Business Commons^™

Lobbying Legislation And Cumulative Abnormal Returns, Brenan Stewart

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

The Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 (Pub.L. 110-81, 121 Stat. 735, enacted September 14, 2007) was passed by the U.S. Congress in order “to strengthen public disclosure requirements concerning lobbying activity and funding. It placed more restrictions on gifts for members of Congress and their staff, and provides for mandatory disclosure of earmarks in expenditure bills.” Treating this event as a natural experiment, we examine how this legislation affected the Cumulative Abnormal Returns (CARs) of firms that lobbied in the year(s) leading up to the passing of the legislation. We find that companies that lobbied in the …

The Free Cash Flow And Corporate Returns, Sen Na

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

Mcpherson (2018) and Jose, Lancaster, Stevens (1996) have written papers to examine the relationship between liquidity management and firm profitability. The literature establishes that the cash conversion cycle has an implication for the profitability and liquidity of a firm. We extend the time period and analyze the free cash flow instead of cash conversion cycle. We provide evidence that firms with higher free cash flows have higher risk adjusted stock returns.

Essays On Market Linkages In Nafta And Latin American Countries: Studies Of Cointegration And Contagion, John K. Tarwater

Theses and Dissertations

The globalization of securities in recent years has led to an increase in market linkages. These linkages are strong among countries that have entered into bilateral and multilateral trade agreements. I investigate the linkages of stock markets in NAFTA countries by exploring their cointegrating relationship, and I explore market linkages in Latin America by showing evidence of financial contagion between Brazil and her Latin American neighbors.

In the first essay, I employ a vector error correction model to examine the linkages between price stock indexes of NAFTA countries that have been segregated into tiers based on market capitalization. In each …

Docking And Curtons' "Crisis In Higher Education: A Plan To Save Small Liberal Arts Colleges In America" (Book Review), R. Curt Rice Dr.

The Christian Librarian

No abstract provided.

How It Awareness Impacts It Control Weaknesses And Firm Performance, Peiqin Zhang, Ju Long, James Ma

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

With the prevalence of information technology (IT), the value of IT awareness increasingly grows, and IT control becomes a key part of firms’ strategies and objectives. Although leadership plays an important role in IT control governance, limited research has studied whether IT awareness is associated with IT control weaknesses (ITCWs) and firm performance simultaneously. Drawing on the agency and resource dependence theory, this paper proposes an integrative model to examine the impact of IT awareness on ITCWs and firm performance. We empirically validate the model using a data set of 310 firms collected from multiple sources including Audit Analytics, Compustat, …

An Overview Of A Failed Thesis, Avery Lewis

Undergraduate Honors Theses

An overview of a project based thesis that did not have the support or funding to be carried out to completion. The project was based around starting up a summer recruitment program for the East Tennessee State University Music Department. The program would consist of various summer events for high school students used to recruit for the department as well as encourage music and fine arts degrees.

Online Learning Tool On External Financing Needs, Yuanto Kusnadi

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

In collaboration with colleagues at the Centre ofTeaching Excellence (CTE), I have developed an innovative online learningobject on External Financing Needs. This tool is designed to introduce a noveland refreshing way in teaching accounting and finance concepts to students andto create a more interactive learning experience in the classroom. The online learning tool is used in the two courses:Accounting for Entrepreneurs and Financial Management, to explain the relevantconcepts related to financial forecasting and financial planning. One unique feature about the learning object is that itprovides instantaneousfeedback to students as they can learn whether the numbers theyprovide are correct/wrong (as indicated …

Robo-Advisors And Wealth Management, Kok Fai Phoon, Cher Chiew Francis Koh

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The recent rise of robo-advisors (RAs) has threatened the traditional fund and wealth management industry. RAs' assets under management (AUM) have risen manyfold through competitiveness on pricing, transparency and services and better expected returns linked to the use of quantitative finance and technology with less subjective human intervention. This article examines the postulation that RAs have an edge over traditional wealth managers. RAs can combine the judgement and computing resources of both human and machine, or bionic power, to provide alternative wealth management services to meet the diverse needs of private wealth clients. However, the authors expect traditional wealth managers …

