Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

Crime And The Effects It Has On Business Development, Alexis Pimental

Honors Theses and Capstones

This reading highlights the topic of crime through exploring what crime is as well as the different types of crimes in our everyday lives. Specifically, this research paper wants to highlight the crimes that may affect businesses, as well as the relationships between crime and business development. By using facts and statistics, we will dive into the relationship between the two and see why certain businesses may find success while other businesses struggle. We will also be looking at different pieces of literature, reviewing them, and drawing conclusions from the literature being discussed. The literature review as well as assessments …

Modeling The Impact Of Adding Cryptocurrency In A Portfolio, Ashley Pineault

Honors Theses and Capstones

This study examines the backgrounds of Bitcoin and Ethereum. How they came about, where they differ from one another in functions, and what investors believe will be a better cryptocurrency stock as an investment to include in an optimized portfolio. It will also study the impact of adding two leading cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum, into a hypothetical, optimal investment portfolio. Data collection includes the adjusted closing price of 30 diversified stocks from 2016 to 2021. Those adjusted closing prices are the beginning of determining the optimal portfolio for three separate portfolios. One has the Ethereum cryptocurrencies, the other has Bitcoin …

Impact Of Islamic Financial Principles On Mitigating The Covid-19 Financial Crisis In Pakistan, Mohammed Monzur Murshid

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a global financial crisis. Governments and central banks around the world took unprecedented measures to mitigate the effect of the pandemic-triggered financial crisis and maintain the stability of the financial system. The purpose of this cross-sectional quantitative study was to examine the capability of the Islamic financial system to mitigate the effect of the pandemic-induced financial crisis on the economy of Pakistan in 2020. The International Monetary Fund enhanced dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (IMF-DSGE) model provided the framework for this study. Data collection included conventional financial sector parameters, Islamic financial sector parameters, and country-level macroeconomic data …

Bubbles Through The Years: An Examination Of Unique And Analogous Characteristics Among Financial Manias From The South Sea Bubble To The Great Financial Crisis, Matthew Hines

CMC Senior Theses

Throughout history, financial bubbles have been shrouded in fear and misunderstanding, with hope, greed, and hearsay fueling inane degrees of risk-taking amongst financial powerhouses and the common retail investor alike. While many studies have been conducted to delve into the unique attributes, causes, effects, and consequences of almost every crisis since adequate data could be recorded and preserved, it is not common for the varying types of crises to be directly compared in their core attributes and price movements. This paper conducts such an examination, with a look into ten different crises across the equity, real estate, and oil markets …

An Analysis Of Impacts Of Covid-19 On Salary Cap Allocation And Performance In The National Football League, Abai Houser

CMC Senior Theses

Professional sports are one of the most successful industries in the world. The live spectacle and in-person nature make sporting events a unique and individual experience. COVID-19 shifted how athletic events were operated, financed, and viewed, thereby changing leagues as well. The National Football League was one of the last sports to start its season during 2019 and 2020, setting the stage as the only league to not isolate its players in a safe operating space. This paper studies the effects of COVID-19 on the salary cap management of teams after the pandemic. The findings suggest that financial metrics analyzed …

How Punxsutawney Phil’S Predictions Affect The Stock Market: A Groundhog Day Analysis, Jessica Cuna Zamora

CMC Senior Theses

With its roots dating back to 1887, Groundhog Day has cemented itself as a beloved American holiday where people gather to see if Punxsutawney Phil will predict 6 more weeks of winter, or an early arrival of spring. Utilizing the data and methodology framework from Shanaev, Savva, and Fedorova (2021) to test if Groundhog Day predictions have any effect on S&P 500 returns, this paper revisits and revises the analysis in attempt to replicate and improve the original findings with a dummy-variable regression while controlling for other calendar anomalies. Additionally, this study expands the original analysis by including two new …

Securing The Overnight Rates: A Study Of Alternative Reference Rates In Illiquid Overnight Tri-Party Repo Markets, Michael Murphy

