Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

Turmoil On The Mississippi River: Harnessing Green Infrastructure To Accommodate Drastically Changing Environmental Patterns, Edouard Ballett

Supply Chain Management Undergraduate Honors Theses

The Mississippi River is one of the most important commercial waterways in the world. It connects the United States’ agricultural and manufacturing centers with the rest of the country and the global supply chain while also being the economic engine for developments up and down the river. Over the past four years, the Mississippi River has experienced its worst drought and flood on record. Climate change is increasing the commonality of extreme weather events, and we must alter outdated concrete or “gray” infrastructure. Traditional river engineering of levees, locks, and dams increases the severity of river flow or lack thereof, …

An Analysis Of The Housing Affordability Crisis: Private Equity Or Legislation Issue, Jack Polk

Finance Undergraduate Honors Theses

The aim of this thesis is to explore the claim that private equity investment is the cause of the modern unaffordability in the single family housing market. Through empirical study and historical research we found that the footprint of institutional investors in this space is insignificant. However, legislative errors which have artificially inflated demand and suppressed supply over the past decade have greatly contributed to the crisis and must be corrected for the long term health of the housing space. These corrections will focus primarily in the alleviation of supply pressures for new development and the continuation of the low …

How The Finance Industry Is Shaped By Technology – A Corporate Experience, Max Pabin

Finance Undergraduate Honors Theses

For this paper, I want to analyze how new technology affects the financial industry for individual clients. My internship at Fidelity Investments provided me with a back-end view of the technology used for clients, while my Chase experience has provided me with an in-depth view of how clients use technology daily. I believe that the financial services industry is being taken over by new technology. This has created a new experience for customers that has made it easier for them to bank, apply for credit, and invest their money. I find this subject to be very interesting as someone who …

Internship Experience At Accenture, Drew Keatts

Finance Undergraduate Honors Theses

This paper discusses my internship experience at Accenture and all of the things I learned from it. I worked out of Dallas, Texas, and it was a 10-week internship. Some of the things I discuss include financial management, financial analysis, profit margins, and professionalism. I cannot express how amazing this experience was and I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to work for Accenture. I hope you enjoy my experience and the key takeaways I had from it.

Company Provided Retirement Plans: Key Distinctions And Impacts For Employers And Employees, Ashley Valentine

Finance Undergraduate Honors Theses

Employee retirement plans vary from company to company as a result of organizational goals to attract and retain employees and drive overall company performance. This thesis will explore the differences between key retirement plans offered in the United States, including 401(k) plans, pension plans, Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOP), and profit-sharing. By understanding and evaluating each, a company can determine the ideal structure of retirement plans for the benefits of both their employees and the company’s growth. This review will provide insights on the financial and productivity benefits to employees and employers from offering each of the various retirement options. …

Assessing The Impact Of Impact Investing: Practices, Challenges, And Opportunities Towards The Standardization Of Impact Assessment Mechanisms, Taylor Poe

Finance Undergraduate Honors Theses

This research project focuses on gathering information on which impact measurement mechanisms are currently used in the impact investing industry, and how these mechanisms are standardized across various firms, geographic locations, and fund types. The overarching goal of the study is to provide an assessment of the impact investing industry and the use of standardized impact assessment practices. The specific goal of this research study is to collect and present information on the current state of impact measurement standardization. Research is separated into three large components: interviews with industry leaders, findings from social finance conferences, and research of scholarly sources. …

Cost Of Capitol: Analyzing Congressional Insider Trading Regulation, Hannah Levy

Finance Undergraduate Honors Theses

The United States Congress has involved itself with the financial regulation of big business for decades. The legislative body has passed a multitude of laws over time which foster greater transparency and trust between individual investors and big business. Until recently, legislators have avoided passing laws which regulate their own financial activity. Recent investigations revealing that dozens of federal lawmakers have violated financial disclosure laws and made stock trades on insider information has successfully angered the public and forced Congress to consider tighter restrictions. But can Americans trust their legislators to effectively regulate themselves? If no legislative action is taken, …

