Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

From Bit Valley To Bitcoin: The Nasdaq Odyssey, Mark Lennon, Daniel Folkinshteyn

Rohrer College of Business Departmental Research

Over the past 15 years, NASDAQ, the world’s first all-electronic stock exchange, has actively engaged in efforts to serve the global digital economy by expanding its reach beyond its original domestic U.S. market. They have attempted to create a global 24/7 trading platform, to serve customers in the U.S., Japan, and Europe. These efforts have met with varying degrees of success. More recently, the renamed NASDAQ OMX Group has been experimenting with the disruptive fintech (financial technology) Bitcoin and its underlying technology blockchain to develop robust trading solutions, which drastically reduce transaction and record keeping costs. In this paper we …

Base Erosion And Profit Shifting: Options, Opportunities And Alternatives, James Mohs, Martin Goldberg, David Palacio Buitrago

Finance Faculty Publications

Base erosion and profit shifting is generally defined as tax strategies that serve to exploit gaps or inconsistencies in global tax systems that allow an enterprise to shift profits to lower tax jurisdictions. This can be accomplished by either shifting income to lower tax jurisdiction or shifting deductible expenses to higher tax jurisdictions. Historically, these shifting strategies have been handled on a country by country basis with no centralized framework. In 2015 the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development proposed modifications through its Base Erosion and Profit Shifting project that if adopted by the member countries, would reverse the adverse …

The Macro Behind Microfinance: Cambodia's Financial Inclusion Success Story, Jonathan Chang

Social Space

Financial inclusion refers to the delivery of affordable financial services to disadvantaged and low-income segments of society. However, as it also involves striking a fine balance between managing businesses’ credit risks and improving customers’ access to credit, different countries have made varied progress in their financial inclusion efforts. To date, across both developed and developing nations, SMEs and individuals still struggle in the face of limited access to adequate financing. Yet there is one country that has made considerable strides in this area: judging from the tremendous success of its microfinance sector, Cambodia seems to have found the sweet spot …

Scaling Impact Investing Through Innovative Finance: A Focus On Women's Livelihoods, Durreen Shahnaz

Social Space

I embarked on a journey from the first steps of my career to utilise finance to do good for the world. This journey has now turned into a global movement that is taking the world by a storm, known as impact investing or social finance.

How Hedge Funds Beat The Market, Singapore Management University

Research@SMU: Connecting the Dots

From epic tales spun around investment legends Ray Dalio and George Soros, to the secretive, high-octane world of Wall Street, the hedge fund has attained a worldwide notoriety for being an opaque, unwieldy beast. Professor Melvyn Teo studies what makes them tick.

See the papers:

• The geography of hedge funds
• The liquidity risk of liquid hedge funds; The liquidity risk of liquid hedge funds
• Limited attention, marital events and hedge funds

Stock Loan Lotteries And Individual Investment Performance, Jordan Moore

Rohrer College of Business Departmental Research

Individual investors trade excessively, sell winners too soon, and overweight stocks with lottery features and low expected returns. This paper models a financial innovation to address these biases and improve individual investor performance. Individual investors pledge shares of stock to an exchange for multiple periods and face a steep penalty for redeeming shares early. The exchange lends the shares to institutions and holds a lottery with the lending fees. I extend the Barberis and Xiong (2009) discrete-time model of realization utility to include stock loan lotteries. Investors with cumulative prospect theory preferences are reluctant to forgo trading opportunities for fixed …

The Paradoxes Of Risk Management In The Banking Sector, Chu Yeong Lim, Margaret Woods, Christopher Humphrey, Jean Lin Seow

Research Collection School of Accountancy

This paper uses empirical evidence to examine the operational dynamics and paradoxical nature of risk management systems in the banking sector. It demonstrates how a core paradox of market versus regulatory demands and an accompanying variety of performance, learning and belonging paradoxes underlie evident tensions in the interaction between front and back office staff in banks. Organisational responses to such paradoxes are found to range from passive to proactive, reflecting differing organisational, departmental and individual risk culture(s), and performance management systems. Nonetheless, a common feature of regulatory initiatives designed to secure a more structurally independent risk management function is that …

Sentiment And Stock Returns: Anticipating A Major Sporting Event, Brian C. Payne, Jiri Tresl, Geoffrey C. Friesen

