Business Commons^™

The Impact Of 401(K) Loans On Saving, John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson, Brigitte C. Madrian

Faculty Publications

Although the popular press and politicians often describe 401(k) loans as a problem, classical economic theory has a more benign view. Loans from a 401(k) can relax liquidity constraints and increase household utility. Moreover, loan provisions may have the subtle effect of raising net asset accumulation by making 401(k) participation more appealing: employees who can access their 401(k) assets if they need them may be willing to put more money into an otherwise illiquid 401(k) account. Our research suggests that 401(k) loans are neither a blessing nor a bogeyman. Conditional on borrowing to finance consumption, we show that a 401(k) …

What's On The Menu? Included Versus Excluded Funds For Singapore's Central Provident Fund Investors, Seng Kee, Benedict Koh, Olivia S. Mitchell

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

As one of the oldest and largest national mandatory defined contribution pension systems, Singapore's Central Provident Fund (CPF) permits employees to invest their retirement accumulations in a variety of investment instruments rather than leaving them in a government-managed investment fund. Many plan participants avail themselves of this opportunity, selecting from a menu of more than 200 `included' funds that satisfy specific admission criteria set by the CPF Board. Nevertheless, many other funds are excluded from the list of eligible retirement system investments. This article shows that the `included/non-included' screening criteria have been effective, in that included fund managers earned higher …

Long-Term Earnings Growth Forecasts, Limited Attention, And Return Predictability, Zhi Da, Mitchell Craig Warachka

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Long-term earnings expectations are critically important to stock price valuations. We identify relative optimism and relative pessimism in long-term analyst forecasts by comparing these forecasts with implied short-term earnings growth forecasts across rms within the same industry. Stocks with relatively optimistic and relatively pessimistic long-term analyst forecasts have negative and positive risk-adjusted returns, respectively. This return predictability depends critically on short-term forecasts since relative optimism and relative pessimism originate from the slow diffusion of information from short-term to long-term analyst forecasts. Our results indicate that market participants have limited attention regarding the long-term earnings implications of information.

Is Regime Switching In Stock Returns Important In Asset Allocations?, Jun Tu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The stock market displays regime switching between upturns and downturns. This paper provides a Bayesian framework for making portfolio decisions that takes this regime switching into account, together with asset pricing model uncertainty and parameter uncertainty. The findings reveal that the economic value of accounting for regimes is substantially independent of whether or not model and parameter uncertainties are incorporated: the certainty-equivalent losses associated with ignoring regime switching are generally above 2% per year, and can be as high as 10%. These results suggest that the more realistic regime switching model is fundamentally different from the commonly used single-state model, …

Sportsbook Pricing And The Behavioral Biases Of Bettors In The Nhl, Rodney Paul, Andrew Weinbach

Falk College Research Center

The betting market for the NHL is investigated using actual betting percentages on favorites and underdogs from real sportsbooks. Sportsbooks do not appear to attempt to price to balance the book as betting percentages are not proportional to set odds. As in the NFL and NBA, bettors are shown to have a strong preference for favorites and road favorites in particular. Simple strategies of betting against significant imbalances toward the favorite are shown to generate positive returns. Although not pricing to balance the book, sportsbooks do not appear to price to exploit known bettor biases in all cases. Clear bettor …

Ua37/29 Gary Ransdell - Fed. Reserve Board - Ben Bernanke Confirmation Hearing Q&A, St. Louis Federal Reserve Board

Faculty/Staff Personal Papers

Question and answers from Ben Bernanke's confirmation hearing as distributed to members of the St. Louis Federal Reserve Board.

Corporate Governance In China: No Quick Fix, No Fixed Solution, Knowledge@Smu

Knowledge@SMU

China offers a multitude of business opportunities, but international investors often find themselves stumped with a range of issues, many of which boil down to the country's distinct system of corporate governance. Here, the lines between interests and relationships are less clear-cut, and links to the government seem to serve as a proxy to accountability. This is a system that exists for a reason, said TJ Wong at SMU's Ho Bee Professorship in Chinese Economy and Business lecture series. However, foreign investors, used to international norms of transparency, are calling this into question.

Predicting Hedge Fund Performance With Style, Melvyn Teo

Research Collection BNP Paribas Hedge Fund Centre

I apply the endogenous benchmark approach to the study of hedge funds. I find that including an investment style benchmark significantly reduces within style correlations in hedge fund residuals. Also, the performance spread between high past alpha t-statistic (a risk-adjusted information ratio) funds and low past alpha t-statistic funds increases dramatically when performance is measured relative to fund investment style. There appears to be valuable information in investment style performance that can aid in fund selection.

The Archway Investment Fund Semi Annual Report, December 2009, Bryant University, Archway Investment Fund

Archway Investment Fund

No abstract provided.

