Business Commons^™

An Examination Of The Effect Of Brigham Young University’S Single-Student Housing Policies On Local Condominium Values, Daniel Matthews, Dr. Barrett Slade

Journal of Undergraduate Research

My research revolved around four hypotheses relating to the impact of BYU’s single-student housing policies on condominium values in Provo and around Utah Country. These four hypotheses are as follows:

Best Practices For Microfranchising In Bangladesh, Joseph W. Wade, Dr. Richard Mcclendon

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The purpose of this research project is to fulfill a research need for the Microfranchise Initiative at BYU’s Center for Economic Self-Reliance.

Issue Brief: Auditing Your Town's Development Code For Barriers To Sustainable Water Management, New England Environmental Finance Center

Sustainable Communities Capacity Building

This issue brief is intended for town officials who want to understand how development regulations in their community affect local water resources. Municipal development codes – the set of regulations that control the built environment – can have a great influence on the availability of clean and healthy water for drinking, recreation, and commercial uses. This in turn affects the community’s social, environmental, and economic vitality.

Comprehensive plans, zoning codes, and building standards are just a few examples of regulations that intentionally or unintentionally regulate the way water is transported, collected and absorbed. Regulations that produce dispersed development or large …

Issue Brief: Saving By Mitigating, University Of Louisville, New England Environmental Finance Center

Sustainable Communities Capacity Building

Natural disasters can cause loss of life, inflict damage to buildings and infrastructure, and have devastating consequences for a community’s economic, social, and environmental well-being. Hazard mitigation means reducing damages from disasters.

Local governments have the responsibility to protect the health, safety, and welfare of their citizens. Proactive mitigation policies and actions help reduce risk and create safer, more disaster-resilient communities. Mitigation is an investment in your community’s future safety, equity, and sustainability.

Quantifying Expertise In Private Equity, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Just how much is expert knowledge worth in running a private equity fund?

Is Manager Gender Important In The Performance Of Mutual Funds?, Steven Welch, Yunqing Wang

Accounting and Finance Faculty Publications

We investigate whether there are differences in characteristics and performance of mutual funds caused by the manager’s gender. Through examining a large sample of U.S. domestic equity mutual fund, we find some evidence that suggests female managers have a lower risk tolerance than males. This leads to the observation that females tend to hold a higher total number of assets (stocks) and fewer assets in their top 10 holdings than do male managers. We then analyze performance within funds over time in order to evaluate the impact of changes in management’s gender composition on funds’ performance. We find some evidence …

Short Sales Constraint And Seo Pricing, Charlie Charoenwong, David K. Ding, Ping Wang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We examine the influence of SEC's Rule 105 on informed trading and the information content of stock prices around an SEO's offer day. We show that constraints on short sales inhibit informed trading and hamper incorporation of information into stock prices for offers whose traders have private adverse information and without options listing. The constraints contribute to increased price uncertainty and higher market sensitivity to seller-initiated trading. After controlling for other causes of SEO discounts, we find that the decrease in information content of stock prices just before an offer day has a significant impact on the SEO's value discount.

Alternative Financing And Private Firm Performance, Daphne W. Yiu, Jun Su, Yuehua Xu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Why do private firms grow vibrantly in transition economies despite their limited access to formal financing? This study underscores the importance of informal financing in facilitating the growth of private firms in China. Drawing from the institutional economics argument, we posit that informal financing, in the form of underground financing and trade credit, substitutes formal financing in providing financial assistance and capital to private firms in China. We further posit that the effects of two kinds of informal financing vary across provinces with different levels of institutional development, and complement each other by supporting firms in different industries. We test …

An Empirical Analysis Of Healthcare Ipos And Seos, Jonathan Holloway, Dr. James C. Brau

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Overall, three phenomena exist in corporate equity issuances. These phenomena include hotissue markets, first-day underpricing, and poor long-run performance. Hot-issue markets refer to fluctuation in the volume of issuances. Hot waves are periods of high issuance volume, and cold waves are periods of low volume. The second phenomenon, first-day underpricing, results in the initial price of equity beginning lower than its first-day closing price. The third phenomenon, poor long-run performance, refers to the tendency of issuances to underperform during a period beginning the day after the issuance and ranging from one to five years.

Exchange Consolidation, Steven D. Dolvin

All Chapters

BATS and Direct Edge, two large electronic exchanges, are merging to form the second largest exchange operator in the United States, taking over the ranking currently held by Nasdaq. This change exhibits the transformation of the industry toward electronic trading. While electronic increases speed and likely lowers trading costs, it doesn't come without risks, as the recent Nasdaq outage illustrates. See article here, Wall Street Journal.

Examining The Relationship Between Expected Market Returns And Political Variables Using Generalized Method Of Moments Procedures, Ian Wright, Dr. Keith Vorkink

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Investors, economists and financial analysts are constantly seeking to develop models that may help them learn what the stock market will do and how it functions. They do this so that they may take advantage of any market anomalies as soon as they appear and try to make “easy money.” Various pricing models (see Sharpe (1964), Litner (1965) and Fama and French (1993) for example1) have been and continue to be constructed that try to predict returns, and variables suspected to be correlated with returns have been included in these models in an attempt to determine specific predictors of returns.

Financial Literacy Amongst University Students, Adam Trone, Dr. James Brau

Journal of Undergraduate Research

My interest in financial literacy and my decision to pursue an ORCA grant in this subject began in the fall of 2007. Many remember the upheaval that devastated financial markets beginning at this time. This upheaval is not just a memory because similar economic and financial conditions continue to this day. As a casual observer of this crisis as shown on the news, I began to think. I began to think about my own finances, saving for retirement, taxes, and the job market. These thoughts never became a serious bother but I was mildly concerned. I began to realize that …

How Does Asymmetric Information Relate To Investment Efficiency? Evidence From Analysts' Earnings Forecasts And Daily Stock Trading, Lingmin Xie

Lingnan Theses

The adverse selection and agency cost theories suggest that the informational transparency of a firm can help to reduce over- or under-investment. This thesis examines how information asymmetry influences firm-level investment efficiency for companies listed in the U.S. market from 1993 to 2009. Information asymmetry is measured by the dispersion and error of the earnings forecasts made by financial analysts. I investigate how information asymmetry affects firms’ proneness to overor under-invest and the firms’ deviations from the investment levels predicted by investment opportunities. To be consistent with the prior literature, I also use the volatility of daily stock returns and …

Institutional Stock Ownership And Corproate Dividend Policy : Evidence From China, Jianghua Shen

Lingnan Theses

Agency theory suggests that institutional stockholders are able to influence the dividend policies of listed firms with the underlying objective of reducing a firm’s agency costs. This study explores the causal effects of institutional ownership on dividend policies for the firms listed in China. Using various measures of institutional ownership and dividend policy, I find that mutual fund ownership in a firm causes it to pay out more cash dividends or to initiate cash dividends. These effects are mainly evident in the firms controlled by the state and regional governments and those with relatively high free cash flows. The effects …

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. .

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 …

Three Essays In Financial Economics, Ivan F. Julio

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

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, …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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.

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 …

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 …