Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

The Euro And Bumps In The Road: Historical Patterns Of Nonresident Holdings In Eurozone Bonds, 1980–2018, Michael H. Scarlatos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A developed bond market which attracts nonresident investors both enables and reflects a host currency’s transition from domestic to international status. My analysis of historical private nonresident holdings of Eurozone portfolio debt securities spanning the euro’s 1999 creation and its subsequent 2008 crisis reveals diverging patterns.

This analysis, complemented by coefficient stability tests, discovers that the conversion of national currencies to the euro was reflected by a pickup in nonresident holdings of bonds issued by countries adopting the euro, especially those of the periphery (Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Spain) relative to the core (Germany, Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, and the …

Three Essays On Corporate Governance, Executive Compensation, And Corporate Social Responsibility, Hong Zhou

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation includes three related essays investigating corporate governance structures, specifically, how firms leverage corporate social responsibility (CSR) related initiatives (providing CSR-linked compensation and establishing a sustainability committee) and the relevant corporate outcomes. This dissertation also examines the relationship between executive compensation and one dimension of CSR, diversity, in boardrooms. The first essay examines the relationship between CSR-linked executive compensation and corporate risk. Results from OLS and firm fixed effects regressions show that CSR-linked compensation reduces both total and idiosyncratic risks. Results also indicate that CSR-linked compensation reduces risk only when risk is well above the optimal level and has …

Two Essays On Corporate And Institutional Investors’ Usage Of Options, Financial Constraints, And Firm Performance, Bharat Patil

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation consists of two major parts. Essay I examines the relationship between the firm’s derivative risk management and its financial constraint. Firms face a wedge between their internal and external financing for their investments. I test whether this wedge reduces the firm’s financial constraint when it hedges using interest rate, foreign currency, and commodity derivatives. Using a difference-in-difference framework around the implementation of Financial Accounting Standard (FAS) 123R, this study shows a strong causal relationship between hedging intensity and the financial constraint. I find that net debt increases for the derivative hedging firms, on the other hand, cash holding …

Commonality In Two-Dimensions: An Empirical Investigation, Zhaoque Zhou

Dissertations - ALL

In this thesis, I follow Hasbrouck and Seppi (2001)’s work and use reduced-rank regression to model the commonality in Chapter Two. The literature on the study of return commonality generally attributes its source to the order flow. But I find that return and order flows are endogenous and use the new exogenous Twitter sentiment dataset to show that return commonality may be due to sentiment and attention. Furthermore, I observe the non-linear (linear) relationship between sentiment (attention) and return commonality. Finally, I may export the non-linear relationship using the same reduced-rank regression framework in future research.

I also follow Korajczyk …

Flexible Cropland Lease Arrangements Across Nebraska In 2022, Jim Jansen, Jeffrey Stokes

Cornhusker Economics

Survey results shown and discussed in this report are findings from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's 2022 Nebraska Farm Real Estate Market Survey. Complete results from the survey may be found at the Nebraska Farm Real Estate website: http://cap.unl.edu/realestate.

Financial Planning: What The Social And Brain Sciences Have To Offer, Ray Forbes, Martina Peng

All Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This paper addresses the potential linkage of the disciplines of financial planning and the social and brain sciences from the combined perspectives of a financial planning expert and a business psychologist. It seeks to offer practical guidance on how to utilize insights from recent research and practice in the social and brain sciences to address the issue of effective financial planning in a time of multiple widespread international crises. The article will review the traditional approach to financial planning, indicate where the profession appears to stand now, describe advances in social and brain science, and provide some practical tools for …

Performance Of Actively Managed Exchange Traded Funds, Xuan None Li

Olin Business School Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Investors who want access to active asset management can choose to invest in actively managed exchange traded funds (AMETFs), actively managed non-transparent ETFs (ANETFs) or mutual funds. Three major differences of AMETFs, ANETFs and mutual funds are the venues funds are traded on, tax liabilities, and disclosure requirements. This paper exploits the 2019 SEC rulings on ETFs to study empirically which fund structure for active asset management delivers the best return performance and explores what are the driving forces behind the superior performance. I find that for equity funds, AMETFs is associated with 0.158% lower monthly returns than mutual fund, …

The Effect Of Off-Site Examination: A Natural Experiment After Covid-19, Whan Kyu Shin

