Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

Determining The Credit Risk Factors In Accessing Debt Financing For Entrepreneurial Activities, Junette A. Perez, Denmark C. Alarcon, Mar Andriel S. Umali

DLSU Business & Economics Review

Access to debt financing can be explained by the capability to pay of the borrower. The idea is that the better the capability to pay of a borrower, the wider his option to access debt financing and secure bank capital. As a derivative function of the individual and business characteristics of the borrower, the credit risk factors among others include housing type, education, share of income, total sales and total expenses, business and unemployment and economic skills. Using the Community Based Monitoring(CBMS) data, a three stage methodology has been implemented. Regression results show that having business capital is positively affected …

Togolese Informal Sector Workers’ Willingness To Pay For Access To Social Protection, Esso-Hanam Atake, Akoété Ega Agbodji

DLSU Business & Economics Review

In Togo, the informal sector accounts for 84% of the workforce with an annual growth rate of 5%. Despite the importance of the informal sector workers in the Togolese productive activity, they do not benefit from social protection. To address this situation, Act No. 2011-006 was adopted by the Togolese National Assembly in 2011 to provide social security to informal sector workers. However, this was not applied, which means they are still not covered by social protection. This paper seeks to estimate the willingness-to-pay (WTP) of informal workers to have access to social protection services offered by National Social Security …

Making Social Health Insurance And Micro-Savings Programs Work For The Informal Sector In The Philippines, Mitzie P. Conchada, Marites M. Tiongco

DLSU Business & Economics Review

In the Angelo King Institute annual report of Monitoring the Philippine Economy, the Philippines maintained its growth momentum in 2014, besting other Asian economies. Given this backdrop, it is interesting to find out whether various sectors have benefited from this growth, particularly the informal sector which includes bulk of the poor who are self-employed and are mostly engaged in the services sector. The intention of this study is aimed to determine the effect of social protection, particularly social health insurance program (known as PhilHealth Insurance) and the micro-savings scheme (known as AlkanSSSya) on informal sector especially those who are poor …

The Economics Of Brand And Marketing Activities, Mehir Baidya, Bipasha Maity, Kamal Ghose

DLSU Business & Economics Review

Understanding the contributions of brand and marketing activities to sales is vital to make smart decisions. This study attempts to investigate this issue empirically. Data were gathered from two brands in frequently purchase packaged goods category. Two double-log regression models were fitted to data. We find that brand and marketing activities contribute to sales significantly. Managers may find our findings useful to allocate fund between short-term and long-term marketing actions. As far as our knowledge is concerned, this constitutes the first empirical work of economics of branding for regional brands in India.

Trans-Pacific Partnership And Political Motivations: Interpretive Work Based On Analyses Of The Chinese State Media, Tai Wei Lim

DLSU Business & Economics Review

This writing is about studying political motivations for and against the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) through interpretive work based on analyses of Chinese state media articles. My criteria for article selection centers on the use of Google index search for such articles drawn from three newspapers: China Daily, People’s Daily, and Global Times. From receiving the call for paper by this journal on 6 January 2016 to the submission deadline for the call for paper on 15 April 2016, a period of about three months, I downloaded articles from these three dailies for analysis. The motivation for the selection of these …

Forecasting The Term Structure Of Philippine Interest Rates Using The Dynamic Nelson-Siegel Model, Elvira P. De Lara-Tuprio, Ramil T. Bataller, Allen Dominique D. Torres, Emmanuel A. Cabral, Proceso L. Fernandez Jr.

DLSU Business & Economics Review

The three-factor Nelson-Siegel model is a widely used model for forecasting the term structure of interest rates. Several extensions have recently been proposed. Even for the original model, different methods of treating the parameters have been shown. Ultimately, what works best depends on the data used to estimate the parameters. In this paper, the original three-factor model with fixed shape parameter was applied to forecast the term structure using market data from the Philippines. Instead of giving a pre-determined model for the latent factors, the best time series model for them was searched using standard statistical tools. Based on the …

Hedging And Pricing Rent Risk With Search Frictions, Briana Chang, Hyunsoo Choi, Harrison Hong, Jeffrey Kubik

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The desire of risk-averse households to hedge rent risk is thought to increase home ownership and prices. While evidence for the ownership implication is compelling, support for the price effect is mixed. We show that an important reason is search frictions. Rent risk reduces outside options, leading to less-picky buyers and worse home/buyer matches. This attenuates the rise in the price-to-rent ratio that would otherwise occur without frictions. Consistent with our model, a house remains on the market for fewer days when rent risk is higher. Accounting for frictions significantly increases the effect of rent risk on home prices.

