Business Commons^™

Intuit, Inc.’S Small Business And Self Employed Unit: A Strategic Analysis, Cat Nyberg

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

Intuit, Inc. is a business and personal finance software company founded in 1983 by Scott Cook and Tom Proulx. It is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and has offices around the United States and internationally. Intuit’s primary mission is to ‘power prosperity’, whether for small business owners, individuals, or accounting professionals.

Intuit has three major business units: Small Business and Self Employed, Consumer, and Strategic Partner. Each business unit offers one or more flagship software platforms, optimized for specific customer needs in business accounting, professional tax preparation, and individual tax filing. Intuit’s major software flagships are QuickBooks (business accounting and …

The Importance Of School District Quality In The Columbus Real Estate Market, Ryan Karapas

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Projects

Using a random sample of 100 houses sold between the months of October 2018 and January 2019 in the greater Columbus, Ohio area, this paper investigates the relationship between school district quality and the selling price of houses. The results show that school district quality has a positive and statistically significant influence on the Columbus real estate market. An increase of one letter grade in school district quality (calculated using output-related factors such as student performance) leads to a 13% increase in the selling price of a house. When using the average house price in my data set of $254,000, …

Order Flow Volatility And Equity Costs Of Capital, Tarun Chordia, Jianfeng Hu, Avanidhar Subrahmanyam, Qing Tong

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We propose that the volatility of order flow is a proxy for costs of information asymmetry, as order flow volatility varies positively with parameters that also influence adverse selection costs of trading. Empirically, order flow volatility is significantly higher prior to earnings or merger announcements when information asymmetry is likely to be elevated. Levels of and shocks to order flow volatility are positively and significantly correlated with existing illiquidity proxies, and strongly predict stock returns in the cross section. The impact of order imbalance volatility shocks on stock prices is reflected within one month in large, visible stocks, but takes …

Reputation Concerns Under At-Will Employment, Jian Sun, Dong Wei

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We study a continuous-time model of long-run employment relationship with fixed wage and at-will firing; that is, termination of the relationship is non-contractible. Depending on his type, the worker either always works hard, or can freely choose his effort level. The firm does not know the worker’s type and the monitoring is imperfect. We show that, in the unique Markov equilibrium, as the worker’s reputation worsens, his job becomes less secure and the strategic worker works harder. We further demonstrate that the relationship between average productivity and job insecurity is U shaped, which is consistent with typical findings in the …

Implementing Natural Capital Credit Risk Assessment In Agricultural Lending, Francisco Ascui, Theodor Florian Cojoianu

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Agriculture has critical impacts and dependencies on natural capital, and agricultural lenders are therefore exposed to natural capital credit risk through their loans to farmers. Currently, however, lenders lack any detailed guidance for assessing natural capital credit risk in agriculture and are challenged by the fact that the relevant material risks vary considerably by agricultural sector and geography. This paper develops a natural capital credit risk assessment framework based on a bottom-up review of the material risks associated with natural capital impacts and dependencies for Australian beef production. It demonstrates that implementing natural capital credit risk assessment is feasible in …

Three Essays On Ceo Characteristics And Corporate Decisions, Trung Nguyen

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

Recent studies have stressed the importance of managerial fixed effects on firm investment decisions. Following this stream of research, this dissertation empirically investigates the potential effects of two major Chief Executive Officer (CEO) characteristics, i.e. risk preferences and potential mobility, on corporate decisions such as merger and acquisition (M&A) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) investments.

Essay 1 examines whether the variation of M&A stock returns around the 2008 financial crisis is associated with shareholders’ increased loss aversion as a result of undergoing financial losses. The results show that acquisitions carried out by CEOs with risk-averse inducing compensation (inside debt) before …

Comparing Estimated To Actual Development Budgets For Air Force Space Programs, Christopher J. Elworth

Theses and Dissertations

The accuracy of budget estimates is vital in ensuring cost efficiency and decreasing the possibility of budget and schedule growth. The goal of this study was to determine when budget estimates increase and what may cause those increases. Percent schedule and linear interpolation was used to analyze the budget changes. Space program budget growth does not increase at a constant rate between Milestone B (MS B) and Initial Operational Capability (IOC). When an exponential curve was fit to the deviations in budget growth, the mean and median R2 for the programs in this study were .83 and .91, respectively. Many …