Managing Swaption Portfolio Risk Under Different Interest Rate Regimes, Poh Ling Neo, Chyng Wen Tee

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Efficient risk managing of swaption portfolios is crucial in the hedging of interest rate exposure. This paper formulates a portfolio risk management framework under stochastic volatility models. The implication of using the right volatility backbone in the stochastic-alpha-beta-rho (SABR) model is analyzed. In order to handle negative interest rates, we derive a displaced-diffusion stochastic volatility (DDSV) model with closed-form analytical expression for swaption pricing. We demonstrate that the dynamics naturally allow for negative rates, and is also able to fit the market well. Finally, we show that choosing the right backbone in the DDSV model results in optimal hedging performance …

Sensation Seeking And Hedge Funds, Stephen Brown, Yan Lu, Sugata Ray, Song Wee Melvyn Teo

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We show that motivated by sensation seeking, hedge fund managers who own powerful sports cars take on more investment risk but do not deliver higher returns, resulting in lower Sharpe ratios, information ratios, and alphas. Moreover, sensation-seeking managers trade more frequently, actively, and unconventionally, and prefer lottery-like stocks. We show further that some investors are themselves susceptible to sensation seeking and that sensation-seeking investors fuel the demand for sensation-seeking managers. While investors perceive sensation seekers to be less competent, they do not fully appreciate the superior investment skills of sensation-avoiding fund managers.

Executive Overconfidence And Securities Class Actions, Suman Banerjee, Mark Humphery-Jenner, Vikram Nanda, T. Mandy Tham

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Overconfident CEOs/senior executives tend to have excessively positive views of their own skills and their company’s future performance. We hypothesize that overconfident managers are more likely to engage in reckless or intentional actions/disclosures that give rise to securities class actions (SCAs). Empirical evidence is supportive: Overconfident CEOs/senior executives increase SCA likelihood, though litigation risk is ameliorated through improved governance, such as following the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002. Post-SCA, companies are less likely to hire an overconfident CEO. Following an SCA, overconfident CEOs appear to moderate behavior and to reduce their litigation risk.

Likely Trajectory Of Fed Policy Far From Settled, Thomas Lam, David Fernandez

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Markets seem to be assuming an almost pre-set path of Fed policy normalization in 2019, including hiking rates and shrinking the balance sheet. In contrast, we see many uncertainties ahead.

Commonality: A Longitudinal Study, Raja Velu, Zhaoque Zhou, Chyng Wen Tee

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The commonality in the asset characteristics such as returns, liquidity and other non-trade parameters attracted intense research interest in the literature. In this paper, we investigate the longitudinal trend in commonality for the duration 2000-2016, an extensive that include years of boom and bust in the financial market. Our results show that while market has become more fragmented, commonality in returns has doubled over this period. This observation holds across all exchanges, with a clear trend of convergence in exchange-wide commonality over time due to increased information efficiency. We develop a unified methodology to systematically accommodate all explanatory factors for …

Commodity Return Predictability: Evidence From Implied Variance, Skewness And Their Risk Premia, Marinela Adriana Finta, Jose Renato Haas Ornelas

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper investigates the role of realized and implied and their risk premia (variance and skewness) for commodities’ future returns. We estimate these moments from high frequency and commodity futures option data that results in forward-looking measures. Risk premia are computed as the difference between implied and realized moments. We highlight, from a cross-sectional and time series perspective, the strong positive relation between commodity returns and implied skewness. Moreover, we emphasize the high performance of skewness risk premium. Additionally, we show that their portfolios exhibit the best risk-return tradeoff. Most of our results are robust to other factors such as …

Ursinus College Student-Managed Investment Fund Prospectus, Fall 2018, Paul Cottam, Shelby Boyle, Tim Carroll, Samantha Crossan, Joseph Heasley, Jake Kang, Thomas Kelly, Chris Moreno, Johnathan Myers, Steve Palis, Daan Slaats, Parker Wolf, Chenyu Yin

Ursinus Student-Managed Investment Fund Prospectus

This prospectus contains a performance summary for previous stocks and endowment funds as well as strategy and analysis for the following new stocks in the managed fund: American Woodmark Corporation, Comtech Telecommunications Corp. and LGL Group, Inc.