Blockholder Characteristics And Earnings Quality, Aslihan G. Korkmaz, Qingzhong Ma, Haigang Zhou

Business Faculty Publications

This study focuses on the impact of blockholder characteristics on earnings quality. Most of the studies in
literature make the implicit assumption that blockholders are a homogeneous group. This study is one of
few studies that acknowledges the heterogeneity of blockholders and attempts to understand the
unexplained proportion of blockholder heterogeneity. Earnings quality is calculated using the modified
Dechow and Dichev (2002) model with fixed effects (FDD model) by Lee and Masulis (2009), and it is
regressed on various blockholder characteristics. The results show that earnings quality is lower for
firms with market-driven and multilateral blockholders.

Identification Of Key Drivers For Municipal Utility Performance, Jasmin Alsaied

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

This report explores the various performance indicators for municipal electric utilities and the greatest impact financial investments can make for improving these indicators. A literature search provided key detail about performing an analysis that would prove useful to utilities. The analysis identifies key performance indicators that allowed for the most prudent of investments. Data mining techniques and statistical analyses were performed on data sets concerning the 51 North Carolina municipal electric utilities to identify several key ratios and performance indicators that have the greatest impact on cost of service, system reliability, and customer satisfaction. Statistical analyses were used to determine …

Committee Agendas, Wku Board Of Regents

Board of Regents Documents

Committee agendas for Academic Affairs and the Finance & Budget Committees.

Fossil Fuel Asset Risk Analysis: Clark University Endowment, Travis A. Dodge, B. Maiwand Akbari

Student Works

The environmental and social risks of climate change are well known and perhaps inevitable. The economic and financial risks are less so. The many financial risks associated with climate change embedded in endowment portfolio fossil fuel holdings are leading many institutional stakeholders to enter into dialogue and take action. Divestment is emerging as an effective strategy for limiting portfolio exposure and tackling climate change itself.

Our team’s goals were to assess whether the Clark University endowment portfolio faces any of these risks and evaluate the impacts on asset values. Our findings show that the Clark endowment does face these same …

P/E Ratios And Value Investor Attention, Jordan Moore

Rohrer College of Business Departmental Research

Price-earnings (P/E) ratios, the most popular value proxy, are widely reported using the last four quarters of earnings. Corresponding earnings yields (4QEP) have significantly greater return predictability than lagged earnings yields or current book-to-market ratios. The weekly pattern in returns is consistent with individual investor trading activity. The return predictability is robust to fundamentals, price momentum, earnings momentum, volume, and liquidity. 4QEP relates positively to volume and liquidity and negatively to idiosyncratic volatility. Financial data providers only report P/E ratios for stocks with positive earnings; 4QEP only predicts returns, volume, and liquidity for these stocks.

The Impact Of Geographic And Cultural Dispersion On Information Opacity, George D. Cashman, David M. Harrison, Michael J. Seiler, Hainan Sheng

Finance Faculty Research and Publications

This paper investigates the influences of intrafirm geographic and cultural dispersion, the distance between the location of a firm’s investments and its headquarters, on the firm’s information environment. Specifically, using a sample of publicly traded real estate companies across the Asia-Pacific region, we examine how intrafirm geographic and cultural distance impacts a firm’s capital acquisition costs. As a consequence of both the heavily regulated operating environment faced by these firms, as well as the capital intensive nature of this industry, funding costs should be of pronounced importance to firms within this sector. Consistent with this paradigm, we find that firms …

Essays On Capital Structure And Public Debt Markets, Viktoriya Staneva

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of three chapters that examine capital structure determinants as well as the evolution of credit rating standards in the market for public debt.

Chapter 1 This chapter shows that firm fixed effects in panel leverage regressions act as a noisy proxy for managerial effects that drive persistence in leverage. Firms that do not change their CEO for prolonged periods of time are more likely to keep debt ratios within a narrow bandwidth and to display persistent differences in their time-series averages for up to 20 years. A CEO turnover is associated with considerable modifications to the financing …

Essays On Investor Sentiment In Asset Pricing, Liya Chu

Dissertations and Theses Collection

The dissertation addresses three topics on investor sentiment in asset pricing.