Department of Finance: Faculty Publications

This study documents the effect of the Super Bowl on the stock returns of firms that are geographically associated with the competing teams. We find significant upward return drift in the 9 trading days leading up to the Super Bowl, a pattern consistent with investors trading in anticipation of the game itself. The ‘‘anticipatory behavior’’ among investors leads to widespread pregame returns, which is not documented in prior studies. These pre-event abnormal returns are positive and statistically and economically significant for all firms, and the size of pre-event returns varies according to each team’s favored status. In addition, firms associated …

The Archway Investment Fund Quarterly Report, First Quarter 2017, Bryant University, Archway Investment Fund

Archway Investment Fund

No abstract provided.

A Leveraged Buyout Of Paychex, Inc., Devon Zielanzy

The University Honors Program

A leveraged buyout is the acquisition of a company funded primarily through debt, typically 60% to 70% of the price, while a financial sponsor provides the remaining amount of funding. A public company is acquired, then made private, and finally sold after a period of time for a profit. During the time that the company is held private, cash flows of the firm are used to repay the debt taken on to acquire it and actions are taken to improve the business and performance of the firm (Rosenbaum 161-162).

Banking On It: Investment Banks As The Next Step For Impact Investing, Mitchell Laferriere

Social Space

For their size, investment banks have comparatively little to do with the rising practice of impact investing: They make up only nine per cent of all the assets under management (AUM) in the impact investment industry. That totals about US$1 trillion in investments in an US$11 trillion market.

Sofi 101: Understanding Social Finance, Christian Petroske, Florian Parzhuber, Haneol Jeong, John Kinsella, Maaya Murakami, Mitchell Laferriere, Remi Cordelle

Social Space

What is social finance? Rachel Kalbfleisch of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) defines it as a collection of approaches to managing money that create value for society or the environment, often while producing a financial return,1 while the MaRS Centre for Impact Investing calls it “an approach to managing money to solve societal challenges”.2 In other words, social finance is a movement that covers various ways of using finance—via socially responsible investments, micro-loans, community investments, and so on—to achieve a social or environmental impact. Who is involved in this process? While charities, socially driven businesses and governments all work …

Can Investors Benefit From Using Morningstar's Stewardship Grades?, Scott B. Moore, Gary E. Porter

2017 Faculty Bibliography

Interest in governance led Morningstar to develop a summary measure for mutual fund governance. In contrast to previous work in this area, we focus on whether and how individual investors can use the Stewardship Grade Overall to improve mutual fund selection. We find that regardless of fee structure, top overall governance grade funds impose lower costs on investors regardless of fund investment style. We also find some evidence that choosing funds with the highest stewardship grade may earn positive risk adjusted returns. Stewardship Grade overall may therefore help less sophisticated investors identify better-performing mutual funds.

Ua25/2 Memoranda, Wku Human Resources

WKU Administration Documents

Memoranda issued by WKU Human Resources to faculty & staff via email.

• Personnel Actions Approval Procedures
• Governor's Proposal for Public Pension Reform
• Keeping the Promise Highlights
• Keeping the Promise KERS-NH/CERS-NH
• Keeping the Promise KTRS
• Keeping the Promise KERS HAZ. / CERS HAZ. / SPRS
• Keeping the Promise - Legislative Retirement
• Keeping the Promise - Judicial Retirement
• Keeping the Promise - Additional Reforms

Quran & Capitalism: The Compliance Of Income Share Agreements With Shari'ah, Kamil Fadel

Honors Program Theses

Income share agreements (ISAs) are a necessary option to finance higher educations. ISAs eschew fixed payments for the flexibility of income based repayments between a student and an investor. ISA contracts stipulate that, in return for educational financing, a student promises a percentage of their future income for an agreed upon time frame. Should the student not possess sufficient income, their obligations are $0.00. Among the fastest growing financial sectors is Islamic financing. Islamic finance abhors gambling, deception, and usury and upholds the public good as its ultimate aim. As Islamic finance grows globally, an opportunity to offer shari’ah compliant …

Succession; A Business Strategy, Jan Miller, Department Of Primary Industries And Regional Development, Western Australia

Farm Systems and Economics published reports

Plan, Prepare, Prosper - workshop

This document is part of the Plan, Prepare, Prosper program that was developed under the Pilot of Drought Reform Measures ('the pilot'), a joint initiative between the Australian Government and the Western Australian Government. The program aims to support farmers and rural communities to prepare for drought, climate variability and other challenges.

