Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

Rational Expectations Or Behaviorally Inefficient Markets, Arati Devendra Kale

Finance and Real Estate Dissertations - Archive

In this dissertation, I examine the rational investment hypothesis, postulated by classical theories, in mutual fund and portfolio management settings. My first two essays focus on mutual fund investors. I study whether mutual fund investors display racial or ethnic prejudices, which can be observed by mutual fund flows. I hand-collect data on characteristics of mutual fund managers in addition to their names and photographs. I use machine learning algorithms from computer science literature to calculate the probabilistic race from photographs and the probabilistic ethnicity from names. In my third essay, I construct a portfolio comprising of the small growth firms …

A Case Study On Whether A Business Should Own Or Lease Its Real Estate, Benjamin Cooper

Finance Undergraduate Honors Theses

Businesses are continually faced with many difficult decisions to make daily that can have a significant impact on their success. Whether it is if they should adopt a new accounting practice, work with a new supplier, or push into a new consumer sector, these decisions will affect their operations and long-term plans. One of these major decisions that a business has to make is whether they should own or lease their real estate. Depending on the size, type, and scope of a business this decision could be made differently but for certain companies there is definitely a correct answer. Buying …

Derivatives Use And Risk Taking: Evidence From Alternative Mutual Funds, Alyse Mcalpine

Financial Analyst

I provide new empirical evidence on the effect of derivatives usage on the risk and performance of a group of mutual funds mimicking hedge fund strategies, namely alternative mutual funds (AMFs). Using data on a sample of 914 AMFs from Morningstar during 2002-2017, I show that while the use of derivatives does impact the performance of AMFs, it significantly increases AMFs’ total and idiosyncratic volatilities, even after we control for various fund characteristics. This positive relation between the use of derivatives and the risk-taking of AMFs is particularly strong during the crisis period, and Bear Market, Long-Short Credit, Managed Futures, …

Cryptocurrencies: An Overview, Investment Investigation, Comparative Analysis, And Regulatory Proposals, Jacob Franzen

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

With cryptocurrencies moving out of obscurity and into the public eye, the initial purpose of this research paper is to provide the history of cryptocurrencies, to explain the complex workings in and around cryptocurrencies, investigate their investment potential, and to draw attention to their potential for misuse. To follow, the primary purpose is to create a platform on which to compare cryptocurrencies with more common mediums of exchange, analyze their current international regulatory climate, highlight their trends within influential nations, discuss their pending and future regulation, and provide personal proposals for additional regulation. Due to the complex nature of the …

Shareholder Coordination And Corporate Innovation, Ani Manakyan Mathers, Bin Wang, Xiaohong Wang

Finance Faculty Research and Publications

We show that greater shareholder coordination, as proxied by the geographic proximity between institutional investors, is positively related to corporate innovation outcomes. This relationship is driven by coordination among dedicated and independent institutions who have strong monitoring incentives and is more pronounced among firms with lower blockholder ownership and greater information asymmetry where there is greater benefit to monitoring. We propose that shareholder coordination promotes corporate innovation through a reduction in managerial agency problems. Overall, our results are consistent with the notion that greater shareholder coordination enables diffuse shareholders to monitor managers more effectively and enhances corporate innovation.

Shattering Glass Ceilings: Where Are All Of The Women In Finance?, Rebecca Schubach

Business and Economics Honors Papers

At a time when women are equally represented in professional fields such as medicine and academia, the finance industry is still facing a lack of gender diversity, most notability at the C-Suite level. Statistics on the paucity of women paint a bleak picture, despite the fact that women are awarded majority of undergraduate and graduate degrees in the United States, a reversal from just one generation ago. This begs the question, what is deterring women from a career in finance? Are compensation discrepancies at play? This paper seeks to examine if being a female truly penalizes a woman in regards …

Using Buy And Rent Discrepancies To Predict Real Estate Bubbles, Jonathan K. Niehaus

Honors Theses

The cost of housing is one of the biggest recurring expenses Americans face. Real estate is also one of the largest asset classes of investments today. The decision of whether or not it is the right time to purchase a piece of residential real estate can be difficult for the everyday person as well as professionals. With the recent downturn of 2008, many people are reminded that the price of houses can spiral upward, and if one bought at the wrong time, their house could lose a tremendous portion of its value. This study focuses on looking at different economic …

Analysis Of True Risk Lab’S Price Prediction Algorithm In Relation To Market Results, Chris F. Hua

