance and prime brokerage business. Using a comprehensive dataset of hedge funds and IPO allocations, I examine IPO allocation decisions by investment banks to hedge funds. I find that investment banks whose prime brokers have strong relationships with hedge funds and are lead underwriters of IPOs tend to allocate more IPOs to these hedge funds. Moreover, the allocation to hedge funds is …

The World Of Finance In Russia, Matthew Thomas

Honors Theses

Russia is currently in an economic crisis the likes of which the Russian people are unfortunately familiar with in their turbulent past. Economic sanctions, paired with a global downturn in oil prices, have stalled any progress that had been occurring after the 2008 global economic meltdown. The Central Bank of Russia, which was founded after the fall of the USSR in the early 1990s, was quick to respond to the sanctions and domestic economic issues by laying out an Anti-Crisis plan along with the aid of the rest of the government. They raised interest rates to over 20%, passed legislation …

Winning And Other Determinants Of Revenue In North America's Major Professional Sports Leagues, John Charles Bradbury

Faculty and Research Publications

This study investigates recent determinants of revenue in North America’s four major professional sports leagues. Estimates reveal that revenue is positively associated with winning in baseball (MLB), basketball (NBA), and hockey (NHL), but not in football (NFL). The returns to winning are not diminishing as commonly assumed, which casts doubt on the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis, and differences across leagues are consistent with revenue sharing arrangements. Estimates also indicate a strong negative relationship between stadium age and revenue, which is consistent with observed rapid replacement of sports stadiums. The results have several important implications for economic models of sports leagues.

Cash Flow News, Discount Rate News, And Momentum, Umut Celiker, Nuri Volkan Kayacetin, Raman Kumar, Gokhan Sonaer

Business Faculty Publications

We examine the effect of aggregate cash flow news and discount rate news on momentum returns. We find that momentum profits are higher following aggregate positive cash flow news, even in down markets or low sentiment periods. This finding expands on the evidence in Cooper et al. (2004) that momentum is significant only when past market returns are non-negative and in Antoniou et al. (2013) that momentum is weaker when sentiment is pessimistic. We find that the higher momentum profits during aggregate positive cash flow news periods are primarily driven by the losers continuing to underperform in subsequent periods. Our …

International Construction Measurement Standard, Charles Mitchell

Other Resources

The International Construction Measurement Standard Coalition (the Coalition) was formed on 17 June 2015 after meeting at the International Monetary Fund in Washington DC, USA. The Coalition, comprising the organisations listed below at the date of publication, aims to bring about consistency in construction cost reporting standards internationally. This is achieved by the creation and adoption of this ICMS, an agreed international standard for the structuring and presentation of cost reports. ICMS sets out a structure for describing construction costs in terms of project scope, attributes and values descriptors. This document setting out the provisions of ICMS is the first …

2016 Q4 Private Capital Access Index Report, Craig R. Everett

Pepperdine Private Capital Access Report

The Pepperdine Private Capital Access Index (PCA) is a quarterly indicator produced by the Graziadio School of Business and Management at Pepperdine University, and with the support of Dun & Bradstreet. The index is designed to measure the demand for, activity, and health of the private capital markets. The purpose of the PCA Index is to gauge the demand of small and medium sized businesses for financing needs, the level of accessibility of private capital, and the transparency and efficiency of private financing markets.

Knowledge Will Set You Free: Financial Awareness And Inclusion In The Bottom Of The Pyramid, Aurobindo Ghosh

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In this project, we explored whether financial literacy and economic awareness alleviates financial exclusion for the general population, particularly the financially underserved sections of the population in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) in Vietnam. We overcame the problem of identifying the financially excluded by looking at multiple measures of financial inclusion including frequency of bank use, access to borrowing for business, having a regular savings plan and having some insurance for possible future unfavorable outcomes. Using an innovative principal component (PCA) based method we identified a single score factor that can be construed as an overall measure of the degree …

A Bankable Future, Jonathan Henry Chang

Asian Management Insights

Efforts to promote financialinclusion in Cambodia arepaying dividends economically,and unlocking opportunity.

Valuation Uncertainty, Market Sentiment And The Informativeness Of Institutional Trades, Lisa Yang, Jeremy Goh, Chiraphol N. Chiyachantana

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Prior studies indicate that institutional investors are informed, in the sense that their trades predict price changes. In this study we show that return predictive ability of institutions arises (after controlling for size, book-to-market, and momentum) mainly from institutional sales of hard-to-value stocks during periods of positive market sentiment. These results support the notion that these stocks tend to be overvalued during periods of bullish market sentiment, and institutions contribute to market efficiency by identifying and trading on these overpriced stocks.

State Ownership And Corporate Innovation Efficiency, Jerry X. Cao, Douglas J. Cumming, Sili Zhou, Lu Zhou

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The conventional wisdom is that state ownership may hinder patenting through reduced incentives and pronounced agency problems associated with state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Empirical evidence from a variety of contexts, including the U.S., Europe, and China, is consistent with this view, including evidence that shows that reductions in state ownership are associated with an increase in patent counts. In this paper, we investigate the innovative efficiency of Chinese SOEs. Innovative efficiency refers to patents/R&D expenditure, and not patent counts. The data indicate that SOEs, and especially central government SOEs, are substantially more innovatively efficient than non-SOEs. The relative innovative efficiency of …

Days To Cover And Stock Returns, Harrison G. Hong, Frank Weikai Li, Sophie X. Ni, Jose A. Scheinkman, Philip Yan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

A crowded trade emerges when speculators' positions are large relative to the asset's liquidity, making exit difficult. We study this problem of recent regulatory concern by focusing on short-selling. We show that days to cover (DTC), the ratio of short interest to trading volume, measures the costliness of exiting crowded trades. Crowding is an important concern as short-sellers avoid illiquid stocks, which we establish using an instrumental-variables strategy involving staggered stock market decimalization reforms. Arbitrageurs require a premium to enter into such trades as a strategy shorting high DTC stocks and buying low DTC stocks generates a 1.2% monthly return. …

2016 University Of Maine System Financial Report, University Of Maine System

General University of Maine Publications

University of Maine System (“the System” or UMS) management has prepared the following unaudited Management’s Discussion and Analysis (MD&A) to provide users with a narrative and analysis of the financial position and activities based on currently known facts, decisions, and conditions. This discussion includes an analysis of the financial condition and results of activities of the System for the fiscal years ended June 30, 2016 and prior years. This presentation includes highly summarized information and should be read in conjunction with the accompanying basic financial statements and related notes.