Man Vs. Machine: The Future Of Financial Advising, Rylee Driggs

Finance Undergraduate Honors Theses

This research evaluates the potential impact of artificial intelligence on the financial advising industry, particularly regarding the demand for human financial advisors within the industry as artificial intelligence rapidly evolves. With the recent launch of ChatGPT, a cutting-edge AI chatbot, the role of financial advisors, which previously seemed mostly exempt from any technological alternatives due to the essential emotional intelligence of a human financial advisor, is potentially at risk for replacement. This research provides an in-depth analysis on the feasibility of artificial intelligence replicating necessary humanlike characteristics of a human financial advisor and utilizes results of an anonymous survey where …

Exploring Social Media Sentiment Analysis In Relation To Common Stock, Landon Johnson

Finance Undergraduate Honors Theses

Many institutions, investors, and researchers have sought to gain insights into consumer attitudes and behaviors by leveraging social media. However, trading strategies utilizing social sentiment have been observed to often provide returns roughly equivalent to or less than those of standard market indexes. This observation raises several questions: does the efficacy of social sentiment analysis vary from firm to firm? Are price or volume directly correlated with social sentiment? Does social sentiment display any predictive ability? The following analysis attempted to answer these questions by comparing one week’s worth of data from Twitter users to price and volume data from …

Outperforming The Stock Market Using Market Anomalies, Brett Bennett

Finance Undergraduate Honors Theses

The objective of this study is to explore the use of well-researched market anomalies to generate higher risk-adjusted returns than the overall stock market. Four specific market anomalies are examined: the small-firm effect; price reversals; the January effect; and the momentum effect. It focuses on historical evidence, anomaly characteristics, and potential risks. This study also explores the use of anomaly detection techniques, such as machine learning, in identifying market mispricings. It finds that a selective approach, combining market anomalies with traditional investment strategies, is crucial for effective implementation. This study provides insights for investors seeking to capitalize on market anomalies …

Benefits Of Impact Investments For Financial Advisors And Their Clients, Jacob Eason

Finance Undergraduate Honors Theses

As society has become more focused on addressing environmental and social issues, interest in impact investing has grown dramatically to a total asset value of $444 billion dollars (Global Sustainable Investment Alliance, 2021). As a result, financial advisors could benefit from incorporating these investments into their service offerings. However, like all financial questions, there is no universal answer for all clients. By exploring existing academic literature, this review seeks to highlight the benefits of impact investments, reveal the downsides, and discover strategies to manage them. Ultimately, this literature review will demonstrate how offering impact investments can be beneficial for both …

Multinational Corporations Use Of Operational And Financial Hedging For Foreign Exchange Risk – Walmart Global Treasury, Zachary Hassan

Finance Undergraduate Honors Theses

This paper examines how multinational corporations can leverage different types of hedging tools to avoid foreign exchange risk. We look at two different hedging methods, financial and operational hedging. Weighing the costs benefit relationship of both of these methods we come to a resolution that a balance of both of these methods is most optimal for multinational corporations.

Boutique Staffing Firm Internship: How Ai Is Changing The Staffing Industry, Garrett Larsen

Finance Undergraduate Honors Theses

This paper explores my experience as an Accounting, Finance, and Recruiting Intern for a boutique staffing firm in Memphis, Tennessee during the summer and winter of 2022 and my research on the current uses and future implications of artificial intelligence in the staffing industry. Specifically, it delves into my goals for the internship, my weekly tasks during the internship, and my observations of the internship. Based on my use of artificial intelligence for email marketing during the winter portion of the internship, I research the current uses of AI in the hiring process and the potential uses for the future. …

The Opportunities And Challenges Of Automation: Insights From An Internship Experience At Ultrasource Llc, Olivia Madden

Finance Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis provides insight into Olivia Madden's time as an intern at UltraSource LLC. UltraSource LLC is a Kansas City company that produces meat manufacturing equipment and operational supplies. Olivia worked as a finance intern, where she was tasked with automating processes for the accounts receivable and payable teams and also did ad hoc projects for the finance department as a whole. These insights are recorded through weekly journal entries describing what was done and what was learned every week.