Olin Business School Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

I examine the effectiveness of off-site bank examinations by using the natural experiment during COVID-19. Exploiting the difference in the amount of soft information and in the effect of the change to off-site examination between the banks far from the supervisory field office and those near the field office, I find that distant banks increase asset risk regarding RWA to asset ratio and become less conservative in anticipating or preparing for future losses from loan portfolios. I also show that distant banks that adjust the loan portfolio to be riskier are less profitable, and the effect is prominent among the …

From ‘Homo Economicus’ To ‘Homo Culturalis’: Review Of Irrationally Rational By V. Raghunathan, Milind M. Shrikhande

Markets, Globalization & Development Review

No abstract provided.

Three Essays On Insider Trading, Haoyang Xiong

Theses and Dissertations

In the first essay we study whether and how personal off-the-job managerial indiscretions impact corporate insiders’ trading behavior. We find that executives accused of personal indiscretions earn significantly higher abnormal returns from their insider purchases and sales in a 15-day window around each trade. The results are robust to matched sample analyses. Further, insiders’ historical trading pattern or corporate culture has less explanatory power than personal attributes. We also document that exposure of these indiscretions to the public provides a disciplinary effect, as insider trading profits significantly drop following the announcement of an indiscretion, despite this drop being temporary. Corporate …

Essays On International Banking Regulation, Wenqing Gao

Theses and Dissertations

The first chapter analyzes the impact of macroprudential policies on bank systemic risk worldwide. Using data from 63 countries over 2001-2017, I find strong evidence that macroprudential policies are effective in reducing systemic risk at the country level. The effectiveness of macroprudential policies differs across countries in the sample. Macroprudential policies are more effective in reducing systemic risk in countries with more advanced economic development, with a higher degree of concentration in the banking sector, and with less stringent micro-prudential regulations. Bank-level evidence suggests that bank size matters. The impact of macroprudential policies on constraining bank systemic risk is more …

Teaching How Supply Chain Operations Impact Financial Results: A Case Study Using Cloud-Based Simulation, Michael J. Murray

Southwestern Business Administration Journal

Understanding how the execution of the supply chain business processes affect the financial performance a firm is key to running a successful enterprise. These processes are integrated across many functional groups within a business organization, and it is difficult to illustrate this integration in a classroom setting. This paper presents a case study of teaching supply chain operations and business analytics using the cloud-based SAP ERPsim manufacturing game. Although teaching about enterprise systems is often classified as part of the MIS or accounting domain, the ERPsim simulation encompasses the primary supply chain business processes, and because the enterprise system on …

How To Create Cash Flows That Give A Priori Irrs?, Charlie Charoenwong, Xinxin Li, Chee K. Ng

Southwestern Business Administration Journal

We illustrate algebraically the way to numerically derive the cash flows of an investment project yielding a set of desired IRRs. This is significant given the dearth of practice questions with the appropriate cash flow numbers, and their corresponding sign, in widely adopted Finance textbooks that will allow students to find multiple IRRs as learning exercises. The note serves to fill that void by allowing the readers to change the IRR inputs in an Excel spreadsheet and have the corresponding cash flows output ready for an assignment. Instructors can use the Excel codes to create different cash flows that yield …

When Will Cryptocurrency’S Winter Come To An End?, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

With the price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies dropping dramatically, what is in store for the digital asset market?

Skbi Big 5 Survey 2022 August, Singapore Management University

Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics

The latest survey results on the largest five economies (Big5) were revised markedly relative to the prior release (pre-Russia-Ukraine conflict), generally indicating weaker growth and higher inflation coupled with incremental ambiguity on the policy front.