Ursinus College Student-Managed Investment Fund Newsletter, Fall 2018, Isaac Abrams, Liam Close, Thomas Reinhart, Daan Slaats

Investment Management Company Newsletter

Inside this issue:

What's New?

Brief History of Ursinus

What our Newest Students are Saying

What are "They" Saying?

2018 Fund Performance

Allianz Field Trip

Looking Forward

The Impact Of Prior-Prior Year On Federal Student Aid Eligibility, Valerie A. Mockus

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Each year, millions of Americans complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) in hopes of securing federal, state, and institutional funding to support their educational goals. The FAFSA recently changed the age of tax data used to determine eligibility for aid, including the Federal Pell Grant—eligibility for which is often used as a proxy for students with the highest need. This study includes a comprehensive review of the extant literature on the subject of prior-prior year. It is also the first look into the actual impact of the recent shift from Prior Year (PY) tax information to Prior-Prior …

Cryptocurrencies: Myth Vs. Reality, Sarina Baldoni

Shared Knowledge Conference

Valuing the market of cryptocurrencies has raised both excitement and fear in popular discussion, with concerns about its legitimacy heatedly debated across the financial world. The cryptocurrency market has grown to 2,042 separate currencies, and despite rampant speculation about the future, current research provides little insight to a market approaching $217 billion in market capitalization. The purpose of this research is to examine how the 67 largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization respond to events, determine if cryptocurrencies behave individually or as a collective asset class, and what factors influence cryptocurrency valuation. On January 16, 2018, the price of Bitcoin fell …

Market Share Growth And Stock Returns, Jaideep Chowdhury, Gokhan Sonaer, Umut Celiker

Business Faculty Publications

We find a negative relationship between market share growth and subsequent stock returns, three- and four-factor alphas. We report the potential explanatory role of market share growth in explaining subsequent average monthly stock returns. High (Low) market share growth firms report good (poor) operating performance and positive (negative) SUEs in the quarter in which market share growth is measured and investors overact to that good (bad) news. However, high (low) market share growth firms experience decrease (increase) in operating performance and SUEs in the subsequent quarters resulting in corrections in investors’ expectations and subsequent lower (higher) stock returns.

Bounded Rationality And The Choice Of Jury Selection Procedures, Martin Van Der Linden

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications

A peremptory-challenge procedure allows the parties to a jury trial to dismiss some prospective jurors without justification. Complex challenge procedures offer an unfair advantage to parties who are better able to strategize. I introduce a new measure of strategic complexity based on level-k thinking and use this measure to compare challenge procedures often used in practice. In applying this measure, I overturn some commonly held beliefs about which jury selection procedures are strategically simple.

Understanding Electricity Bills: Guidance For Nebraska Businesses And Municipalities, Elizabeth M. Regier, Bruce I. Dvorak

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering: Faculty Publications

This publication is intended to help business owners and municipal managers understand the different types of charges in their electricity bills. By understanding these charges, they may be able to identify ways to reduce their electricity costs.

Partisan Conflict And Stock Price, Dashan Huang, Wang Liyao

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Partisan conflict has been one dominant theme in U.S. politics in recent years. By using the textual index of Azzimonti (2018), this paper shows that partisan conflict positively predicts market returns, controlling for economic predictors and proxies for uncertainty, disagreement, geopolitical risk, and political sentiment. A one standard-deviation increase in partisan conflict is associated with a 0.58% increase in next month market return. The forecasting power concentrates in periods when the president is from the Republican Party or the majority of House is Republicans. Partisan conflict is positively related to downside risk, and makes investors more conservative when its value …

News Co-Occurrence, Attention Spillover, And Return Predictability, Li Guo, Lin Peng, Yubo Tao, Jun Tu

