Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

2013 Q3 Market Pulse Report, Craig R. Everett

Pepperdine Market Pulse Report

The quarterly IBBA and M&A Source Market Pulse Survey was created to gain an accurate understanding of the market conditions for businesses being sold in Main Street (values $0-$2MM) and the lower middle market (values $2MM -$50MM). The national survey was conducted with the intent of providing a valuable resource to business owners and their advisors. The IBBA and M&A Source present the Market Pulse Survey with the support of the Pepperdine Private Capital Markets Project and the Graziado School of Business and Management at Pepperdine University.

Access To Capital In Dakar: An Analysis Of Microfinance, Michael Furlane

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This study analyzes the effectiveness of micro credit in a developing African country by evaluating the history of microfinance and then focusing on access to credit in modern day Dakar, Senegal. Microfinance, or small capital loans to business startups in budding nations, has been used as a tool in developmental economics for a several decades. Ideally it is an elegant solution to a problem that permeates developing countries around the world: the lack of available credit. This lack of credit stifles economic growth in every sector of an emerging economy. As part of this study I interviewed both credit firms …

Singapore Management University Launches Financial It Academy @Smu To Train It Professionals In The Financial Services Industry, Singapore Management University

SMU Press Releases and News

Singapore Management University (SMU) has launched the first-of-its-kind academy in Singapore to provide training programmes targeted at the financial services IT segment. The Financial IT Academy @SMU (FITA) will equip financial sector IT professionals with enhanced IT capabilities that are critical to the growth of banking and financial services in Singapore, and also with the essential knowledge of the business needs and processes of financial institutions so that business and IT initiatives can be more effectively integrated for competitive advantage.

Efinancial Health, Nan Taylor

Cornerstone 1 Reports : Expansion and Enhancements of the Thinkfinity Platform

No abstract provided.

Notes With Interest: Department Of Finance Newsletter, N02, Fall 2013, University Of Northern Iowa. Department Of Finance.

Department of Finance Newsletter

News about the activities of the Department of Finance

Leverage Buy-Out Case Study, Binh Duc Nguyen

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

Women In The Workforce: An In-Depth Analysis Of Gender Roles And Compensation Inequity In The Modern Workplace, Rebecca L. Ziman

Honors Theses and Capstones

This paper explores the increase in participation and education of American women in the workforce with a special focus on women in business and accounting roles. The paper then goes on to discuss the wage gap between genders, how to remedy inequality in the workplace, and highlights several reasons why pursing a solution to gender inequality is beneficial for both the employee and the company.

Patron-Driven Acquisition Optimization And Workflows At Liberty University Jerry Falwell Library, Erin Crane, Lori B. Snyder

Faculty Publications and Presentations

In the Spring of 2010, the Liberty University Jerry Falwell Library began a pilot patron-driven acquisition program with the e-book aggregator ebrary. In the Fall of 2012, the program had been active for two years and the librarians sought to optimize the program in the form of selecting more titles which are used. This paper describes the formula that the librarians used to achieve optimization in the PDA program. Also described is the workflow involved with acquisitions and cataloging before and after the purchases are made.

The Crisis In State Highway Finances: Its Roots, Current Effects, And Some Possible Remedies, Juita-Elena Yusuf, Lenahan O'Connell

School of Public Service Faculty Publications

This paper focuses on the American states and the sources of the expanding structural imbalance between their highway-related revenues on the one hand and expenditures for transportation infrastructure needs on the other. The paper describes the roots of the funding problem over recent decades, looks at some of the responses taken at the state and federal level, and discusses their inherent limitations as solutions to this funding crisis. The paper also presents several policy recommendations for increasing revenues. We demonstrate that a variable rate gas tax indexed to the construction cost index and improvements in automobile fuel efficiency and a …

New Covariance-Based Feature Extraction Methods For Classification And Prediction Of High-Dimensional Data, Mopelola Adediwura Sofolahan

Open Access Dissertations

When analyzing high dimensional data sets, it is often necessary to implement feature extraction methods in order to capture relevant discriminating information useful for the purposes of classification and prediction. The relevant information can typically be represented in lower-dimensional feature spaces, and a widely used approach for this is the principal component analysis (PCA) method. PCA efficiently compresses information into lower dimensions; however, studies indicate that it is not optimal for feature extraction especially when dealing with classification problems. Furthermore, for high-dimensional data having limited observations, as is typically the case with remote sensing data and nonstationary data such as …

The Case Against Stock Picking, Charles J. Higgins

Finance Faculty Works

This paper brings together various topics in finance--the Capital Asset Pricing Model, Portfolio Theory, the empirical evidence, and the Efficient Market Hypothesis--to address whether individual security selection--Stock Picking--is or is not a meritorious venture.

