Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

Even Adults Like "Happy Meals", Steven D. Dolvin

All Chapters

Higher risk companies, in order to sell bonds at lower interest rates, must often attach "sweetners" to the bond offering. Historically this has included warrants or conversion options. Recently, however, some companies have offered a combination of bonds and a loan of the company's shares, a so-called "Happy Meal." The bond buyers subsequently sell the shares short. If the company fails, the investors lose on the bonds, but make a profit on the short sale. This strategy is typically employed by hedge funds. See article here, Wall Street Journal.

P/E Ratios, Steven D. Dolvin

All Chapters

Most investors know that the PE multiple is the ratio of price to earnings. While the market price is easy to agree upon, the earnings number that should be used in the ratio is not. Some investors prefer historical earnings, while others focus on forecasted earnings. Each of these approaches can provide widely different PE estimates, making comparison difficult. .

Three Essays In Financial Economics, Ivan F. Julio

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Two Essays On The Efficiency, Diversification, And Performance Of Financial Institutions, Abu Khan

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

In the first chapter I investigate the change in operating performance, efficiency and value addition of US bank merger and acquisition after GLBA. I extend the previous research by combining all the previous methodology used in merger literature and added a new methodology namely Expected EVA improvement. I will test whether these performance metrics have similar results or the performance of merger vary depending on the measurements. I will also examine the factors that have significant impact on the change in the banks’ performance.

My results show that industry-adjusted operating performance of merged banks increases significantly after a merger.I also …

Financial Inclusion In Nigeria: Issues And Challenges, Ukpai Kama, Mustapha A. Adigun

CBN Occasional Papers

Financial Inclusion is a state where financial services are delivered by a range of providers, mostly the private sector, to reach everyone who could use them. Specifically, it means a financial system that serves as many people as possible in a country. In recent time, financial Inclusion has assumed a critical development policy priority in many countries, particularly in developing economies. This paper reviewed experiences of other jurisdictions in the achievement of financial inclusion. More importantly, the various country experiences showed that, though financial inclusion may have become a general phenomenon, its nature, form and challenges differ among jurisdictions and …

Can Hedge Funds Time Liquidity?, Charles Cao, Yong Chen, Bing Liang, Andrew W. Lo

Research Collection BNP Paribas Hedge Fund Centre

We explore a new dimension of fund managers' timing ability by examining whether they can time market liquidity through adjusting their portfolios' market exposure as aggregate liquidity conditions change. Using a large sample of hedge funds, we find strong evidence of liquidity timing. A bootstrap analysis suggests that top-ranked liquidity timers cannot be attributed to pure luck. In out-of-sample tests, top liquidity timers outperform bottom timers by 4.0–5.5% annually on a risk-adjusted basis. We also find that it is important to distinguish liquidity timing from liquidity reaction, which primarily relies on public information. Our results are robust to alternative explanations, …

Forecasting Foreign Exchange Rates, Timothy M. Znaczko

Applied Economics Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to seek answers to different questions regarding the forecasting of foreign exchange rates. Exchange rate movement is regularly monitored by central banks for macroeconomic analysis and market surveillance purposes. Results in the literature show exchange rate models perform poorly in out-of-sample prediction analysis, even though some models have good in-sample analysis. The results were found using methods including moving average, exponential smoothing, random walk, and Box-Jenkins transfer function. The questions that I ask are: how accurate are these models when compared to a random prediction of future exchange rates, and what variables, if any, …

Medicaid Expansion, Long-Term Care Financing In Retirement States And The Post World War Ii Birth Cohort, Toni P. Miles

Center for Policy Research

This policy brief contains a formal consideration of ideas discussed during a presentation to the 2012 Syracuse Seminar on Aging. Like most briefs, it will appeal to policy makers and academics craving detailed demographic, fiscal and policy data. Before diving into this brief, I would encourage readers to view the presentation video (available at http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=bsv8K7DdJFY). As you will see, the seminar was informal and the discussion was wide ranging. In contrast, this brief focuses on limitations faced by states as they finance longterm care. It is primarily concerned with the Medicaid expansion and growing need for care as the …

Essays On The Relationship Between Investor Sentiment And Real Estate Investment Trusts, Daniel Huerta

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) are federal tax-exempt firms originated in 1960 to allow investors participation in professionally managed real estate to attain greater portfolio diversification. Although REITs are often considered transparent and informationally efficient, extant literature suggests that investor behavioral biases impact their prices and returns. This dissertation examines the relationship between investor sentiment and REITs, contributing to the literature in the following distinct ways. First, I examine the contemporaneous and intertemporal impact of changes in sentiment on REIT returns making a distinction between sentiment derived from large institutional investors and small individual investors. Results suggest that sentiment from …

Assessing Revenue Managers' Level Of Trust In Information Systems: An Exploratory Study Of Las Vegas Casino Resorts, Landon Taylor Shores

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This study examined revenue managers' level of trust in their revenue management system (RMS) at Las Vegas casino resorts. The study utilized an e-mail interview to measure revenue managers' attitudes about their RMS's degree of reliability and dependability, the degree to which they trust their RMS's pricing recommendations, and if a revenue manager's level of trust in technology had any effect on their likelihood of trusting their RMS.