CMC Senior Theses

Since 2011, the London Interbank Offer Rate (LIBOR) has been on the way out for practitioners and researchers alike due to its manipulation in key bank quotes during the Great Financial Crisis (GFC). This paper intends to examine key rates being introduced as LIBOR substitutes, such as SOFR, BSBY, and Ameribor. Specific to its concern, the paper will back test these rates during times of illiquidity in both their respective markets and the broader financial markets to determine which rates will be able to sustain an abnormal drop in transaction volumes. Furthermore, this paper will try to determine whether a …

De-Fi Protocol Token Valuation By Projecting Token Flows And Estimating An Appropriate Risk Premium, Anders C. Brucker

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

Monte Carlo And Bootstrapping Carry Trade Simulations In Excel, Tom Arnold, C. Mitchell Conover, Joseph Farizo

Finance Faculty Publications

In a currency carry trade, an investor borrows money in a low interest rate currency and invests in a high interest rate currency. The trade is profitable if the future exchange rate does not adjust to the interest rate differential. After downloading exchange rate data, a Monte Carlo simulation of a carry trade is performed in Excel based on a normal distribution and the data’s mean and standard deviation. A bootstrapping carry trade simulation exercise is also generated by randomly selecting observations from the historical data. In contrast to the Monte Carlo simulation, the bootstrapping exercise preserves the skewness within …

Optimal Illiquidity, John Beshears, James J. Choi, Christopher Clayton, Christopher Harris, David Laibson, Brigitte C. Madrian

Faculty Publications

We calculate the socially optimal level of illiquidity in an economy populated by households with taste shocks and present bias (Amador, Werning, and Angeletos 2006). The government chooses mandatory contributions to respective spending/ savings accounts, each with a different pre-retirement withdrawal penalty. Penalties collected by the government are redistributed through the tax system. When naive households have heterogeneous present bias, the social optimum is well approximated by a three-account system: (i) a completely liquid account, (ii) a completely illiquid account, and (iii) an account with an ≃ 10% early withdrawal penalty. In some ways this resembles the U.S. system, which …

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions: Summer Activities For Anna!, David Henderson, John Marsh

Business

Anna Swanson will soon be home for the summer. Her parents John and Carol are trying to figure out the best way to keep Anna busy for the summer using a $400 gift from her grandmother. Given their budget, John and Carol must weigh the cost, benefits, and break-even points of options like a YMCA pool pass, amusement park pass, or various summer camps and try to find the best option or options that will keep young Anna busy during the summer.

Governing Fintech 4.0: Bigtech, Platform Finance, And Sustainable Development, Douglas Arner, Ross Buckley, Kuzi Charamba, Artem Sergeev, Dirk Zetzsche

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

Over the past 150 years, finance has evolved into one of the world’s most globalized, digitized, and regulated industries. Digitalization has transformed finance, but also enabled new entrants over the past decade in the form of technology companies, especially FinTechs and BigTechs. As a highly digitalized industry, incumbents and new entrants alike are increasingly pursuing similar approaches and models, focusing on the economies of scope and scale typical of finance and the network effects typical of data. Predictably, this has resulted in the emergence of large digital finance platforms. We argue that the combination of digitalization, new entrants (especially BigTechs), …

2022 Crummer Suntrust Portfolio Recommendations: Crummer Investment Management 23rd Anniversary, Jason Philips, Michael Capra, Denis Golubev, Connor Jensen, Kovi Katz

Crummer Truist Portfolios

SunTrust (now Truist) endowed this portfolio to provide scholarships for future Crummer students and to give current students a practical, hands-on learning opportunity. This year, we are pleased to be able to disburse $55,000 to be used for scholarships. We are extremely grateful for SunTrust’s generosity and investment in higher education. We have all learned a great deal from this experience and the responsibility of managing real money. Our first challenge is to establish a portfolio position that takes advantage of economic opportunities while avoiding unnecessary risk and conforming to the Crummer SunTrust Investment Policy Statement (IPS). We are also …

Audit Firm Culture: An Evolution Of The Audit Profession In Response To External Forces, Christina T. Alberti

2022

The COVID-19 pandemic is disrupting business operations throughout the world, including the working procedures of audit professionals. Yet, to date, research on COVID-19’s impact on auditing is limited. This is despite its potential long-term implications. Thus, my dissertation uses a mix of research methods to examine auditors’ response to, and regulators’ evaluation of auditors’ response to, COVID-19.