Honors Theses

The concept of beating the stock market is one of the main goals of financial investors and analysts. However, seasoned analysts and investors cannot perfectly predict the movements within the stock market. Machine learning (ML) is one prediction method that has intrigued the financial industry as a means of accurately predicting the market. Though the current prediction algorithms do not grasp every change in the stock markets, the models do provide a means of looking towards stock trends as a means to hedge an investor's or fund's portfolio against market declines by looking at the artificial intelligence (AI) results. This …

Implementing Option Pricing Model, Zhao Ming

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

In this paper I replicate Clewlow and Strickland's control variates methods based on Greek letters method to test if it can improve the simulation efficiency. First, I use Black Scholes Merton formula for option pricing as a benchmark, to compare with the European call option price from Monte Carlo methods. Then I use Greek letters as control variates to reduce sample standard deviation and improve the efficiency of the Monte Carlo simulation. The whole process is programming in C++. C++ is a compiled language which can generate machine code from source code and provide a shorter running time. This paper …

Do Firms Adapt To Climate Change? Evidence From Establishment-Level Data, Frank Weikai Li, Yupeng Lin, Zuben Jin, Zilong Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper examines firms’ adaptation to long-term changes in climatic conditions. Using detailed information of establishments owned by U.S. public firms from 1990 to 2012, we show that higher abnormal temperatures over the previous five years in a county lead to a significant reduction in local employment and the number of establishments. Further tests suggest that the decline in employment and establishments is largely due to a decline in local consumer demand rather than lower labor productivity. We also find that firms more likely take adaptive actions when their managers are more likely to believe in, or are concerned about, …

Analyzing Competitive Balance In Professional Sport, Kevin Alwell

Honors Scholar Theses

In this paper we review several measures to statistically analyze competitive balance and report which leagues have a wider variance of performance amongst its competitors. Each league seeks to maintain high levels of parity, making matches and overall season more unpredictable and appealing to the general audience. Here we quantify competitive advantage across major sports leagues in numbers using several statistical methods in order for leagues to optimize their revenue.

Equity Crowdfunding In The United States: Evolution, Determinants And Performance, Kenny Ozuna

Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, equity crowdfunding has developed into an alternative form of early stage financing for startup firms. The main purpose of this dissertation is to understand the evolution, process and regulation of equity crowdfunding in the United States as well as assess the determinants of a successful campaign and whether this capital market lead to an enduring business.

The first essay examines the evolution, process and regulation surrounding equity crowdfunding. I establish a clear definition of crowdfunding and its restructuring of the music industry to establishing an alternative form of raising capital for nascent firms via equity crowdfunding. I …

The Strategic Disclosure Of Currency Headwinds And Tailwinds, Kevin Butler

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this study, I examine whether companies are more likely to disclose revenue growth adjusted to remove the effects of foreign currency fluctuations (constant-currency revenue growth rates) when currency fluctuations decrease revenue growth (i.e., there is a currency headwind) than when currency fluctuations increase revenue growth. Public companies increasingly cite non-GAAP performance metrics when announcing earnings. While regulators see value in non-GAAP reporting, they continue to express concern that it is carried out inconsistently and in a misleading manner. Because the disclosure of constant-currency revenue growth is discretionary, companies have an incentive to strategically disclose it only when it benefits …

Pmkt: Privacy-Preserving Multi-Party Knowledge Transfer For Financial Market Forecasting, Zhuoran Ma, Jianfeng Ma, Yinbin Miao, Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo, Ximeng Liu, Xiangyu Wang, Tengfei Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While decision-making task is critical in knowledge transfer, particularly from multi-source domains, existing knowledge transfer approaches are not generally designed to be privacy preserving. This has potential legal and financial implications, particularly in sensitive applications such as financial market forecasting. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a Privacy-preserving Multi-party Knowledge Transfer system (PMKT), based on decision trees, for financial market forecasting. Specifically, in PMKT, we leverage a cryptographic-based model sharing technique to securely outsource knowledge reflected in decision trees of multiple parties, and design a secure computation mechanism to facilitate privacy-preserving knowledge transfer. An encrypted user-submitted request from the target …

Three Essays On Financial Economics, Jiangyuan Li

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Disagreement measures are known to predict cross-sectional stock returns but fail to predict market returns. This paper proposes a partial least squares disagreement index by aggregating information across individual disagreement measures and shows that this index significantly predicts market returns both in- and out-ofsample. Consistent with the theory in Atmaz and Basak (2018), the disagreement index asymmetrically predicts market returns with greater power in high sentiment periods, is positively associated with investor expectations of market returns, predicts market returns through a cash flow channel, and can explain the positive volume-volatility relationship.

