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Finance and Financial Management

Air Force Institute of Technology

Defense contracts

Publication Year

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Full-Text Articles in Business

The Effect Of Company Financial Health On The Likelihood Of Cost Overruns, Brady C. Weaver Mar 2022

The Effect Of Company Financial Health On The Likelihood Of Cost Overruns, Brady C. Weaver

Theses and Dissertations

Financial ratio analysis has long been used to determine the financial health of firms and project business performance. Despite the usefulness of financial ratio analysis, risk analysis in defense acquisitions largely ignores these indicators of company financial well-being. This research performs contingency table statistical analysis to determine if a relationship exists between company financial ratios and their future cost performance on Air Force contracts. The general findings are that poor financial ratios at the time of contract start are related to increased likelihood of cost overruns on that contract. Specifically, recent trends of a company’s current ratio in comparison to …


Acquisition Program Problem Detection Using Text Mining Methods, Trevor P. Miller Mar 2012

Acquisition Program Problem Detection Using Text Mining Methods, Trevor P. Miller

Theses and Dissertations

This research provides program analysts and Department of Defense leadership with an approach to identify problems in real-time for acquisition contracts. Specifically, we test the abilities of statistical algorithms using text mining techniques to detect unusual changes in acquisition programs’ cost estimates at the completion of the programs. Currently, the government purchases monthly written reports, an informational tool on status of an acquisition program, but has not been integrated into problem prediction analysis. We center our research on the following two questions: First, can we quantify the qualitative written reports? Second, can we use these quantifications of the texts to …


Some Empirical Evidence On The Non-Normality Of Cost Variances On Defense Contracts, Robert J. Conley Iv Nov 1996

Some Empirical Evidence On The Non-Normality Of Cost Variances On Defense Contracts, Robert J. Conley Iv

Theses and Dissertations

This study tested the hypothesis that defense cost variances reported on the Cost Performance Report are normally distributed. The DOD requires that all defense cost variances which breech a pre-specified threshold be investigated. The present variance investigation model has been criticized because it can prompt frivolous investigations. In theory, statistical models could reduce the number of frivolous investigations, but they are not used because they require too much information about the cost variance, including its distributional form. Often such models assume a normal distribution, but researchers have shown that the models do not work properly if the assumption is fallacious. …