Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Effect Of Leverage On Credit Default Swaps, Xiling Lai

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

The research investigates the effect of leverage on the pricing of Credit Default Swaps (CDS) and focuses on key sectors of the economy: Technology, Financials, Consumer Staples and Industrials. CDS are financial instruments that were developed a few decades ago and have become more widely used in financial markets for hedging credit exposures. Given their prevalence in financial markets, it is important to understand how CDS spreads change when reference entities modify their capital structure.

In the regression analysis, the level of CDS spread is used as dependent variable, and the standardized relative leverage is used as independent variable. My …

Simulating Salience: Developing A Model Of Choice In The Visual Coordination Game, Adib Sedig

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

This project is primarily inspired by three papers: Colin Camerer and Xiaomin Li’s (2019 working paper)—Using Visual Salience in Empirical Game Theory, Ryan Oprea’s (2020)—What Makes a Rule Complex?, and Caplin et. al.’s (2011)—Search and Satisficing. Over the summer, I worked towards constructing a model of choice for the visual coordination game that can model player behavior more accurately than traditional game theoretic predictions. It attempts to do so by incorporating a degree of bias towards salience into a cellular automaton search algorithm and utilizing it alongside a sequential search mechanism of satisficing. This …

Agents Of Economic Resilience And The Role Of Islamic Approach Towards Financial Inclusion During Covid-19: A Case Of Pakistan, Aneela Kiran, Muhammad Imran Khan

3rd IBA SBS International Conference 2024

Pakistan is facing issues of health financing and food crises due to increasing prices of goods and services. It is important to reduce the risk food insecurity, and economic vulnerability. The aim of this study is to explore the Vulnerability of society to pandemic shocks and resilience of Islamic country like Pakistan and also to explore and identify the agents of Economic resilience in Pakistan. This study additionally explored the role of Islamic approaches toward financial inclusion during pandemic This study is based on multiple data types and methods. The study has used primary as well as secondary qualitative and …

Household Preferences Of Decentralized Solar Photovoltaic And Thermal Systems, Roozbeh Ghasemi, Yue Li, Zhongming Lu, Ju-Chin Huang, Weiwei Mo

Student Research Projects

Small-scale, residential solar systems have been increasingly recognized as a key sector of future solar capacity growth and carbon emission reduction in cities. This study investigated customer preferences of solar thermal and photovoltaic (PV) systems to facilitate their broader residential penetration. A discrete choice experiment was designed and administered through Amazon Mechanical Turk targeting two testbeds: Boston, Massachusetts and Atlanta, Georgia. Six system features were investigated, including system type, ownership, upfront cost, annual savings, environmental benefits, and neighbor’s choices. The collected data were then analyzed using latent class choice modeling to identify the hidden classes of unique preference characteristics and …

Kankakee In Deindustrialization: An Oral History Approach, Rachel Shepard

Scholar Week 2016 - present

The City of Kankakee was an industrialized city which prospered economically for decades. Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, economic trends shifted for Kankakee and the surrounding communities. The major factories, such as Roper Corporation and A.O. Smith, migrated their source of production from Kankakee to other regions of the United States and abroad during the 1970s and 1980s. As a result, the declining industrial economic activity led to changing community perceptions. Kankakee is an example of the “Rust Belt” region, a region in the Midwestern and Northeastern States of the United States where declining industrial activity occurred throughout the …

The Effect Of Quantitative Easing On U.S. Stock Prices And Wealth Inequality, Griffin W. Phillips

Student Scholar Showcase

My thesis will investigate and try to find a casual relationship between Quantitative Easing, or “QE”, and the U.S. stock market since 2003. The secondary effects will then be investigated to see if stock prices impact wealth inequality. To find the causal relationship between the two a regression model will be used. It predicts the magnitude of effects for QE and other variables that may impact stock prices. Since 2007-2009, the Federal Reserve has used QE as a means to spur economic growth. This expansionary monetary policy has impacted many financial markets including the U.S. stock market. Finding the extent …