Three Essays On Political Contributions And Firm Performance, Ankita Damani

Finance and Real Estate Dissertations - Archive

The interaction of politics with financial markets and the macroeconomy has received increasing attention in recent years. Extant literature identifies the significant impact of political connections on firm value. However, several questions in this area remain unanswered. My dissertation consists of three essays. In the first essay, I examine the impact of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on total campaign contributions and the relative contributions to Republicans and Democrats. I find that the total Political Action Committee (PAC) contributions by firms increase following an increase in EPU. This is also true for the contributions to each major political party, i.e., Republicans …

Managers’ Political Ideology And Debt, Abdulaziz Alshamrani

Finance and Real Estate Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation investigates the effect of managers’ political ideology and their level of managerial conservatism on their firms in the credit markets. In particular, we present three studies on the effect of managers’ political ideology and conservatism on loans’ spreads, credit ratings, and borrower-lender homophily. The level of executive's conservatism is inferred from their direct form of political donations. In chapter I, we provide an introduction that includes an overview and a background to motivate our research. In chapter II, we examine the effect of top managements’ conservatism on their firms' cost of bank loans. We find that firms with …

Three Essays On International Mutual Fund Flows, Anh Tuan Nguyen

Finance and Real Estate Dissertations - Archive

In this dissertation, I investigate the comprehensive relationship of international mutual fund flows among markets. While my first essay presents the unprecedent findings of commonality in mutual fund flows and global market integration, my second essay focuses on answering the classic question in financial market: is there any contagion in the market for asset management? In the third essay, I examine the intransitivity puzzle presented in the first essay. In the first essay, I examine global integration in the market for asset management, as indicated by the correlation of mutual fund flows across domiciles. I observe no leading role for …

Reconciling Conflicting Institutional Logics: Community Reinvestment Officers At The Intersection Of Public Policy And Market Forces, Meredith Mckee Adkins

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Although the public policy literature has traditionally focused on public sector agencies’ roles in the policy implementation process, private sector managers who oversee regulatory mandates for their organizations are also policy actors. These actors operate between multiple conflicting field-level institutional logics that create demands that they must reconcile through their work. In the banking sector, the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), enacted in 1977, and its associated policies are monitored by the banking regulatory agencies and implemented by the senior managers responsible for these mandates at regulated financial institutions. Simultaneously with their responsibility for the policy mission of the CRA, CRA …

Obstacles To Domestic Retail Investing : Evidence From Mexico, Kenneth Bulko

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Despite efforts to improve investment behavior, equity participation worldwide remains low. Researchers have attempted to explain the reluctance to purchase risky assets by seeking to identify the barriers investors face during the investment process. However, past empirical results relied on data often collected as part of a larger investigation and not explicitly centered on barriers to investing. We seek to deepen the understanding of investor behavior with qualitative and qualitative research designed to specifically identify the obstacles typically faced by potential investors, with a particular focus on Mexico.

The Importance Of Teaching Personal Finance, Ryan Brewer

Honors College Theses

This research project will consider the impact of a personal finance course being taught in an organized non-profit setting. A community church offers a finance course to their congregants on an annual basis that is designed to teach short- and long-term personal finance concepts to individuals and families to learn adequate budgeting and investment practices. Typically, anywhere from 5 to 15 people will sign-up for this course. This specific project will evaluate the participants skillset and confidence in their financial goals before and after they are involved with the course. The data of study will be collected from a pre- …

Cecl For Financial Institutions: An Analysis Of The Scale Method, Jared Stauffer

Department of Agricultural Economics: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Released by the Federal Reserve Bank in June of 2021, the Scaled CECL Allowance for Loss Estimator (SCALE) is meant to assist community banks implementing the new Current Expected Credit Loss (CECL) accounting standard. The efficacy of this method is important to community banks and financial institutions considering the use of SCALE to estimate expected future losses. Using quarterly Call Report data, two separate analyses of the SCALE method are conducted. First for qualifying community banks and second for Farm Credit Services of America, an agricultural credit association within the Farm Credit System. For the first quarter of 2022, both …

Three Essays On Stock Price Informativeness, Stock Price Momentum, And Firm Investment Efficiency, Chen Chen

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

Scholarly studies documented that stock price informativeness plays a critical role in market efficiency. In this dissertation, we participate this stream of literature by investigating the effects of stock price informativeness on the magnitudes of stock price momentum and the outcomes of corporate merger and acquisition decisions.