The first essay investigates the impact of market sentiment on the recent debate on equity premium forecasting. Particularly, market sentiment may break the link between fundamental economic predictors and equity premium. We find that economic predictors tend to lose their power and various remedies proposed in recent studies, such as non-negativity constraints, no longer work during high sentiment periods. In contrast, economic predictors actually do have strong performances even without using any such remedies, as long as the sentiment stays low enough so as not to distort the link. …

Essays In Corporate Cash Holdings, Chenxi Liu

Dissertations and Theses Collection

This dissertation addresses three topics in corporate cash holdings. The first paper provides a new determinant of cash holdings by examining the impact of earnings transparency on corporate cash holdings. Motivated by Barth et al. (2013), who show that firms with less earnings transparency tend to have higher cost of equity, this paper shows that the cross-section differences in earnings transparency cause variations in firm cash holdings because firms with less earnings transparency have more incentives to hold cash in order to avoid costly external financing. Using data of US firms from 1980 to 2013, it is found that earnings …

Financial Reporting And The Accounting Expectations Gap, James Mohs

Finance Faculty Publications

The overall goal of financial reporting is to provide high quality financial information regarding reporting entities that is useful for informed decision making. Considering most organizations have multiple groups of stakeholders which often have differing and competing informational needs, as well as expectations and desired outcomes, the accounting expectations gap has become a topic of current debate in many business circles. Historically, the accounting expectations gap has centered around the role of the auditor and audit responsibility. The financial accounting expectations gap encompasses what the preparers of the statements and auditors believe they should contain and includes what stakeholders believe …

Industry Integration And Stock Price Synchronicity, Hao Cheng, Kian Guan Lim, Tien Foo Sing, Long Wang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper provides an alternative explanation of the negative relationship between price synchronicity and proprietary right protection that are uncorrelated to the information hypothesis. Using empirical data for 40 countries, we show that stock market volatility and firm size have significant impact on stock price synchronicity. We find significant correlations of international R2 disparity with industry structure integrations. The derived industry integration indices that capture industry correlations significantly explain cross-sectional and temporal variations in price synchronicity. The results imply that tighter industry integration leads to higher R2, and also explain away the property rights factor found in the information hypothesis.

Competing With Free: An Analysis Of The Effects Of Tennessee Promise On Freshman Enrollment In Four-Year Colleges And Universities, Vicki Clark

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

In 2014, Tennessee’s governor, Bill Haslam, introduced Tennessee Promise - legislation that enabled Tennessee high school and home school graduates to attend two years of tuition-free higher education at qualifying institutions. In the fall of 2015, Tennessee’s four-year colleges and universities experienced a significant decline in freshman enrollment. This quantitative descriptive study uses the theories of human capital, social capital, and marketing service theory to examine the impact of free tuition on the college choice. Four hundred twelve Tennessee Promise students answered survey questions, demonstrating the impact of Tennessee Promise funds on their decision to attend college and on the …

Shades Of Darkness: A Pecking Order Of Trading Venues, Albert J. Menkveld, Bart Zhou Yueshen, Haoxiang Zhu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We characterize the dynamic fragmentation of U.S. equity markets using a unique data set that disaggregates dark transactions by venue types. The "pecking order" hypothesis of trading venues states that investors "sort" various venue types, putting low-cost-low-immediacy venues on top and high-cost-high-immediacy venues at the bottom. Hence, midpoint dark pools on top, non-midpoint dark pools in the middle, and lit markets at the bottom. As predicted, following VIX shocks, macroeconomic news, and firms' earnings surprises, changes in venue market shares become progressively more positive (or less negative) down the pecking order. We further document heterogeneity across dark venue types and …

Short Interest, Returns, And Unfavorable Fundamental Information, Ferhat Akbas, Ekkehart Boehmer, Bilal Erturk, Sorin Sorescu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Several months before information becomes public, the level of short interest contains value-relevant information about publicly traded corporations. Short interest predicts future bad news, negative earnings surprises, and downward revisions in analyst earnings forecasts. This informational content is stronger for stocks that are harder to short. We also find that nearly half of the well-known cross-sectional relation between short interest and future stock returns is related to future changes in firms’ value-relevant information. Our results suggest that short interest predicts future returns, in part, due to short sellers’ ability to uncover unfavorable information about firms.

Liquidity In A Market For Unique Assets: Specified Pool And To-Be-Announced Trading In The Mortgage-Backed Securities Market, Pengjie Gao, Paul Schultz, Zhaogang Song

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS) trade simultaneously in a market for specified pools (SPs) and in the to-be-announced (TBA) forward market. TBA trading creates liquidity by allowing thousands of different MBS to be traded in a handful of TBA contracts. SPs that are eligible to be traded as TBAs have significantly lower trading costs than other SPs. We present evidence that TBA eligibility, in addition to characteristics of TBA-eligible SPs, lowers trading costs. We show that dealers hedge SP inventory with TBA trades, and they are more likely to prearrange trades in SPs that are difficult to hedge.