These insights are translated into research on the opportunities and challenges of automation, and the impact automation has on worker …

Financial Advising Experience, Joshua Wittenauer

Finance Undergraduate Honors Theses

Building wealth can be easier with the help of a financial advisor. Wealth consists of assets and savings, and while there are many ways to save, there are some basic steps to get started:

1) Earn enough money to live and have some left over for saving. 2) Control your spending so you can save. 3) Invest your money in different assets – “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”

Lehman Brothers Bankruptcy: Reasons, Effects, And Outcome, Christian J. Reller

Finance Undergraduate Honors Theses

Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy was a major turning point during the 2008 Financial Crisis, and Lehman Brothers itself has become a prime example of regulatory failure since its closing. The demise of Lehman stemmed from the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. The deregulation of investment banking in the 1990s forged the way for new investment practices on Wall Street. The relaxation of rules allowed investment banks to be heavily invested in volatile assets. Lehman’s issues were an extremely high leverage ratio, illiquid assets, and poor corporate governance. An extremely high leverage ratio left Lehman susceptible to large movements in …

Three Chapters On Investments And Financial Institutions, Cao Fang

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Only the stock selection (“alpha”) decisions of fund managers who trade on firm-specific information should have predictive return content. Faced with the same information, skilled fund managers make similar stock selection decisions. In Chapter one, we introduce a new measure - stock investment quality - which uses fund quality to weight asymmetries in private information reflected in deviations of fund from peer group ownership on stocks in a style segment. We show stocks ranked high on investment quality generate significantly higher excess returns that persist through the ensuing year. The positive investment quality–future return relationship is robust to alternative fund …

Essays On Performance Evaluation Of Portfolio Managers Of Mutual And Hedge Funds, Yuekun Liu

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three essays focusing on the performance evaluation of portfolio managers of mutual and hedge funds. The first essay shows the performance of corporate bond mutual funds tends to be estimated using models with limited empirical validation. I test several models and find considerable variation in quality. That variation leads to meaningful differences with respect to the stylized facts of corporate bond fund performance. Using my preferred BENCH4 model—a novel model based on funds’ common benchmarks—I find average underperformance, substantial relative performance persistence, a small number of funds with positive alphas unattributable to luck, and positive alphas …

Reconciling Conflicting Institutional Logics: Community Reinvestment Officers At The Intersection Of Public Policy And Market Forces, Meredith Mckee Adkins

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Although the public policy literature has traditionally focused on public sector agencies’ roles in the policy implementation process, private sector managers who oversee regulatory mandates for their organizations are also policy actors. These actors operate between multiple conflicting field-level institutional logics that create demands that they must reconcile through their work. In the banking sector, the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), enacted in 1977, and its associated policies are monitored by the banking regulatory agencies and implemented by the senior managers responsible for these mandates at regulated financial institutions. Simultaneously with their responsibility for the policy mission of the CRA, CRA …

Does The Financial Experience Of Sec Regional Directors Impact Sec Investigations Into Reporting Entities?, James Justin Blann

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The SEC’s Division of Enforcement is frequently criticized for its lack of oversight effectiveness, and certain vocal critics attribute this to a lack of financial experience within the SEC. Using hand-collected data on SEC regional directors, I find that the majority of these SEC officials lack financial experience. I then examine whether the financial experience of SEC regional directors impacts SEC investigations into reporting entities. Consistent with financial experience equipping directors to better process complex financial transactions and reports, I find that directors with financial experience open public company investigations 29 percent more often and conduct these investigations 34 percent …

The Effects Of Consumer Loan Application Formats And Advertised Terms On Consumer Borrowing Decisions, Alicia M. Johnson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Consumers continue to demonstrate a willingness to accrue more debt. They are also more accepting of increased repayment risk via the acceptance of longer loan terms. Extant research on consumer borrowing consists primarily of experiments designed to assess consumer choices and understand how consumers evaluate loan attributes in relation to one another within consumer borrowing contexts (Kamleitner, Hoelzl, and Kirchler 2012; Ranyard et al., 2006). Thus, prior research examines consumer responses to loan information rather than the generation of loan parameters at the time of financing. With important implications for consumers, marketers of financial products, academic researchers, and federal regulators, …

Bitcoin, Blockchain Technology, And Cryptocurrencies, Jeffrey Dodson

Information Systems Undergraduate Honors Theses

The blockchain based cryptocurrency known as Bitcoin was theorized in a whitepaper published October 28, 2008, by Satoshi Nakamoto (pseudonym) (Nakamoto, 2008). The paper, titled, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” laid out a digital currency creation/exchange structure that employs a decentralized ledger that would later run on the author’s open-source application (Nakamoto, 2008). The main innovation of this technology is found within the security benefits provided by the proof-of-work consensus mechanism that requires solving a mathematic trap-door compression function to verify transactions/blocks added to the blockchain. On January 3, 2009, the genesis block, a term for the first block …