An Analysis Of Profit Margin In Relation To The Better Buying Power Initiative, Jerry (Trey) L. Baker Iii

Theses and Dissertations

Recent Better Buying Power (BBP) initiatives have sought to better contractually align contractor profit with performance. Profit should incentivize efficiency in cost and schedule and only be awarded when earned. The current research seeks evidence that BBP has been effective in improving performance. The first part of the research examines the trends of profit margin and cost growth both before and after the implementation of the first BBP initiative. BBP recommended the use of incentive type contracts over award fee contracts, where appropriate. This research found an increased use of incentive type contracts and a reduced use of award fee …

An Analysis Of Estimate Variance In Program Office Estimates, Benjamin J. Bonenfant

Theses and Dissertations

Past research has shown that predicting the cost growth within DoD systems is an important topic. Total program cost growth and predictors of program cost growth have been studied. Kozlak (2017) studied cost growth at four major reviews: Critical Design Review, First Flight, Development Test and Evaluation End, and Initial Operating Capability. This research attempts to assess cost growth and cost variance at similar points in a program life cycle. In the past the majority of studies have been done identifying programs as either: Acquisition Category (ACAT) I and non-ACAT I programs, or Major Defense Acquisition Programs (MDAP) and non-MDAP …

A Case Study Of Epa Clauses As They Apply To Fixed Price Contracts, Trevor A. Enos

Theses and Dissertations

Adjusting fixed price contract prices over long periods of performance is vital to protect both the government and contractor from market price fluctuations. This is accomplished via an Economic Price Adjustment (EPA) clause which currently utilize forecasts of producer price indexes (PPI) as a baseline. There is currently a lack of research on if the use of these forecasts as a baseline for calculating EPAs is the best alternative. This research involves determining the validity of using Global Insight (GI) forecasts for the purpose of calculating EPAs in fixed price contracts. Two EPA clauses are examined as a case study …

Developing Standard Emd Cost Factors For Major Defense Acquisition Program (Mdap) Platforms, Matthew R. Markman

Theses and Dissertations

This research involves the creation of standard factors that more accurately reflect observed outcomes in the development stages of major programs. Traditionally, estimation techniques such as analogy, parametric, engineering build-up, and factors are utilized to develop budgets and serve as the baseline for measuring project progress. This effort accomplishes the development and creation of 443 new standard cost factors that are delineated by five categories: commodity type, contract type, contractor type, development type, and service. The factors are developed for those elements that are "common" in a wide array of projects such as program management, systems engineering, data, training or …

The Lehman Brothers Bankruptcy B: Risk Limits And Stress Tests, Rosalind Z. Wiggins, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

Investment banks are in the business of taking calculated risks. Risk management infrastructure facilitates the safe pursuit of profits and the balancing of associated risks. By 2006, Lehman Brothers was thought to have a very respectable risk management system, and even its regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission, viewed its risk framework as being fully compliant with regulatory requirements. In its public disclosures, Lehman characterized its risk controls as “meaningful constraints on its risk taking” and evidence of its continued financial stability. Beginning in late 2006, however, Lehman began dismantling its carefully crafted risk management framework as it pursued a …

2019 Private Capital Markets Report, Craig R. Everett

Pepperdine Private Capital Markets Report

The Pepperdine private cost of capital survey was originally launched in 2007 and is the first comprehensive and simultaneous investigation of the major private capital market segments. This year’s survey specifically examined the behavior of senior lenders, asset‐based lenders, mezzanine funds, private equity groups, venture capital firms, angel investors, privately‐held businesses, investment bankers, business brokers, limited partners, and business appraisers. The Pepperdine survey investigated, for each private capital market segment, the important benchmarks that must be met in order to qualify for capital, how much capital is typically accessible, what the required returns are for extending capital in today’s economic …

Essays On The Role Of Systematic And Idiosyncratic Volatility In Pricing Individual Equity Options, Mobina Shafaati

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

It is widely accepted that the value of an option is an increasing function of the underlying volatility. The positive relation between volatility and option price is intuitive only if we keep all other determinants of the option value constant, including the stock price. The notion that an asset price is completely unaffected by the volatility of the asset is virtually unacceptable in asset pricing theory and holds only in a stylized one-factor world in which the volatility change is completely diversifiable. In Chapter 1, I examine the role of the non-zero correlation of the underlying asset return and its …

The Effect Of Dental Therapists On Access To Dental Care, Jacob Caldwell

Research on Capitol Hill

Oral health is an important indicator of overall individual health and general well-being. Unfortunately, there is a lack of dental care availability and access in many parts of the United States. According to the Health Resources and Services Administration, as of December 31, 2018 there were nearly 6,000 Dental Health Professional Shortage Areas (HPSAs) in the US. Around 58 million people live in these shortage areas and it is estimated that over 10,000 practitioners are necessary to meet the needs of these populations.

