Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

Gold, Gas And Grains: Smartest Investment For The Coming Decade?, Knowledge@Smu

Knowledge@SMU

The disappointing performance of investments like stocks, bonds and real estate during the recent crisis, has only served to accentuate the attractiveness of investing in commodities. With finite supply and voracious demand from countries like China, it seems that the prices of oil, gold, iron and other natural resources could only rise. John Stephenson, of First Asset Investment Management Inc, tells us more in The Little Book of Commodity Investing, why investing in commodities is timely and smart.

Psychological Correlates Of Investor Risk, John Laurin Vaughn

Theses Digitization Project

The present study explores the efficacy of a standardized psychological test known as Rotter's Internal/External Locus of Control Scale in predicting investor's level of risk aversion.

Off The Rack Versus Savile Row: The Value Of Custom Tailoring For Equity Investors, Steven D. Dolvin, John Gonas

Scholarship and Professional Work - Business

eparately managed accounts (SMAs) generally carry a higher fee structure than standard mutual funds, but managers tout the ability to customize accounts as being worthy of this higher cost. This customization may increase returns, or it may simply allow for more personalized tax management or control over other unique circumstances. • Very little research exists on the relative return benefit of SMAs compared with actively managed mutual funds. We fill this gap by examining firms that offer concurrently managed funds-SMAs as well as matching mutual funds run by the same manager(s) and following the same general strategy. • We find …

Basic Concepts In Forest Valuation And Investment Analysis: Edition 3.0, Steven H. Bullard, Thomas J. Straka

Faculty Publications

This book was originally intended to supplement lectures in forestry economics at the undergraduate level. It’s currently used for that purpose in ‘Forest Resource Economics’ courses at several universities. The book is also intended, however, to serve as a basic reference for foresters with experience in valuation and investment analysis concepts and methods. It has proven to be a valuable resource in forest valuation and investment analysis workshops for practicing foresters, landowners, and others interested in forestry investments.

Financial Literacy: What Are Business Schools Teaching?, Candy A. Bianco, Susan M. Bosco

Business Faculty Publications

The financial illiteracy of Americans has attracted the attention and funds of more than 10 federal agencies and countless other state agencies and non-profit organizations. The manifestations of poor financial skills and planning are divorce, depression, and many elderly Americans living in poverty.

Hundreds of business and non-business college students have been surveyed. Both groups were found to be financially illiterate. We examined the curricula of 100 AACSB institutions and concluded that business schools are either not offering fundamental courses in personal financial planning or that the courses are not generally available to business students (for credit) or non-business students. …

Essays On Reverse Leveraged Buy-Outs, Mark Richard Gruskin

Wayne State University Dissertations

ABSTRACT

ESSAYS ON REVERSE LEVERAGED BUYOUTS

by

MARK GRUSKIN

August 2011

Advisor: Dr. Sudip Datta

Major: Business Administration (Finance)

Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

This dissertation is the first study to investigate public-to-private reverse leveraged buyouts (RLBOs). The first essay measures changes in profitability, financial structure, operations, and cost structure to detect actions taken during the private period. Results show that approaching the leveraged buyout there is an above industry level of free cash flow and capital expenditures, while growth options are at competitive levels. These factors in the presence of low ownership concentration suggest the existence of overinvestment.

Increased leverage …

The Fed And The 2007-2009 Financial Crisis: Treating A Virus With Antibiotics? Evidence From The Commercial Paper Market, Mark D. Griffiths, Vladimir Kotomin, Drew B. Winters

Faculty Publications – Finance, Insurance, and Law

The two main explanations for the 2007-2009 financial crisis in the money markets are credit concerns and liquidity issues. These risks are intimately related, especially in the money markets, and either can lead to somewhat similar behavior by market participants. We study the U.S. commercial paper (CP) market to draw insights about the nature of the crisis which resulted in the amount of outstanding CP shrinking from the peak of $2.18 trillion in early August 2007 to $1.27 trillion in early July 2009. However, the CP market is not homogeneous in terms of credit quality, maturities and types of issues …

A Web Application For Financial Trading Simulation, Li-Chiou Chen, Lixin Tao, Padma Kadiyala

Cornerstone 3 Reports : Interdisciplinary Informatics

No abstract provided.