Investor Heterogeneity, Investor-Management Disagreement And Share Repurchases, Sheng Huang, Anjan V. Thakor

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper develops and tests a new theoretical explanation for stock repurchases. Investors may disagree with the manager about the firm's investment projects. A repurchase causes a change in the investor base as investors who are most likely to disagree with the manager tender their shares. Therefore, a firm is more likely to buy back shares when the level of investor-management agreement is lower, and agreement improves as a consequence. Moreover, dispersion of opinion among investors cannot explain repurchase activity once the stock price and investor-management agreement are controlled for. Overall, the evidence is consistent with firms strategically using repurchases …

Valuing Twitter's Ipo, Steven D. Dolvin

All Chapters

Twitter recently announced (via a tweet) that they would be going public. While valuation is difficult in general, it is particularly problematic for an IPO. Read a good summary article here, Yahoo!.

Impact Of Corruption In A Developing Economy The Example Of Armenia, Sevak Tsaturyan, Dr. Phillip Bryson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

In our research we have attempted to address the negative impacts of corruption on economic development, trade and foreign direct investment in developing economies. Historically, it has been argued that political corruption is a very significant hindrance of economic development, especially in transitional economies. Economists from major organizations and institutions have performed numerous empirical analyses finding the negative correlation between corruption and economic performance measured in GDP. They have found this correlation to be especially significant when foreign direct investment is a factor of development. Assumptions have been formed that investors avoid corrupt economies due to business insecurities and the …

The Dow Shuffle, Steven D. Dolvin

All Chapters

While it is viewed as a major stock market barometer, the Dow Jones Industrial Average only follows 30 companies, and every so often the set of companies changes. The recent shuffle eliminated Alcoa, Bank of America, and HP, while adding Goldman Sachs, Visa, and Nike. The primary reason was the low prices of the eliminated companies. While most indexes are value weighted, the Dow is price weighted, meaning lower priced stocks exert little influence. This is also the reason why Apple will likely not be added -- with its "high" stock price. See a good summary here, Wall Street Journal …

Preferred Stock, Steven D. Dolvin

All Chapters

Preferred stock, also called perpetual stock, is considered a type of hybrid security. It has characteristics of debt, the primary of which is a fixed dividend. However, it also has similarities to equity, in that it is equity, so the dividend is not guaranteed. So, it has higher risk than comparable bonds, but less risk (and less upside) than common stock. Moreover, the price of preferred stock is primarily responsive to changes in interest rates (i.e., like a bond). See related article here, Wall Street Journal.

Jumbo Mortgages And Securitization, Steven D. Dolvin

All Chapters

After a home buyer secures a loan from a bank (i.e., a mortgage), the bank often securitizes the loans, which means they package them for sale to investors. This process is much easier if the loans are backed by Fannie and Freddie, the government sponsored mortgage agencies. Fannie and Freddie, however, will only back loans below certain values -- the so-called jumbo loans. This amount has generally been capped at $417,000 (although higher in certain high-cost areas). Regulators plan to lower these caps, which means jumbo loans may be harder to come by since it will be more difficult to …

Expected Market Returns And Political Factors Using Gmm, Ian J. Wright, Dr. Keith Vorkink

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Investors, economists and financial analysts are constantly seeking to develop models that may help them anticipate 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.