Effects Of Winning Percentage On Men’S Collegiate Basketball After Investments In Facilities, Matthew D. Frank

Purdue Polytechnic Directed Projects

Throughout studying the impacts of investments on facilities and its potential impacts on Men’s Basketball overall success within the conferences we were able to find some indicators that would suggest the financial investments do have an impact but we would need to study more teams to see a possible statistical significance. Although statistical significance was not found within the current study (.13 was found with an alpha set at .10) my suggestion and observations throughout this study show that facilities play a major role in the overall success of a program and spending will continue to take place as the …

Is Google Search Behavior Related To Volatility? Incorporating Google Trends Data Into A Garch Model For Equity Volatility, Timothy De Silva

Undergraduate Economic Review

Intuitively, one would expect that internet search volume would contain valuable information about investor sentiment for a company. With the development of new data sources, such as Google Trends, this relationship can be more easily and objectively examined. This paper seeks to examine the relationship between a company’s stock price volatility and its Google search volume. A small cross-section of twenty companies is considered, and the goal of this paper is to demonstrate the power of Google Trends data in hope of initiating further research. Using a conventional GARCH framework for financial market volatility, an economically and statistically significant contemporaneous …

A Dual-Role Analysis Of Game Form Misconception And Cognitive Bias In Financial And Economic Decision Making, Chinedum D. Nwadiora

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The endowment and the framing effect are widely examined cognitive biases. The experimental economics literature, using choice data gathered through an elicitation device, commonly finds evidence of these biases. Recent work by Cason & Plott (2014) shows that the interpretation of choice data as consistent with biases related non-standard preference theory could also be consistent with confusion or misconception of the game type used to elucidate preferences. I use the Cason and Plott card auction framework to analyze offers of buyers and sellers in an experimental setting with subjects from the University of New Orleans simulating 97 sellers and 90 …

Banking And Microfinance Performance: Market Power, Efficiency, Performance, Outreach And Sustainability Perspectives, Nazar S. Mustapha

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of two empirical papers that explore recent phenomena in Banking and Microfinance Performance. Chapter 1, “Market Power and Bank Performance in MENA Countries,” examines the determinants of market power in 12 Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), specifically within six Gulf Cooperation Countries and six non-Gulf countries. We examine the dynamics of bank competition in MENA countries, provide an up-to-date assessment of market power, investigate the factors impacting bank competition, and explore the evolution of market power during the financial crisis. Our results show an overall increase …

Essays On Financial Intermediation, Yong Kyu Gam

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

Chapter 1 investigates a regulatory spillover effect of the Basel III liquidity standard on the real economy through a series of difference-in-difference estimations. Since the Basel Committee’s official endorsement for the new liquidity regulation in December 2010, a bank exposed to high liquidity risk reduced its loan proportion significantly, making a negative real effect on its surrounding economy via a bank-lending-channel. The new regulation also induced a bank with a weak liquid balance sheet to raise its deposit rate aggressively, generating a liquidity problem in a nearby local bank through a deposit-competition-channel and ultimately curbing an expansion of the local …

Managing And Analyzing Cash Flow, Annetta M. Gibson

Faculty Publications

Presentation for SPD 2017 Business Professional Convention May 18, 2017

A Systems Approach To Revenue Fluctuation In Nonprofit Human Service Organizations, Joshua James Hunter

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Nonprofit Human Services Organizations (NPO) are normally considered to do all they can to work toward providing clients with optimal services (Bowman, 2011). What has not been considered is the possibility that NPOs sometimes allocate more revenue toward accumulating profit than toward generating services. This study used IRS 990 Forms of 150 private nonprofits from 2009 to 2010 to investigate whether NPOs did this at the peak of the recent recession, a time when there was a strong need for NPOs to increase their level of services. Results showed revenue increased 56%, services increased 1.4%, profit increased 43%, operating margin …

Business Plan: Peacock Financial Advising, Kevin Peacock

Undergraduate University Honors Capstones

This business plan presents a service-based business, Peacock Financial Advising, which provides fee-only financial advice. Targeting the deaf and signing community, Peacock Financial Advising will provide investment, budgetary, and tax planning advice to educate and provide tools for clients so that they can build a solid financial foundation.