How Sector Volatility Spills Into Related Markets, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Research reveals the linkages that let a meltdown go global

Driving Sustainable And Responsible Investment, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Appealing to the moral imperative is futile. Sustainable investment funds should work on target’s self-interest

Dynamic Credit Default Swap Curves In A Network Topology, Xiu Xu, Cathy Yi-Hsuan Chen, Wolfgang Karl Härdle

Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics

Systemically important banks are connected and their default probabilities have dynamic dependencies. An extraction of default factors from cross-sectional credit default swap (CDS) curves allows us to analyze the shape and the dynamics of default probabilities. In extending the Dynamic Nelson Siegel (DNS) model to an across firm multivariate setting, and employing the generalized variance decomposition of Diebold and Yilmaz [On the network topology of variance decompositions: Measuring the connectedness of financial firms. J. Econom., 2014, 182(1), 119–134], we are able to establish a DNS network topology. Its geometry yields a platform to analyze the interconnectedness of long-, middle- and …

Abuses And Penalties Of A Corporate Tax Inversion, James G.S. Yang, Leonard Lauricella, Frank J. Aquilino

Department of Accounting and Finance Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

There is a serious problem in international taxation today. Many United States (U.S.) multinational corporations have moved abroad to take advantage of a lower tax rate in a foreign country. As a consequence, the tax base in the U.S. has been seriously eroded. This practice is known as “corporate tax inversion”. This paper discusses the abuses and penalties of this phenomenon. It is rooted in some deficiencies in the U.S. tax law. This paper points out that the U.S. has the highest corporate tax rate in the world. It imposes tax on worldwide income. It permits deferral of tax on …

Financial Market Implications Of Marketing Actions And The Disclosure Of Marketing Information, Sungkyun Moon

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation contributes to marketing literature by examining the effects of marketing actions and the disclosure of marketing information through the financial market perspective that has high managerial relevance and policy implications. Specifically, the first essay provides the first empirical examination of the effects of the disclosure of advertising spending on investors’ and analysts’ uncertainty. It is responsive to calls by Marketing Science Institute and Marketing Accountability Standard Board to examine the consequences of disclosure of marketing metrics. The second essay examines the effect of advertising spending on firm value and explores firm and market level contingency effects. By doing …

Unintended Consequences: How Suppliers Compensate For Price Concessions And The Role Of Organizational Justice In Buyer-Supplier Relations, Steven Carnovale, John W. Henke, Scott Duhadway, Sengun Yeniyurt

Business Faculty Publications and Presentations

“You get what you pay for” is one of life's lessons that predominates in purchasing decisions individuals make in their personal lives. The results of this study suggest this lesson should also prevail among management when price‐related purchasing decisions in businesses are being made. An evaluation of over 1,700 purchasing instances across seven years of a longitudinal panel data set collected from Tier 1 production suppliers to the six major North American automotive Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), Chrysler, Ford, General Motors, Honda, Nissan, and Toyota, found that suppliers compensate for price concessions and price reduction pressure from the OEM in …

Activist Investors: A Corporate Social Responsibility Perspective On Hedge Fund Activism And The Need For Focus On All Stakeholders, Lucy Marie Ankenbauer

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) can result in distinctly different visions when instituted under the enlightened stakeholder theory or the shareholder maximization theory. The critical variation between these two theories is the principal party that businesses consider when instituting strategic decisions. Firms following the enlightened stakeholder theory will base decisions on all the various stakeholders of the company and develop policies which increase long-term firm value. Companies pursuing shareholder value maximization will consider all strategies through the eyes of the stockholders and how these individuals will be affected. Neither theory is more valid than the other, since many factors must be …