The first paper (co-authored) synthesizes research on audit firm culture (AFC) over the past decade, reviewing recent developments in research on AFC and its influence on audit quality and auditors’ work attitudes. Using a three-phase model based on prior research and professional guidance, …

Optimizing Pension Outcomes Using Target Volatility Investment Concept, Zefeng Bai

2022

The target volatility strategy is a very popular investment concept in financial marketplace. For my dissertation, I focus on studying the target volatility investment concept in application to pension accumulation as well as decumulation stages. Additionally, I extend a basic target volatility strategy by introducing trading boundaries to its asset allocation mechanism. My dissertation study follows a three-paper format.

In paper one, we propose a new pension strategy that aims at improving the protection of a long-term pension plan in volatile market conditions. Over a hypothetical twenty-year pension scheme, we show that our newly proposed strategy, which attaches a target …

Exploring The Use Of Rasch Models To Construct Measures Of Firms’ Profitability With Multiple Discretization Ratio-Type Data, Chen Qiu

Theses and Dissertations--Education Sciences

Ratio-type data plays an important role in real-world data analysis. Mass ratios have been created for different purposes, depending on time and people’s needs. Then, it is necessary to create a comprehensive score to extract information from those mass ratios when they measure the same concept from different perspectives. Therefore, this study adopts the same logic of psychometrics to systematically conduct scale development on ratio-type data under the Rasch model. However, it is first necessary to discretize the ratio-type data for use in the Rasch model. Therefore, this study also explores the effect of different data discretization methods on scale …

Media Merger Madness: An Event Study Analyzing Acquiror Returns In Media & Entertainment, Samuel Johnson

CMC Senior Theses

Utilizing an event study methodology, this paper studies the effect that mergers and acquisitions (M&A) announcements have on media acquirors’ stock returns. This study also examines the effect that various characteristics of the target and acquiror have on acquirors’ returns. These characteristics include: location of the acquired company, year of the acquisition, industry of the acquired company, price of the acquired company, size of the acquiror, and serial acquiror status of the acquiror. My findings are consistent with previous literature that find that, in a short-term event window surrounding the announcement of a merger or acquisition, acquirors experience returns that …

Tax Avoidance, Corporate Governance, And Corporate Policies, Yang Yang

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This dissertation includes three essays examining the interactions between tax avoidance, corporate governance, and corporate policies. The first essay exploits corporate governance shocks induced by cross-listing in the U.S., and find that firms tend to engage in less tax avoidance after cross-listing. This effect is more pronounced for firms that experience significant improvements in corporate governance, and for firms from countries with weaker shareholder protection and disclosure requirements. Taken together, the results indicate that cross-listing in the U.S. helps align the interests of managers and shareholders and reduces managerial diversion.

The second essay examines the importance of tax avoidance to …

Impact Of Covid-19 Pandemic On Household Financial Decisions: A Consumer Vulnerability Perspective, Atefeh Yazdanparast, Yasser Alhenawi

School of Business

This study joins a rapidly growing body of research that investigates the multi-faceted impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on consumers' behavior. Specifically, we examine how the pandemic-induced state of vulnerability impacts consumers' saving, investing, and spending decisions. Using survey data from four different countries (i.e., USA, UK, South Africa, and Mexico), we examine the role of personality on consumer vulnerability, create an index of consumer vulnerability, and establish the role of vulnerability in impacting important financial decisions. We report evidence that perceptions of vulnerability and the pandemic-induced changes in financial and consumption behaviors vary across residents of developed and developing …

The Gender Bias Burden On Business: Women's Access To Credit In Bahrain, Sandra J. Thiman

Mary Ann Bolton Undergraduate Research Award

Entrepreneurship is essential to virtually every economy; however, Bahraini women face many challenges accessing business development. In particular, a major constraint for these women is their access to capital support. In 2020, the government signed a law prohibiting gender-based discrimination in access to credit to help the issue; nonetheless, its effectiveness has yet to be systematically examined. Using data from several sources, I test whether the law significantly affected the gender gap in borrowing for business purposes while controlling for other variables. Importantly, I find that women’s labor force participation is a significant factor in reducing the borrowing gap between …