Fintech Regulations In The United States Compared To Regulations In Europe And Asia, Victoria Williams

Honors College Theses

Fintech, or financial technology, is an up and coming industry and yet at the same time has been around since the 1950s. In Europe and Asia, there has been a lot of innovation, and lawmakers have been forced to keep up with regulating the rapidly growing industry. However, the United States has not risen to the occasion of properly regulating this industry and can learn from countries in Europe and Asia on how to effectively regulate fintech. This essay explains generally what fintech is, why it must be properly regulated, how countries in Europe and Asia regulate it, and how …

Sloth Speed: Finance Classes Slow To Incorporate Important Research, Ellis Pristash

Honors College Theses

Traditional finance contains many models which misrepresent human behavior. In order to mathematicise the field and make it more like hard sciences, economics in the 20th century presupposed that people act “rationally.” In economics, rationality means adherence to the neoclassical model, which presents persons as utility maximizers. This presupposition was useful for certain applications but dominated the academic landscape. Later, the Chicago School of Economics built on the rationality premise, advocating less regulation in favor of the free market. The Efficient Markets Hypothesis was built on these same ideas and argued that markets have a wisdom that individuals do not. …

The Equifax Hack Revisited And Repurposed, Hal Berghel

Civil and Environmental Engineering and Construction Faculty Research

Reports on the recent indictments against Chinese hackers regarding Equifax.

J Mich Dent Assoc May 2020

The Journal of the Michigan Dental Association

Every month,The Journal of the Michigan Dental Association brings news, information, and features about Michigan dentistry to our state's oral health community and the MDA's 6,200+ members. No publication reaches more Michigan dentists!

In this issue, the reader will find the following original content:

• A cover story on Michigan Dentistry in the COVID-19 Pandemic
• A message from the MDA President
• “Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2: What Dental Professionals Need to Know” a feature on protecting the health of your patients and your dental team.
• “Keep the Lights On: Protecting the Health of Your Practice During the Economic Downturn” a …

The Minuses Of Plus Loans; Trends, Issues, And Opportunities For Parents Who Borrow For College, Ross A. Riskin

Doctoral Dissertations (DBA)

As college costs rise, students aren’t the only ones facing the financial burden of education-related debt. In this paper, parent borrowing through the PLUS loan system, which is a federal program that provides parents and graduate students with access to funding for higher education costs, is examined. The systemic issues present in the PLUS loan system along with the rise in overall borrowing suggest the need for improved policies to help increase borrower awareness and improve loan outcomes. This paper is unique in that it addresses parent PLUS loan borrowing at the school level in order to identify factors that …

Corporate Decision-Making In The Presence Of Political Uncertainty: The Case Of Corporate Cash Holdings, William B. Hankins, Anna-Leigh Stone, Chak Hung Jack Cheng, Ching-Wai (Jeremy) Chiu

Research, Publications & Creative Work

Using a quarterly panel of U.S. corporations over the period 1985 – 2014 we show that corporate managers respond to political uncertainty and economic policy uncertainty shocks in different ways. We proxy for political uncertainty using the Partisan Conflict Index and employ a prevalent empirical macroeconomic methodology to construct structural shocks that are orthogonal to shocks captured by the Economic Policy Uncertainty Index. Following a political uncertainty shock, corporations increase cash but do not adjust investment. Alternatively, following an economic policy uncertainty shock, firms appear to draw on cash and reduce capital spending to increase R&D spending.

Go Big With Economic Push To Fight Covid-19, David Fernandez

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Economic policymakers need to focus on taking bold and immediate action in order to tackle the pandemic crisis.