The Succession planning: A business strategy workshop will help participants to begin and maintain the succession planning process.

This workshop will guide you through the process of exploring, planning and enacting succession planning.

Please use this manual as a checklist to help you …

Strategies To Reduce Voluntary Employee Turnover In Small Retail Businesses In Jamaica, Georgia Justus

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Voluntary employee turnover destabilizes small retail businesses and is a costly business problem for small retail business owners. Some small retail businesses experience voluntary employee turnover of up to 50% annually. Guided by Herzberg's 2-factor theory, the purpose of this multiple case study was to explore successful strategies used to reduce voluntary employee turnover. The target population consisted of 3 small retail business owners in Kingston, Jamaica. Data were collected from semistructured interviews and member checking, and human resource (HR) manuals containing HR policies and procedures. Data were analyzed into emerging themes using Yin's 5-step method. Based on the analysis …

Factors Predicting Profitability Of Enterprises Funded By Microfinance Institutions In Burkina Faso, Fulgence Kabore

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

In sub-Saharan Africa, only 13% of new businesses show profitability and survive beyond start-up. Such a low rate of success has an adverse impact on the region economy as small and medium enterprises comprise 90% of African businesses. Understanding the cause of business failure can help existing and new entrepreneurs to focus on factors that may help to overcome barriers to business growth and increase entrepreneurs' chances of success. The purpose of the correlation study was to examine the relationship between business ownership characteristics, resources and professional management, timing, and profitability. The resource-based theory served as the theoretical lens for …

Impact Of Financial Reporting Frameworks On The Quality Of Not-For-Profit Financial Reports, Jobra Mulumba Kisaku

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Even when clean audit reports are issued for not-for-profit organizations (NFPOs), misuse of donor resources may continue for years without detection by financial statement users. Previous research has established creative accounting, haphazard reporting, and fraud among NFPOs. As a result, aid has been reduced and some projects have been suspended. With Uganda as the study area, the key research question was the following: What is the impact of financial reporting frameworks on the quality of financial reports in Uganda, controlling for class of external auditors? The purpose of this quantitative, causal-comparative study was to establish whether reporting frameworks used by …

The Relationship Between Financial Performance, Firm Size, Leverage And Corporate Social Responsibility, Fraser T. Nega

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Approximately $25.2 trillion in total assets under management in the United States is involved in some strategy of socially responsible and sustainable investing. Grounded in the stakeholder theory, the purpose of this correlational study was to examine the relationships between financial performance, firm size, leverage, and corporate social responsibility. A random sample included 119 large companies located in the United States from the population of companies listed in the Russell 100 index. The data were collected via Bloomberg Terminal. Multiple linear regression analysis was used to predict Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) activity scores. The 3 predictor variables accounted for …

Marital Status Of Executives And Company Performance, Ilona Day

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This research paper explores differences in company performance levels, as measured by selected company fundamentals and annual return, with regard to the marital status of top executives, specifically the chief executive officer and the chief financial officer. It examines whether the differences in firm performance are determined by the marital status of the respective business executive. Groups of never married, married, and divorced executives are compared against each other to establish if and how the company performance changes between these groups. Summary statistics of the examined variables in conjunction with the results of the simple and multiple regression analyses indicate …

Too Big To Fool: Moral Hazard, Bailouts, And Corporate Responsibility, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

Domestic and international regulatory efforts to prevent another financial crisis have been converging on the idea of trying to end the problem of “too big to fail”—that systemically important financial firms take excessive risks because they profit from success and are (or at least, expect to be) bailed out by government money to avoid failure. The legal solutions being advanced to control this morally hazardous behavior tend, however, to be inefficient, ineffective, or even dangerous—such as breaking up firms and limiting their size, which can reduce economies of scale and scope; or restricting central bank authority to bail out failing …

Financial Analysis With Artificial Neural Networks Short-Term Stock Market Forecasting, Andrew Linzie

