Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Investment Styles, Fees, & Returns Among Individually Managed & Team Managed Mutual Funds, Kendal Cehanowicz

Honors Projects in Finance

Identifying a successful mutual fund investment involves a crucial analysis of alternatives, all of which influence the true benefit of the investment. Major considerations must include performance, management and fees; which ultimately determine investment returns. Studies have shown that team managed mutual funds exhibit similar risk adjusted performance to individually managed mutual funds, however studies lack this comparison of performance based on fund fees and investment objective. This gap in research implies that there is an opportunity to examine how fund management, investment objective, and fund fees affect overall returns to the investor. Using the 2010 Center for Research in …

Does Twitter Create Similar Patterns Of Positivity/Negativity As Face-To-Face Word-Of-Mouth?, Nicholis Jones

Honors Projects in Marketing

Word-of-mouth communication is important to organizations because it is a free form of advertising and has been shown to be influential on consumers’ purchasing decisions. Marketers of course, would like WOM to be positive and thus increase brand reputation and sales. In the past decade, new forms of communication have created different channels for WOM to travel through. Current social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter allow one person to send a message to many almost instantaneously. This study’s objective is to examine the WOM on the networking site Twitter. Previous research has indentified the relative incidence rates of …

Effects Of Chronic Regulatory Focus And Product Type On Internet Purchase Decisions, Chad Ryan

Honors Projects in Marketing

This study draws on Regulatory Focus Theory (RFT; Higgins 1987) to explore factors that affect a consumer’s online purchase attitudes and intentions. According to RFT, consumers tend to be either chronically promotion- or prevention-focused. Promotion-focused consumers are concerned with positive outcomes. Conversely, prevention-focused consumers are concerned with avoiding negative outcomes. Promotion-focused consumers are more willing to take risks than prevention-focused consumers (Higgins 1997). Promotion-focused consumers also prefer hedonic shopping experiences (i.e., pleasurable), whereas prevention-focused consumers prefer utilitarian shopping experiences (i.e., task-oriented) (Arnold & Reynolds 2009). Because products that are purchased on the Internet cannot be seen or touched prior to …

The Semiotics Of Sexual Identity: Myth Vs. History, Mackenzie Schroth

Honors Projects in English and Cultural Studies

In this project, I argue that gay, lesbian, and bisexual (GLB) students majoring in liberal arts have a higher likelihood of being out and of feeling confident in their identity and manner of self-expression. On the other hand, GLB students majoring in business-related fields are more likely to either be closeted or to fit a very defined, stereotyped gay identity. I test my hypothesis by conducting a semiotic analysis of sexual identity and by looking to the history of sexual identity categories. I also survey and interview various students, both liberal arts and business majors, to determine their perceptions about …

Getting The Sharks To Bite In Your Ocean: A Look At Regional Differences In Funding Components In China And The United States, Jennifer Ashley Schwall

Honors Projects in Finance

This study explores the relationship between a venture capital firm’s geographic region and the investment traits that it values. This study’s results will help determine whether venture capital firms, by geographic region, emphasize certain investment traits over others when funding new companies.

The study examines three regions (the East Coast of the United States, the West Coast of the United States and China, specifically Beijing and Shanghai). By surveying available firms in each region, I collected data on which funding components, or investment traits, the sampled respondents valued. To increase the usefulness of my findings, I held constant the stage …

Do Foreign Direct Investment And Trade Openness Accelerate Economic Growth?, Donna Chan Wah Hak

Honors Projects in Economics

This research investigates the impact of trade openness and foreign direct investment (FDI) on economic growth. Using a framework proposed by Barro (1991), panel data regression analysis is performed on 5-year time periods between 1985 and 2005. A sample of 89 countries is analyzed using data collected from the World Development Indicators (WDI), Penn World Table, Barro and Lee (2010), and Polity IV Project datasets. The empirical analysis shows that conditional convergence occurs among the countries in the sample and that FDI net inflows per worker slightly increases the speed of conditional convergence. This study also finds evidence that FDI …