Semantic Understanding Of Smart Contracts: Executable Operational Semantics Of Solidity, Jiao Jiao, Shuanglong Kan, Shang Wei Lin, David Sanan, Yang Liu, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Bitcoin has been a popular research topic recently. Ethereum (ETH), a second generation of cryptocurrency, extends Bitcoin's design by offering a Turing-complete programming language called Solidity to develop smart contracts. Smart contracts allow creditable execution of contracts on EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) without third parties. Developing correct and secure smart contracts is challenging due to the decentralized computation nature of the blockchain. Buggy smart contracts may lead to huge financial loss. Furthermore, smart contracts are very hard, if not impossible, to patch once they are deployed. Thus, there is a recent surge of interest in analyzing and verifying smart contracts. …

How Streaming Services Changed The Way We Listen To And Pay For Music, Claire Carter

Honors Theses

This thesis seeks to explain how streaming services have changed the way we listen to and pay for music. Furthermore, this analysis examines the perspective of consumers and artists on streaming services. Most data is obtained from various academic journals and organizations involved in the music industry. The result of this research indicates that after the financial peak of the music industry in 1999, a decline in revenues was due to emerging technology, the illegal file sharing website Napster and piracy, the industry’s response to piracy, and digital downloads. As streaming services started to emerge the shift in revenues from …

An Examination Of How Environmental, Social, Governance (Esg) Investing Influences A Company's Stock Return, Sam Marty

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Projects

Using a random sample of 184 companies traded on the New York Stock Exchange in 2019, this paper investigates the impact of Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) investing on a company’s stock return. The results show that ESG investing has a positive and statistically significant impact on a company’s stock return. An increase in one ESG rating leads to an increase between 0.4% and 3.6% in the return of a company’s stock. Additionally, the results show that individual ESG factors are each statistically insignificant. This indicates that the three ESG factors need to be viewed together rather than individually. Lastly, the …

The Power Of Investing To Alleviate Poverty, Zachary Sicher

Senior Honors Theses

Hundreds of millions of people across the world are affected by extreme poverty each day. At the same time, investing has generated more wealth than anything in the history of the world. Because of the great success of investing in generating wealth, there must be a way for investing to be used to assist in the alleviation of poverty. To examine this possibility, one must consider the root causes of poverty, the reasons for the success of investing, and how poverty is currently being alleviated, to effectively develop a way for investing to be used to help alleviate poverty.

Small Business, Big Change: How Start-Ups Positively Affect The Community Around Them, Kaylee Spears

Senior Honors Theses

Usual measures of success refer commonly to financial means. In a world where success is synonymous with money, small businesses may appear to fall short of the standard. However, these measures do not comprehensively translate to small, family, or start-up companies. Incorrect measurements of success can skew the data when it comes to start-ups and family businesses, but new standards can bring to light just how large an impact small business can make. This thesis seeks to identify better ways to measure success for small businesses through non-financial means, research current examples for relevance, and provide insight for start-ups on …

Data-Driven Investment Decisions In P2p Lending: Strategies Of Integrating Credit Scoring And Profit Scoring, Yan Wang

Doctor of Data Science and Analytics Dissertations

In this dissertation, we develop and discuss several loan evaluation methods to guide the investment decisions for peer-to-peer (P2P) lending. In evaluating loans, credit scoring and profit scoring are the two widely utilized approaches. Credit scoring aims at minimizing the risk while profit scoring aims at maximizing the profit. This dissertation addresses the strengths and weaknesses of each scoring method by integrating them in various ways in order to provide the optimal investment suggestions for different investors. Before developing the methods for loan evaluation at the individual level, we applied the state-of-the-art method called the Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) …

Payroll Disparity Among Major League Baseball Teams: Building A Competitive Team Despite Limited Resources, Sarah Holtschneider

Senior Honors Theses

There has been an inequality in payroll among Major League Baseball teams for many years that became increasingly evident in the late 1990s. Revenue disparities among teams cause a competitive imbalance for the league and make it harder for small-market teams to compete with large-market teams with much higher payrolls. MLB has attempted to alleviate this disparity, but the implementation of revenue sharing and the competitive balance tax alone is not enough for small-market clubs to build a competitive team. There are a number of ways that small-market clubs can build a competitive team despite limited resources, including employing the …

Guarantees And Capital Infusions In Response To Financial Crises B: U.S. Guarantees During The Global Financial Crisis, June Rhee, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

During 2008-09, the federal government extended multiple guarantee programs in an effort to restore the financial market and contain the panic and crisis in the market. For example, the Treasury provided a temporary guarantee program for the money market funds, the FDIC decided to stand behind certain debts and non-interest-bearing transaction accounts, and the Treasury, the FDIC, and the Federal Reserve agreed to share losses in certain assets belonging to Citigroup. This case reviews these guarantee programs implemented during the global financial crisis by the government and explores the different rationale that shaped certain design features of each program.