Quarterly Meeting Information Packet, Wku Board Of Regents

Board of Regents Documents

Quarterly meeting information packet:

• Sabbatical Leaves
• Emeritus Appointment
• Property Transfer
• Tyson Helton Contract
• Todd Stewart Contract Addendum
• Auditor's Reports & Financial Statements for WKYU-TV & WKYU-FM Radio
• 2019-20 Tuition & Mandatory Student Fees Schedule
• Personnel Actions
• Faculty One Time Payments
• Staff One Time Payments
• 2018-19 Operating Budget Revisions
• 2018-19 Second Quarter Statement of Revenues & Expenditures

Picking Flowers In An Ico Garden, Fam Guo Teng, Paul R. Griffin, Andrew Koh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The rise of Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) in recent times and their potential for investment opportunities have investors spending a lot of time researching ICOs or having to follow the crowd. This paper aims to explore four broad factors of ICOs: identity, credibility, investor sentiment, and price movement to develop a framework that is useful in determining ICO quality. Research is shown using data sources including public forums, chat groups, web sites, white papers as well as smart contract details. Finally, a system, based on the framework, is proposed that can be used to detect and regulate ICO activities and …

Establishing An Asia-Pacific Cryptocurrency Hub, Arnat Leemakdej, Chiyachantana N. Chiraphol

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Asia is leading the way in digital asset markets, but individual countries are taking markedly different paths toward regulation and management in establishing themselves as cryptocurrency hubs, balancing innovation and regulation. Investors should be vigilant about the risks associated with alternative capital-raising methods.

Scaled Pca: A New Approach To Dimension Reduction, Dashan Huang, Fuwei Jiang, Guoshi Tong, Guofu Zhou

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The notion that bond risk premium varies with business cycles is challenged once real time macro data are used. In this paper, we argue that the macro factors extracted by using the standard PCA are not the most relevant for forecasting bond risk premium, because the PCA factors are designed to explain the most variation of macro data instead of the variation of bond risk premium. With the latter objective in mind, we propose a scaled PCA (sPCA) approach, which incorporates the information in bond risk premium in the factor extraction procedure. The real time macro sPCA factors have much …

Incorporating Active Adjustment Into A Financing Based Model Of Capital Structure, Neal Maroney, Wei Wang, M. Kabir Hassan

Business Faculty Publications

The conventional partial adjustment model, which focuses on leverage evolution, has difficulty identifying deliberate capital structure adjustments as it confounds financing decisions with the mechanical autocorrelation of leverage. We propose and estimate a financing-based partial adjustment model that separates the effects of financing decisions on leverage evolution from mechanical evolution. The speed of adjustment (SOA) is firm specific and stochastic, and active targeting of capital structure has a multiplier effect that depends on the size of financial deficit. Overall, we find expected SOA from active rebalancing
(30%) more than doubles what is expected from mechanical mean reversion alone (13%).

The Evolution Of Entrepreneurial Finance: A New Typology, J. Brad Bernthal

BYU Law Review

There has been an explosion in new types of startup finance instruments. Whereas twenty years ago preferred stock dominated the field, startup companies and investors now use at least eight different instruments—six of which have only become widely used in the last decade. Legal scholars have yet to reflect upon the proliferation of instrument types in the aggregate. Notably missing is a way to organize instruments into a common framework that highlights their similarities and differences. This Article makes four contributions. First, it catalogues the variety of startup investment forms. I describe novel instruments, such as revenue-based financing, which remain …

Financial Repression In China: Short-Term Growth But Long-Term Crisis, Guangdong Xu, Michael Faure

Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review

No abstract provided.

Count On Your Subordinates: Young Managers And Innovation Efficiency, Lei Gao, Christine X. Jiang, Mohamed Mekhaimer

Business Faculty/Staff Publications

We investigate the relationship between executives’ horizons and firms’ innovation efficiency. Motivated by Acharya, Myers, and Rajan’s (2011, JF) theory, we devise a measure of internal governance based on the difference in expected horizons between a CEO and her subordinates. Consistent with our conjecture, we find robust evidence that subordinate managers with longer horizon compared to the CEO can improve firm’s innovation efficiency. Internal governance has a stronger effect on innovation efficiency for firms with elder, generalist CEOs and when the number of subordinates on the board is higher. However, while the presence of powerful CEOs attenuates the effect, overconfident …