Carbon Finance Ii: Investing In Forests For Climate Protection, Jamie Carlson, Bryan Garcia, Claire Jahns, Eric Roberts, Katie Schindall

Yale School of the Environment Publications Series

Carbon Finance II: Investing in Forests for Climate Protection is a collection of lectures given during the 2008-2009 Carbon Finance Speaker Series at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. The annual series is hosted by the Center for Business and the Environment at Yale and supported by the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation and the Henry P. Kendall Foundation. The 2008-2009 speaker series focused on forest carbon and the opportunities and obstacles to including forests in greenhouse gas emission reduction policies, carbon markets, and cap-and-trade systems.

The Ceecs’ Banking System: A Risk Study During The Global Financial Crisis, Bernadette Andreosso-O'Callaghan, Lucia Morales, Valentina Tarkovska

Conference papers

We consider operational risk and market integration in the banking system of the Central and East European Countries’ (CEECs). The analysis provides an interesting framework in relation to the effects of the global financial crisis in some European emerging banks. We implement an econometric model that takes into account the level of integration of these banks in relation to a number of most developed institutions, which are represented by the Dow Jones STOXX 600 index, with the objective of analyzing how this could be impacting the level of operational risk in the region. This paper provides new evidence that links …

Impact Of Mad Money Stock Recommendations: Merging Financial And Marketing Perspectives, Ekaterina Karniouchina, William L. Moore, Kevin J. Cooney

Business Faculty Articles and Research

This article relies on advertising and persuasive communications theories to uncover persistent variations in investor response to television stock recommendations targeting naive investors. The authors use an event study methodology to determine the size of the next-day abnormal market reaction to recommendations on Mad Money with Jim Cramer. Although viewers are actively looking for recommendations, the results show that any individual recommendation is still subject to many of the same communication challenges as traditional advertisements. A regression analysis finds that traditional advertising variables, such as message length, recency-primacy effects, information clutter, and source credibility, influence the size of the market …

Business Process Automation And Managerial Accounting: An Sap Plug And Play Module, Picheng Lee, Principal Investigator, Christian N. Madu, Rudy Jacob, Chu-Hua Kuei

Cornerstone 3 Reports : Interdisciplinary Informatics

The primary aim of our project is to develop an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform that enables students at Pace to understand how different interdisciplinary areas in cross-unit and/or cross-enterprise decision making are related. ERP can help us do this since it allows a firm to automate and integrate its business processes, share common data and practices across the entire enterprise, and provide and access information in a real-time environment.

Path To Financial Inclusion: The Success Of Self-Help Groups-Bank Linkage Program In India, Sivakumar Venkataramany, Balbir B. Bhasin

WCBT Faculty Publications

Financial inclusion has been a major theme in both industrialized and developing economies in the era of financial globalization. When microcredit institutions have received limited success in many countries, microfinance is being used in India for the purpose of accomplishing universal financial inclusion. This paper recognizes the overwhelming efforts of the Government of India and focuses on the success of the linkage between commercial banks and self-help groups (SHGs). The SHGs comprising predominantly women groups help in the social cause of alleviation of poverty, increase of sustainability, reduction of vulnerability, improvement of capacity building and help the weaker sections build …

Locating Decision Rights: Evidence From The Mutual Fund Industry, George D. Cashman, Daniel N. Deli

Finance Faculty Research and Publications

Mutual fund advisors make portfolio decisions for their funds on a daily basis. We examine the location of these portfolio decision rights on two dimensions. First, we consider the geographic location of the decision rights. Second, we consider whether the decision rights remain with an advisor or are allocated to an independent sub-advisor. We argue that the allocation of portfolio decision rights involves a tradeoff between the opportunity cost of not matching decision rights with specific knowledge, and the agency costs associated with moving the decision rights to the specific knowledge. The patterns in the location of decision rights are …

Bayesian Analysis Of Structural Credit Risk Models With Microstructure Noises, Shirley J. Huang, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

In this paper a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) technique is developed for the Bayesian analysis of structural credit risk models with microstructure noises. The technique is based on the general Bayesian approach with posterior computations performed by Gibbs sampling. Simulations from the Markov chain, whose stationary distribution converges to the posterior distribution, enable exact ¯nite sample inferences of model parameters. The exact inferences can easily be extended to latent state variables and any nonlinear transformation of state variables and parameters, facilitating practical credit risk applications. In addition, the comparison of alternative models can be based on deviance information criterion …

Dating The Timeline Of Financial Bubbles During The Subprime Crisis, Peter C. B. Phillips, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

A new recursive regression methodology is introduced to analyze the bubble characteristics of various financial time series during the subprime crisis. The methods modify a technique proposed in Phillips, Wu, and Yu (2011) and provide a technology for identifying bubble behavior with consistent dating of their origination and collapse. The tests serve as an early warning diagnostic of bubble activity and a new procedure is introduced for testing bubble migration across markets. Three relevant financial series are investigated, including a financial asset price (a house price index), a commodity price (the crude oil price), and one bond price (the spread …

At A Crossroads: The Impact Of International Financial Reporting Standards In The U.S., Cindy K. Harris