Competition In Hong Kong’S Banking Industry, Lai Yee Chu, Yue Cui, Nan Ye, Yuelin Yan

Lingnan Journal of Banking, Finance and Economics

This paper tests the competition structure of Hong Kong’s banking industry using the Panzar-Rosse approach and a panel dataset of the largest 20 banks in Hong Kong from 1998 to 2011. The estimation results showed that the competitive pressures were equal across time and across the different sizes of the banks in Hong Kong’s banking industry. Competitive pressures may heighten in the near future as banks will seek to gain competitive edge and they can do so through mergers and acquisitions. Regulations are also slowly being relaxed after the financial crisis in order to boost the economy and more advances …

Assess The Crisis Management Effort Following The Outbreak Of The Subprime Crisis, Yuchen Luo

Lingnan Journal of Banking, Finance and Economics

In this paper, I employ a linear regression model to examine the effectiveness of four microeconomic variables, namely government debt, GDP growth rate, household consumption growth rate and government spending growth rate, in stimulating economic growth. In order to test the effectiveness of expansionary fiscal policy in different macro-environments, countries were first partitioned into low and high government debt categories. In addition, raw dataset was partitioned into two time periods, respectively, representing normal macroeconomic years and recession years. My results suggest that countercyclical government spending has been an effective stimulation tool but its effect was more significant in countries of …

Can The Euro Rival The United States Dollar And Become The World Currency?, Kar Wai Man, Feissal Thomas Germais Mombo Paraga Apengue, Weixin Zhang, Yiqing Tu, Yuan Yuan

Lingnan Journal of Banking, Finance and Economics

Due to the outstanding performance of the Euro since its advent, the public may wonder whether the Euro would, one day, replace the US dollar (USD) which has all along been a force to be reckoned with all around the world. By tracing the chain of contributions the USD (the United States of America) and the Euro (European Union) have made to the world economy in the past and at present, we hope to arrive at some conclusions. However, the paper will give primacy to predicting the future trends for them separately.

Democracy And Economic Growth: A Perspective Of Cooperation, Menghan Yang, Li Zhang

Lingnan Journal of Banking, Finance and Economics

Does democracy cause higher economic growth? We build a model taking culture and interpersonal cooperation into account and find that democracy increases economic productivity through giving people more equal rights, which allows people to build a larger interpersonal network so that they can reduce investment risk and employ high-productivity (high-risk) methods in production.

Does Okun’S Law Still Hold Today?, Michael Jeffrey White, Lai Yee Chu

Lingnan Journal of Banking, Finance and Economics

Arthur Okun claimed that when a country’s unemployment rate fell, the GDP expanded. This paper investigates the claim of Arthur Okun and the effect of unemployment rates and GDP of a country on each other. Data from three countries, namely, USA, Japan, and France, were tested to see if there was a causal link between the two variables. It was found that the proposed law of Arthur Okun did not hold. In the USA, there was a two way causality link but different directions of effect. France and Japan did not have a causal link between the two variables.

Impact Of Change In Exchange Rate On Foreign Direct Investment: Evidence From China, Weifeng Jin, Qing Zang

Lingnan Journal of Banking, Finance and Economics

Based on the monthly data of foreign direct investment (FDI) in China and the index of real effective exchange rate (REER) of RMB during Jan 1997 to Sep 2012, we develop a statistical model in this paper to test the impact of changes in exchange rate in the host country on FDI, with reference to international and domestic research. According to the results of the empirical test, the appreciation of RMB promotes FDI after the reforms in the exchange rate regime in 2005 and this phenomenon is a result from the change in the type of FDI into China in …

Quadrophobia, Analyst Recommendations, And Financial Reporting System, Eugene Groff, Stefan Vladan Blagojevic, Taras Koshylovskyi, Haigang Zhou

Undergraduate Research Posters 2013

“Quadrophobia” is a relatively novel term that corresponds to a type of ‘fear’ or ‘misrepresentation’ that can manifest itself during the process by which companies report their earnings per share (EPS) values to the public. This study sought to conduct an in-depth examination into the process by which company's reported their respective EPS amounts, in order to determine the degree to which they manipulate the fourth number after the decimal place to bolster their perceived value. Our research focused on analyzing the actual v. reported EPS data (via Worldscope) of various companies being trading on different exchanges throughout the world, …

Modeling The Skewness Of Stock Return Distributions Using A Bayesian Framework, Ian J. Wright, Dr. Keith P. Vorkink

Journal of Undergraduate Research

In order to make optimal portfolio choices, individuals, firms and portfolio managers are interested in the probabilities attached to their receiving various returns in the stock market. These probabilities of returns on securities are described by statistical functions called return distributions. However, much uncertainty concerning such return distributions exists and over the years many models have been created that attempt to predict the mean and variance of return distributions, and recently some have even been put forth that attempt to predict the skewness of such distributions. The skewness of return distributions is of import to investors in particular because the …

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.