The study invited 11 property and corporate revenue managers from Las Vegas casino resorts to participate in an e-mail interview, with nine revenue managers agreeing to participate. The main findings of the …

Liquidity And Crises In Asian Equity Markets, Charlie Charoenwong, David K. Ding, Yung Chiang Yang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This article presents a discussion of stock market liquidity and its relation to financial crises. It begins by defining liquidity and explaining possible measures of liquidity and then explores factors influencing liquidity. It also analyzes the liquidity among 11 Asian countries. The empirical findings based on the time-series analysis show a sharp decline in stock liquidity during both the 1997-1998 Asian and the recent 2007-2008 global financial crisis. The multivariate regression results show that both stock liquidity and trading activity decrease after large market declines. Stock liquidity responds significantly to large market declines in South Korea and Taiwan whereas it …

Testing For Multiple Bubbles 1: Historical Episodes Of Exuberance And Collapse In The S&P 500, Peter C. B. Phillips, Shu-Ping Shi, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

Recent work on econometric detection mechanisms has shown the effectiveness of recursive procedures in identifying and dating financial bubbles. These procedures are useful as warning alerts in surveillance strategies conducted by central banks and fiscal regulators with real time data. Use of these methods over long historical periods presents a more serious econometric challenge due to the complexity of the nonlinear structure and break mechanisms that are inherent in multiple bubble phenomena within the same sample period. To meet this challenge the present paper develops a new recursive flexible window method that is better suited for practical implementation with long …

Growing The Asset Management Franchise: Evidence From Hedge Fund Firms, William Fung, David Hsieh, Narayan Y. Naik, Melvyn Teo

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We investigate the growth strategies of hedge fund firms. We find that firms with successful first funds are able to launch follow-on funds that charge higher performance fees, set more onerous redemption terms, and attract greater inflows. While first funds outperform follow-on funds, the superior performance of the former attenuates following the launch of the second fund. Multiple-product firms underperform single-product firms, but harvest greater fee revenues. Consequently, the multiple-product firm has become the dominant business model in the hedge fund industry.

The Determinants And Consequences Of Ceo Cheap Stock In Ipos, Michael Dennis Stuart

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The term "cheap stock" describes undervalued stock options granted to CEOs and other key employees prior to initial public offerings (IPOs). Pre-IPO firms have incentives to issue cheap stock as compensation because it results in lower compensation expense on the income statement and in large cash windfalls to CEOs subsequent to the IPO. Because cheap stock results in an overstatement of earnings, the Securities and Exchange Commission frequently challenges the valuations of these grants, which makes cheap stock a key accounting issue in many IPOs. Using a sample of firms that completed IPOs between 2004 and 2007, I investigate the …

Getting Your Accounting Right, Themin Suwardy, Jiwei Wang

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

The book brings together authors from the industry and the academic world to contribute articles on the topic of high quality financial reporting. The objective is to help business directors and accounts preparers to understand the importance of high quality financial reporting to their business and get it right from the start.

Robust Median Reversion Strategy For On-Line Portfolio Selection, Dingjiang Huang, Junlong Zhou, Bin Li, Steven Hoi, Shuigeng Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

On-line portfolio selection has been attracting increasing interests from artificial intelligence community in recent decades. Mean reversion, as one most frequent pattern in financial markets, plays an important role in some state-of-the-art strategies. Though successful in certain datasets, existing mean reversion strategies do not fully consider noises and outliers in the data, leading to estimation error and thus non-optimal portfolios, which results in poor performance in practice. To overcome the limitation, we propose to exploit the reversion phenomenon by robust L₁-median estimator, and design a novel on-line portfolio selection strategy named "Robust Median Reversion" (RMR), which makes optimal …

Does Analyst Experience Affect Their Understanding Of Non-Financial Information? An Analysis Of The Relation Between Patent Information And Analyst Forecast Errors, Taiwhun Taylor Joo

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study examines whether analyst experience affects the relation between patent information and analyst forecast errors. U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles require that firms expense all in-house research and development (R&D) costs. This means that even when R&D activities produce intangible assets with future economic benefits, firms cannot capitalize R&D costs as assets. Consequently, financial statements are largely deficient in the information they provide regarding the output of R&D activities. However, patent information is one type of non-financial information about R&D output that is publicly available.

Using updated patent data, I confirm the results of prior studies that find a …

Do Changes In The Sg&A Ratio Provide Information About Changes In Future Earnings, Analyst Forecast Revisions, And Stock Returns?, Eugene Scott Johnson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In fundamental analysis, increases in the ratio of selling, general and administrative (SG&A) costs to sales (SG&A ratio) are viewed as negative signals about future firm performance. However, this interpretation focuses on the overall change in the SG&A ratio and ignores the underlying changes in the components of the ratio. For example, prior literature finds that the interpretation offered by fundamental analysis does not hold during periods of decreasing sales. I contend that a further partitioning of the full sample into subsamples representing all possible combinations of changes in the components of the SG&A ratio, and the ratio itself, will …

High School Seniors' Financial Knowledge: The Impact Of Financial Literacy Classes And Developmental Assets, Kathy Ngoc Nguyen

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Low levels of financial literacy among high school students are a growing concern in the United States. High school students lack the financial knowledge to make important financial decisions. Financial literacy and money management skills are important for high school students as they transition into an ever-changing economy. High school students, who are financially literate, are likely to develop positive financial behaviors and make positive financial decisions. Previous studies show that financial literacy classes can increase financial knowledge.

The present study has three objectives. First, this study examined whether the Money Management Skills for Young Adults Class increased high school …

Broker Vs. Advisor, Steven D. Dolvin

All Chapters

Over the past decade, more retail investment professionals have transitioned away from a pure broker relationship to a more advisory role. This switch is potentially good for both sides, as it reduces the incentive to churn (i.e., excessively trade) an account simply to generate commissions, while also providing a more stable revenue for the advisor. See article here, Financial-Planning.com.