Business and Economics Faculty Publications

Public companies in the United States face a new challenge. As set forth in its roadmap for implementation, the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) is considering the potential use of financial statements prepared in accordance with international financial reporting standards (“IFRS”.) The chief goal of these global standards is to establish a uniform system to improve comparability of companies’ financial positions. For decades, Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (“GAAP”) have been the framework of financial statement preparation for public companies in the U.S. The movement to IFRS represents an unprecedented change in the basis of financial reporting, since IFRS would supersede …

Monitoring State-Owned Versus State-Controlled Enterprises, Knowledge@Smu

Knowledge@SMU

What’s the best way to monitor listed Chinese companies effectively? Should the Chinese government introduce more stringent corporate governance regulations to keep managers on their toes? Forget it. According to a research study by SMU accounting professor Wang Jiwei, the government is better off ditching its little black book of corporate governance reform and focusing on other ways to get results. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Regulation Of The Otc Derivatives Market: A Regulatory Proposal Of Cds, Erik Welin

WCBT Undergraduate Publications

According to many commentators the credit derivatives and especially CDS have been a leading cause to the development of the current financial crisis. During the last year, policy makers, regulators, and other commentators around the world have therefore focused their attention on how to regulate OTC derivatives and especially CDS.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze some of the proposed regulatory responses to OTC derivatives and especially CDS from an economic point of view. The paper proposes a twofold regulatory response. First it proposes that we return to the old common law rule of "rule against difference contracts". …

Historical Data: Net Farm Income, Department Of Agricultural Economics, University Of Kentucky

Agricultural Economics Presentations

No abstract provided.

Mass Business Report, College Of Management, University Of Massachusetts Boston

Financial Services Forum Publications

Welcome to the College of Management, UMASS – Boston, Financial Services Forum’s Fall 2009 report on the Massachusetts economy. The Forum is a source of current information and commentary about critical issues facing the industries in Boston and at the national level, as well as the health of financial services in general.

Stochastic Business Cycle Volatilities, Capital Accumulation And Economic Growth: Lessons From The Global Credit Market Crisis, Kwamie Dunbar

WCBT Faculty Publications

The recent global economic downturn in a number of economies was preceded by rising credit market risk brought on by a massive financial market failure. This paper develops a small open economy model that analyzes the interaction of business cycle volatilities with capital accumulation and the subsequent impacts on economic growth. We use a stochastic dynamic programming model to test the central hypothesis that rising volatility shocks is an inhibitor to capital accumulation and subsequently economic growth. The model illustrates that traditional capital-based growth models which assume a constant capital stock are not consistent with the business cycle variation in …

Finance Flies High: How Unilever Redesigned The Finance Function To Build Brand Value And Drive Growth, Barbara M. Tarasovich, Bridget Lyons

WCBT Faculty Publications

Unilever's finance team played a key role in the success of their brands. The company achieved its fourth consecutive year of accelerating organic sales growth from less than 0.5% in 2004 to more than 7% in 2008, according to Jim Lawrence, Unilever's CFO. Its strategy is to focus on volume growth and strengthening the competitive position of the company's brands. In this article, the authors examine how the finance function at Unilever was redesigned to deliver the firm's strategic goals, including an emphasis on volume growth and competitive position of its brands. Beginning in 2005, the finance team at Unilever …

Origins And Resolution Of Financial Crises: Lessons From The Current And Northern European Crises, Finn Ostrup, Lars Oxelheim, Clas Wihlborg

Business Faculty Articles and Research

Since July 2007, the world economy has experienced a severe financial crisis that originated in the U.S. housing market. Subsequently, the crisis has spread to financial sectors in European and Asian economies and led to a severe worldwide recession. The existing literature on financial crises rarely distinguishes between factors that create the original strain on the financial sector and factors that explain why these strains lead to system-wide contagion and a possible credit crunch. Most of the literature on financial crises refers to factors that cause an original disruption in the financial system. We argue that a financial crisis with …

Wise Charitable Giving, Ann House, Janet Andersen

All Current Publications

This publication provides ten tips to smart, charitable giving.

2008-2009 Operating Budget: Subr Agricultural Extension And Research Programs, Southern University System. Office Of Finance & Administration.

All Southern University System Budgets

2008-2009 Operating Budget of the SUBR Agricultural Research and Extension Center Campus. Fiscal Year Ending June 2009.

2009-2010 Operating Budget: Southern University Law Center, Southern University System. Office Of Finance & Administration.

All Southern University System Budgets

The 2009-2010 Fiscal Year Operating Budget for the Southern University Law Center Campus.

2009-2010 Higher Education Operating Fund Budget: Southern University At Shreveport, Southern University System. Office Finance & Administration.

All Southern University System Budgets

The Higher Education Operating Fund Budget of the 2009-2010 Southern University at Shreveport Campus.

2009-2010 Revised Operating Budget, Southern University System. Office Of Finance & Administration.

All Southern University System Budgets

The Southern University System Board and System Administration Higher Education Operating Fund Budget Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 2010. Revised September 30, 2009.