A Test Of The Expectations Hypothesis In Very Short-Term International Rates In The Presence Of Preferred Habitat For Liquidity, Vladimir Kotomin

Faculty Publications – Finance, Insurance, and Law

This study incorporates year-end and quarter-end preferences for liquidity and other calendar-time effects into the test of the expectations hypothesis (EH) in the very short-term LIBOR (maturities of one month and shorter) in seven major world currencies. The calendar-time effects are found to alter long-term relations between very short-term rates in these currencies. These effects alone are not responsible for the rejection of the EH in the data, as it is rejected in most of the cases even after appropriate controls are introduced. However, such effects are capable of causing the EH to be rejected and should be controlled for …

Executive Compensation And Idiosyncratic Risk, Hum Nath Panta

Finance and Real Estate Dissertations - Archive

Executive compensation is a very heavily researched area in finance, accounting and management over the last three decades. However, there are several inconclusive issues. One of them is the relationship between idiosyncratic risk and executive compensation. Prior research findings on this issue are inconclusive. In this context, this dissertation analyzes the effects of idiosyncratic risk on executive compensation. This research seeks to discover and document the role of idiosyncratic risk on all top executive compensation, CEO compensation and non-CEO executive compensation. This study will begin with an extensive review of prior studies on executive pay to identify the determinants of …

The Opaqueness Of Fair Value Assets And Systematic Risk In The Banking Industry, Jody Wayne Bland

Inquiry: The University of Arkansas Undergraduate Research Journal

Opacity has economy-wide implications. A lack of information, whether from non-disclosure or complexity of business, creates uncertainty that even the most sophisticated of investors must face. In this paper, I analyze the relationship between opacity and the systematic risk of bank holding companies. Specifically, I find that investments in opaque assets required to be reported at fair value significantly affect the levels of financial institutions’ systematic risk. Furthermore, I provide evidence that firm investments in opaque assets contribute to systematic risk to an even greater degree during times of financial crisis.

The Impact Of Transaction Duration, Volume And Direction On Price Dynamics And Volatility, Anthony S. Tay, Christopher Ting, Yiu Kuen Tse, Mitchell Warachka

Research Collection School Of Economics

We explore the role of trade volume, trade direction, and the duration between trades in explaining price dynamics and volatility using an Asymmetric Autoregressive Conditional Duration model applied to intraday transactions data. Our results suggest that volume, direction and duration are important determinants of price dynamics, while duration is also an important determinant of volatility. However, the impact of volume and direction on volatility is marginal after controlling for duration, and the impact of volume on volatility appears to be confined to periods of infrequent trading.

Internal Debt And Private Investment: Evidence From Pakistan, Muhammad Ramzan Sheikh, Muhammad Zahir Faridi, Shoukat Malik

Business Review

In most of the developing countries financial sectors are characterized by limited availability of loanable funds. Public sector borrowing leads to crowding out of the private sector as well as high interest rates and inflation. In Pakistan, government has relied more on borrowing from the domestic sources as well. The study explores the impacts of internal debt on private investment in Pakistan applying the OLS technique for the period of 1972 to 2009. The study indicates that the stock of internal debt and debt servicing affects the private investment negatively in Pakistan. This implies that internal debt and internal debt …

A Profile Analysis Of The Customers Of Islamic Banking In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Syed Umar Farooq

Business Review

Interviews conducted with the subscribers of Islamic banks in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa revealed their key characteristics and patterns. The study sample comprised 100 subscribers of Al-Meezan Bank and Bank of Khyber in N.W.F.P. A comprehensive profile analysis and a series of chi-square tests were conducted to elaborate the main attributes of the customers of Islamic banking system: the majority of Islamic bank customers are well educated; approximately 80 percent are between 25-50 years of age; more than 50 percent of the surveyed customers have maintained their current banking relationship with Islamic banks for more than one year; customers’ awareness and usage …

Using Real World Applications To Policy And Everyday Life To Teach Money And Banking, Dean D. Croushore

Economics Faculty Publications

Teaching a course in money and banking can be simultaneously challenging and easy. It is challenging because teaching the course well often requires a fair amount of institutional knowledge, which an instructor may not have acquired in graduate school. However, it is easy because the course can be geared to the coverage of current events, so economic data releases and the state of the economy help the instructor develop a new course every semester and produce an interesting lecture every day.

There are many different ways to teach a course on money and banking. At most schools, the only prerequisite …

Predicting Currency Pair Trends Using The Fractal Market Hypothesis, Jonathan Blackledge, Kieran Murphy

Conference papers

This paper reports on the results of a research and development pro- gramme concerned with the analysis of currency pair exchange time series for Forex trading in an intensive applications and services environment. In particular, we present some of the preliminary results obtained for Forex trading using MetaTrader 4 with a new set of trend indicators deigned using a mathematical model that is based on the Fractal Market Hypothesis. This includes examples of various currency pair exchange rates considered over di erent time intervals and use of the indicators in a live trading environment to place a buy/sell order.