Research Collection School Of Economics

We examine the effect of investor attention spillover on stock return predictability. Using a novel measure, the News Network Triggered Attention index (NNTA), we find that NNTA negatively predicts market returns with a monthly in(out)-of-sample R-square of 5.97% (5.80%). In the cross-section, a long-short portfolio based on news co-occurrence generates a significant monthly alpha of 68 basis points. The results are robust to the inclusion of alternative attention proxies, sentiment measures, other news- and information-based predictors, across recession and expansion periods. We further validate the attention spillover effect by showing that news co-mentioning leads to greater increases in Google and …

Assessing The Effects Of Post-Crisis Regulatory Reforms On Liquidity In The Singapore Government Securities And Mas Bills Market, John M. Sequeira

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The FSB initiated in 2017 an evaluation of the effects of post-crisis regulatory reforms, by developing a framework to assess whether the reforms are achieving their intended outcomes and identify any material unintended consequences. In tandem, MAS established an evaluation framework, which covers four broad impact areas, comprising FIs, financial markets, financial end-users and the broader financial landscape. Internationally, there have been particular concerns over whether post-crisis reforms may have impaired liquidity conditions in specific financial markets. We provide an assessment of the effects of the reforms on liquidity in a key market in Singapore, the SGS and MAS bills …

Growth Options And Corporate Goodness, Linh Thompson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

I find evidence to support the negative impact of growth options on corporate social responsibility (CSR). I propose that attention-constrained managers reduce corporate goodness to focus on growth opportunities. The effect is more pronounced for well-governed firms, for financially-constrained firms, and for capital-intensive social dimensions. Firms reduce their research and development (R&D) and capital expenditures, and experience lower annual buy-and-hold abnormal returns (BHAR) subsequent to significant increases in their social performance. I also report value implications of CSR investments. The empirical evidence suggests that managerial choices to divert attention from growth projects toward CSR hurt shareholders.

Impact Of Airplane Crashes On Firm's Credit Risk Under The Creditgrades Model, Alexandros Bougias

Undergraduate Economic Review

The paper examines the impact of airplane accidents with 40 or more fatalities, on airline's firm credit risk. The sample contains 20 airplane crashes for the period 2000-2017. The analysis proposes the CreditGrades model introduced by Finger et al. (2002) , which is an extension of the first passage time model of Black and Cox (1976). The study concludes that airplane accidents lead to a statistically significant increase in airline's Probability of Default. The results are both significant and robust under the t-Test and the non-parametric Wilcoxon Signed-rank test.

2018 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 Pepperdine Graziadio Business School, in partnership with 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.

Ceo Compensation After Harvester Director Departure, Victor Jarosiewicz

Finance Department Faculty Journal Articles

I examine the effects of board member departures on CEO compensation using a sample of high growth IPO firms. Agency theory predicts that a reduction in board monitoring by harvester directors (VCs and private equity investors) will result in an increase in CEO pay. I find that departures of the last harvester director on a board result in an immediate and lasting increase in CEO equity compensation, while prior departures by other harvester directors are not significant. The results hold even when controlling for other governance mechanisms such as CEO wealth, CEO turnover, board composition, and external blockholder ownership.

Redefining 'Useful Life'--An Energy Consumption Method Emerges From The Cc/Ds Environment, James Scott Magruder, Dena S. Mitchell, Carl Smolinski, Eddy J. Burks

Faculty Publications

A redefining of the underlying concept of "useful life" in the depreciation and costing is a result of the changes driven by advancements in the application of technology emerging from the Cloud Computing and data storage environment. Cloud Computing has found success in being an integral structural improvement used in business to improve efficiency and effectiveness as well as to manage costs. Data Storage has proven an equally successful tool in managing the expanding data captured and used in data analytics by companies. Beyond these influences a new approach to existing accounting methods can become a fundamental change which will …

Credit Securities From An Information Perspective, Meredith E. Rhodes

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I present three studies that independently contribute to the literature on credit securities from an information perspective. In the first chapter, I examine the informational role of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) to the corporate bond market. Considering the dramatic growth of ETFs and the fact that they trade on exchanges, I posit that ETFs provide information to market participants about the underlying market, but not all information provided may be relevant. Indeed, I show that higher levels of ETF ownership of bonds are associated with lower transactions costs, higher liquidity, but also contain less firm-specific information.

In the …