Implementing A Micro-Business Internship Program In Dangriga, Belize, Shaadee Shojai

Management Undergraduate Honors Theses

Over the Summer, I was able to work with Peacework in Belize through the University of Arkansas. While I was unable to physically go to Belize due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, I feel that I was still able to learn about the culture, in both the casual and business workplace, as well as help the people of Dangriga. The goal of my project was to help consult with the Tourism Department of Dangriga to help develop their small business into businesses that were more appealing to tourists. Unfortunately, most people who own small businesses in Dangriga can’t support themselves with …

The Importance Of Process Documentation In The Workplace, Alisha Chatlani

Finance Undergraduate Honors Theses

This paper focuses on the benefits of process documentation in the workplace and how individuals can go about creating documentation that best suits their business needs. The author of this paper explains how they went about researching, developing, and creating process documentation for a team at J.B. Hunt Transport Services and the methodology behind the entire process through an internship.

An Evaluation Of Esg Funds And Their Performance, Mason Hook

Finance Undergraduate Honors Theses

Over the past decade, Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) oriented funds have seen a dramatic increase in inflows and many investors have chosen to replace traditional holdings with sustainable ones. Within 5 years, it is projected that ESG exchange traded funds and mutual funds will exceed $53 trillion. Many fund managers claim that ESG funds will outperform traditional funds in the long run. If this claim is accurate, many asset managers would have a fiduciary duty to invest in ESG products. While there is often a non-financial benefit to investing in ESG funds, this paper challenges the claim that they …

Exploring The Impact Of Stock Market Performance On The Real Estate Market, Jake Taylor

Finance Undergraduate Honors Theses

This paper goes on to analyze the impact of stock market performance on the real estate market. This is done through the analysis of the recent performance of the stock market, real estate market, and key indicators of both markets. The goal of this paper is to inform the reader of potential trends in the real estate market based on key indicators that play a large role in the stock market’s performance in order to make more knowledgeable investments.

Altering Overdraft Fee Policies To Promote Consumer Financial Health, Nadia Barbarawi

Finance Undergraduate Honors Theses

The objective of this study is to describe the traditional overdraft practices, explain the reaction of the banking industry from the pressure coming from consumers, regulators, and innovative companies to reduce or eliminate overdraft fees to promote consumer financial health.

How Corporate America Has Been Impacted By Remote Work, Jack Berg

Finance Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis evaluates how the new era of remote work has affected organizations and their employers. Specifically, it focuses on the effect remote work has had on productivity and revenue within companies, as well as the mental health and work-life balance implications it has had on employees. Furthermore, this analysis focuses on the history of remote work, how companies have had to adapt in recent years due to the COVID-19 pandemic and how remote work will look in post-COVID-19 times. In addition, all possibilities will be assessed to examine how efficient remote work is in the workplace.

Multiple resources were …

Insomnovation – Natural Sleep Solutions Business Plan, Nikolas Limperis

Finance Undergraduate Honors Theses

Currently, 70 million Americans suffer from some sort of sleep issues from trouble falling asleep, trouble staying asleep, and daytime drowsiness. However, the sleep solutions on the market today are either highly artificial or only address the symptoms of sleep issues rather than the underlying cause. This is what Insomnovation seeks to address. By providing supplementation to seven key vitamins and minerals, Insomnovation hopes to bring a natural solution to put the issue of sleep disorders to rest.

Financial Planning Through A Pandemic: A Northwestern Mutual – Fayetteville Internship Experience, Grant Hoeldtke

Finance Undergraduate Honors Theses

For my internship, I worked as a College Financial Representative. As a College Financial Representative, I essentially worked as a full-time financial representative, but without some of the certifications required to offer the full line of products offered by Northwestern Mutual. Throughout the internship, I went through the process of kickstarting my financial advising practice and growing my connections around the Northwest Arkansas and Tulsa areas. I gained experience setting and hosting meetings with potential clients, then creating personalized and customizable financial plans based on the information I received during the client's meeting. Every single meeting and financial plan were …