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Excerpt from Introduction

Seldom reward is absent from risk, and stock markets are a prime example. Stock markets across the world are viewed as profitable and risky at the same time. Companies have made a business out of forecasting these markets. Quantitative analysis companies use mathematicians, financial analysts, and computer scientists to compete in the stock market. The old days of floor trading have progressed towards high-frequency trading with supercomputers housed within the exchange. For example, the New York Stock exchange has created regulations for these companies so that there’s competitive equality. The computer’s power, length of cable to the …

Hedge Fund Boards And The Market For Independent Directors, Christopher P. Clifford, Jesse A. Ellis, William C. Gerken

Institute for the Study of Free Enterprise Working Papers

We provide the first examination of hedge fund boards and their directors. The majority of directorships are held by extremely busy independent directors. These directors are sought after by funds because they have more reputational capital at stake, making them independent and credible monitors whose presence can certify fund quality to investors. Busy independent directors are more likely to be hired by high quality funds, and their departure from the board is associated with investor withdrawals. Moreover, funds with busy independent directors are less likely to commit fraud, abuse discretionary liquidity restrictions, or engage in performance-based risk shifting.

Performance Analysis Of Equity Index Universal Life Insurance, Zhixin Wu, Lei Liang

Mathematics Faculty Publications

Equity Index Universal Life (EIUL) is a variation of whole life insurance which carries a death benefit component and a cash value component. The popularity of EIUL has been growing quickly in recent years because of its promised downside protection and upside potential. However, its long-term viability can’t be directly verified since no public data of EIUL is available to check its historical performance. This paper models the stock market return, interest rate and other market variables simultaneously to simulate the potential future returns of EIUL under different scenarios. Research in the literature often only models the stock market return …

News And Social Media Emotions In The Commodity Market, Jiancheng Shen, Mohammad Najand, Feng Dong, Wu He

Finance Faculty Publications

Purpose--Emotion plays a significant role in both institutional and individual investors' decision-making process. Emotions affect the perception of risk and the assessment of monetary value. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence available that addresses how investors' emotions affect commodity market returns. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether media-based emotions can be used to predict future commodity returns.

Design/methodology/approach--The authors examine the short-term predictive power of media-based emotion indices on the following five days' commodity returns. The research adopts a proprietary data set of commodity-specific market emotions, which is computed based on a comprehensive …

International Diversification Into Emerging Equity Markets: Perspective Of U.S. Investors, Ki C. Han, Sukhun Lee, David Y. Suk, Hyun Mo Sung

School of Business: Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this study, we examine whether investing in emerging markets is indeed beneficial to U. S. investors. The results we find in this study are not so encouraging for U. S. investors. First, the change in currency exchange rate weakens the benefit of overseas investment to U. S. investors. Second, the correlations between the U. S. market and the emerging markets have been steadily rising during the sample period. Third, most of these emerging equity markets scored lower Sharpe Ratios than the U. S. equity market. Fourth, we find that the emerging market and its currency market move in the …

Banking On It: Investment Banks As The Next Step For Impact Investing, Mitchell Laferriere

Social Space

For their size, investment banks have comparatively little to do with the rising practice of impact investing: They make up only nine per cent of all the assets under management (AUM) in the impact investment industry. That totals about US$1 trillion in investments in an US$11 trillion market.

Stock Returns And Industrial Production: A Sectoral Analysis, Griffin Lazarus

CMC Senior Theses

This paper analyzes the relationship between stock returns and future industrial production growth rates from 1926-1940. It replicates the work of Fama (1990) and Schwert (1990) with the intent to see if the relationship continues to hold using sector data. Furthermore, this paper focuses on the 1926-1940 sample period to explore how the relationship is affected by the stock market crash of 1929. It is expected that the relation will be weak for the industry sectors experiencing strong growth prior to the crash. The results indicate that the relationship between stock returns and future industrial production growth rates persists on …

Are Shorts Equally Informed? A Global Perspective, Ekkehart Boehmer, Zsuzsa R. Huszar, Yanchu Wang, Xiaoyan Wang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Short selling predicts future stock returns globally. We use 11 short-sale measures to examine the informativeness of short sales in 38 countries for the July 2006 to December 2014 period. We find that different short-sale measures display different return predictability. The days-to-cover ratio and loan supply measures have the most robust predictive power in the global capital market. We also document significant cross-country differences in the predictive power of the short selling measures and find that return predictability is stronger in countries with mild forms of short-sale restrictions, better market quality, and more developed markets.