Bootstrapping Techniques And New Venture Emergence, John T. Perry, Gaylen N. Chandler, Xin Yao, James Wolff

New England Journal of Entrepreneurship

Among nascent entrepreneurial ventures, are some types of bootstrapping techniques more successful than others? We compare externally oriented and internally oriented techniques with respect to the likelihood of becoming an operational venture; and we compare cash-increasing and cost-decreasing techniques with respect to becoming operational. Using data from the first Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics, we find evidence suggesting that when bootstrapping a new venture, the percentage of cash-increasing and cost-decreasing externally oriented bootstrapping techniques that a venture’s owners use are positive predictors of subsequent positive cash flow (one and two years later). But, internally oriented techniques are not related to …

The Implied Volatility Of Etf And Index Options., Stoyu Ivanov, Jeff Whitworth, Yi Zhang

Faculty Publications

We examine the option-implied volatility of the three most liquid ETFs (Diamonds, Spiders, and Cubes) and their respective tracking indices (Dow 30, S&P 500, and NASDAQ 100). We find that volatility smiles for ETF options are more pronounced than for index options, primarily because deep-in-the money ETF options have considerably higher implied volatility than deep-in-the-money index options. The observed difference in implied volatility is not due to a difference between the realized return distributions of the underlying ETFs and indices. Differences in implied volatility for ETF and index options also do not appear to be explained by discrepancies in net …

Cross-Sectional Analysis Of Index And Commodity Markets Price Discovery., Stoyu Ivanov

Faculty Publications

This study examines the determinants of relative price discovery between the futures and cash prices in 30 index and commodity markets based on the Gonzalo and Granger (1995) permanent-transitory decomposition methodology. Twenty-eight indexes and commodities have proportional futures market information shares greater than 60%. Two commodities are the only exception: Feeders Cattle and Wheat-Minneapolis have price discovery occurring predominantly in the cash markets with information shares of their futures contracts of 33% and 40%, respectively. The research documents a significant cross-sectional variability of the information shares across the 30 indexes and commodities and finds that the information shares of the …

Finance, Fear, And Family: Issues Of Trust And The Common Ground With Terrorist Funding, David M. Cook, Timothy Smith

Australian Counter Terrorism Conference

In the immediate aftermath of al-Qaeda’s September 11 attacks on the United States of America, examinations of terrorist funding focused on the Middle Eastern and South Asian use of Hawala and non-traceable financial transactions. However, whilst the cloaking of identity is certainly a part of criminal activity for funds transfer, there are other factors. South Asia’s community banking norms align far more closely with informal systems that follow centuries-old customs of familial trust rather than reportable record keeping. Tightened restrictions on money movement in the form of identity checks and statements of purpose have coerced more than two hundred million …

Common Currency In East Asia: An Analysis Of Currency Convergence, Lee K. Lim

Research outputs 2011

The recent global financial crisis of 2007-2009 and fears of a sovereign debt crisis in some European countries have fuelled the debates among economic analysts and policy makers on the future directions of monetary and exchange rate arrangements in the East Asian region. This paper applies both the cluster analysis and time series tests to determine whether increased trade and financial integration has led to currency convergence in the region over the period January 1990 to June 2010. The countries included in this study are the high-performing East Asian economies, namely China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the …

Are Credit Ratings A Good Measure Of Capital Adequacy?, David Allen, Akhmad Kramadibrata, Robert Powell, Abhay Singh

Research outputs 2011

Focus on capital adequacy intensified since the onset of the Global Financ ial Crisis (GFC), with many US and other global banks experiencing capital shortages over this time. The Basel standardised approach uses credit ratings as a determinant for corporate capital adequacy requirements. A problem with credit ratings is that they were designed to be a measure of relative, as opposed to absolute credit risk, and do not ratchet up or down with changes in economic circumstances. This paper examines how credit risk as indicated by credit ratings (and thei r associated capital requirement) changed pre and post Global Financial …

Modeling The Conditional Heteroscedasticity And Leverage Effect In The Chinese Stock Markets, Zhihui Yin, Albert Tsui, Zhaoyong Zhang

Research outputs 2011

The Chinese stock market has experienced an astonishing growth and unprecedented development since its inception in the early 1990s, emerged to be the world's second-largest by market value by the end of 2009. The Chinese stock market is also one of the most volatile markets, which has been called by many observers a “casino”. In the recent years there are several far-reaching events that have reshaped the Chinese stock markets. The most notable events include the “dot-com bubble” in 2000, China’s non-tradable shares reform in 2005 and the global financial crisis in 2008. It is noted that the “dot-com bubble” …