Essay 1 explores the effect of stock price synchronicity on momentum. The momentum anomaly is widely attributed to investor cognitive biases, but the trigger of cognitive biases is largely unexplored. In this study, inspired by psychology studies linking cognitive biases to the noisiness of information, we examine whether momentum returns are associated with …

International Asset Pricing With Strategic Business Groups, Massimo Massa, Hong Zhang, Hong Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Firms in global markets often belong to business groups. We argue that this feature can have a profound influence on international asset pricing. In bad times, business groups may strategically reallocate risk across affiliated firms to protect core “central firms.” This strategic behavior induces co-movement among central firms, creating a new intertemporal risk factor. Based on a novel data set of worldwide ownership for 2002–2012, we find that central firms are better protected in bad times and that they earn relatively lower expected returns. Moreover, a centrality factor augments traditional models in explaining the cross section of international stock returns.

Ceo Power, Subordinate Executives' Confidence And Ability, And Corporate Decisions, Md Raihan Uddin Chowdhury

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The dissertation consists of two essays. The first essay investigates the relationship between CEO power and investment efficiency. I find that powerful CEOs reduce investment efficiency, and this investment inefficiency is mainly driven by overinvestment. The negative effect of CEO power on investment efficiency is more pronounced when information asymmetry, agency problems, and product market competition are strong. This negative effect is mitigated when operation complexity is high and when internal and external governance is strong. However, if the majority of the independent directors are co-opted, the positive impact of internal governance diminishes. I further find that inefficiency and overinvestment …

Customer Concentration And Corporate Carbon Emissions, Saiying Deng, Tinghua Duan, Frank Weikai Li, Xiaoling Pu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper examines whether economic links with major corporate customers curb corporate carbon emissions. We show that supplier firms with a concentrated customer base have significantly lower carbon emissions. The baseline results are robust to alternative measures of carbon emissions and customer concentration, and various approaches that mitigate endogeneity concerns due to omitted variables and reverse causality. Moreover, the curbing effect of customer concentration on supplier carbon emissions is more pronounced in firms facing lower customer switching costs, with less (more) supplier (customer) bargaining power, fewer redeployable assets, operating in more carbon-intensive industries, and after the Paris Agreement of 2015. …

Do Analysts’ Eps Forecasts Obey Benford’S Law? An Empirical Analysis, Clarence Goh

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Benford’s law gives the expected frequencies of digits in tabulated data. In this study, I investigate the extent to which a sample of analysts’ earnings per share (EPS) forecasts obey Benford’s law. I conduct Benford’s law’s second digit and last-two digits tests on a sample of analyst EPS forecasts of S&P 500 firms from 1998 to 2018. Overall, I find that analysts’ EPS forecasts obey Benford’s law’s second digit test but do not obey the last-two digits test. These findings suggest that while analysts do not engage in number invention, they do engage in rounding when making EPS forecasts.

Three Chapters On Investments And Financial Institutions, Cao Fang

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Only the stock selection (“alpha”) decisions of fund managers who trade on firm-specific information should have predictive return content. Faced with the same information, skilled fund managers make similar stock selection decisions. In Chapter one, we introduce a new measure - stock investment quality - which uses fund quality to weight asymmetries in private information reflected in deviations of fund from peer group ownership on stocks in a style segment. We show stocks ranked high on investment quality generate significantly higher excess returns that persist through the ensuing year. The positive investment quality–future return relationship is robust to alternative fund …

Essays On Performance Evaluation Of Portfolio Managers Of Mutual And Hedge Funds, Yuekun Liu

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three essays focusing on the performance evaluation of portfolio managers of mutual and hedge funds. The first essay shows the performance of corporate bond mutual funds tends to be estimated using models with limited empirical validation. I test several models and find considerable variation in quality. That variation leads to meaningful differences with respect to the stylized facts of corporate bond fund performance. Using my preferred BENCH4 model—a novel model based on funds’ common benchmarks—I find average underperformance, substantial relative performance persistence, a small number of funds with positive alphas unattributable to luck, and positive alphas …

Information Acquisition And Expected Returns: Evidence From Edgar Search Traffic, Frank Weikai Li, Chengzhu Sun

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper examines expected return information embedded in investors' information acquisition activity. Using a novel dataset containing investors' access of company filings through SEC's EDGAR system, we reverse engineer their expectations over future payoffs and show that the abnormal number of IPs searching for firms' financial statements strongly predict future returns. The return predictability stems from investors allocating more effort to firms with improving fundamentals and following exogeneous shock to underpricing. A long-short portfolio based on our measure of information acquisition activity generate monthly abnormal return of 80 basis points and does not reverse over the long-run.. In addition, the …