A Participatory Teaching Strategy Developing A Timeline Of The Global Financial Crisis, Margaret J. Giles

Research outputs 2011

The rapid pace of change of ideas and events in economics places pressure on teachers of university economics to stay abreast of developments in their field and to reflect these developments appropriately in their classes. The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) was an excellent example of this phenomenon with a great deal of material written on this subject over a relatively short space of time. Under certain circumstances, one way of coping with such developments may be for teachers and students to acquire emerging knowledge and information jointly rather than sequentially. This paper describes a teaching strategy where students constructed a …

Innovative Transition Matrix Techniques For Measuring Extreme Risk: An Australian And U.S. Comparison, David Allen, Akhmad Kramadibrata, Robert Powell, Abhay Singh

Research outputs 2011

Comparing Australia and the U.S. both prior to and during the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), using a dataset which includes more than six hundred companies, this paper modifies traditional transition matrix credit risk modelling to address two important issues. Firstly, extreme credit risk can have a devastating impact on financial institutions, economies and markets as highlighted by the GFC. It is therefore essential that extreme credit risk is accurately measured and understood. Transition matrix methodology, which measur es the probability of a borrower transitioning from one credit rating to another, is traditionally used to m easure Value at Risk (VaR), …

Measuring Real Capital Adequacy In Extreme Economic Conditions: An Examination Of Swiss Banking Sector, David E. Allen, Robert Powell

Research outputs 2011

The global financial crisis (GFC) has placed the creditworthiness of banks under intense scrutiny. In particular, capital adequacy has been called into question. Current capital requirements make no allowance for capital erosion caused by movements in the market value of assets. This paper examines default probabilities of Swiss banks under extreme conditions using structural modeling techniques. Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) and Conditional Probability of Default (CPD) techniques are used to measure capital erosion. Significant increase in Probability of Default (PD) is found during the GFC period. The market asset value based approach indicates a much higher PD than external …

East Asian Financial Crisis Revisited: What Does A Copula Tell?, Pei Fei, Albert Tsui, Zhaoyong Zhang

Research outputs 2011

We construct a regime-switching model of copulas to capture observed asymmetric dependence in daily changes of exchange rates in five selected East Asian economies during the 1997 financial crisis era. In particular, we investigate the effects of the financial crisis on asymmetric dependence in exchange rates returns and assess the asymmetric relationships between five currencies, including the Singapore Dollar, Japanese Yen, South Korea Won, Thailand Baht and Indonesia Rupiah. Various time-varying copula models will also be applied to examine the possible structural breaks. The results confirm significant changes at the dependence level, tail behaviour and asymmetry structures between returns of …

Assessing The Dynamic Relationship Between Small And Large Cap Stock Prices, K. Ho, B. Ernst, Zhaoyong Zhang

Research outputs 2011

The historical long-run return on small capitalization stocks has unquestionably outperformed large capitalization stocks since 1926. The phenomenon of small capitalization stocks having higher risk- adjusted returns compared with large capitalization stocks is an equity market anomaly first discovered in 1981. Since then, many academics and investors have strongly argued that “size is dead”. This paper argues that far from being dead, the phenomenon of size effect appears alive and well and it could be exploited effectively over long-term investment horizons. To analyze this phenomenon, we focus specifically on the dynamics of small cap and large cap prices. We test …

Credit Risk Measurement Methodologies, David Allen, Robert Powell

Research outputs 2011

The significant problems experienced by banks during the Global Financial Crisis have highlighted the critical importance of measuring and providing for credit risk. This paper will examine four popular methods used in the measurement of credit risk and provide an analysis of the relative shortcomings and advantages of each method. The study includes external ratings approaches, financial statement analysis models, the Merton / KMV structural model, and the transition based models of CreditMetrics and CreditPortfolioView. Each model assesses different cr iteria, and an understanding of the merits and disadvantages of the various models can assist banks and other credit modellers …

Peas In A Pod: Canadian And Australian Banks Before And During A Global Financial Crisis, David Allen, Ray Boffey, Robert Powell

Research outputs 2011

In the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), the Canadian and Australian banking systems have been singled out by some commentators as having performed better than many other banking systems, particularly those in Europe, America and the United Kingdom. Banks in both Canada and Australia, for instance, have continued to report enviable earnings, sound capital levels, and high credit ratings both before and during the GFC. The G-20 and the European Union have tried to identify the features of the Canadian and Australian financial systems which have underpinned this success in order to use them in shaping a revised …