Economics Commons^™

Responsible Microfinance Bundling: Experimental Evidence On Separating Insurance And Credit Offers, Vance J. Larsen

Open Access Theses

In recent years combining multiple financial products into one package in a process known as bundling has become more common among microfinance institutions (MFIs). While bundling can be beneficial to MFIs by cutting costs and providing protection from client default, the implications for MFI customers are less clear. Bundling the products may take advantage of the existing relationship between the financial institution and the client to expand microinsurance access and take-up, but alternatively offering too many products could lead to low client understanding and thus low take-up of the product. We conducted a randomized field experiment to determine if separating …

From Hard Money To Branch Banking California Banking In The Gold Rush Economy, Larry Schweikart, Lynne Pierson Doti

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

In Gold Rush–era California, banking and the financial sector evolved in often distinctive ways because of the Gold Rush economy. More importantly, the abundance of gold on the West Coast provided an interesting test case for some of the critical economic arguments of the day, especially for those deriving from the descending—but still powerful—positions of the “hard money” Jacksonians.

Mexico Consensus Economic Forecast, Volume 19, Number 2, Thomas M. Fullerton Jr., Adam G. Walke

Border Region Modeling Project

No abstract provided.

Benchmarking And Currency Risk, Massimo Massa, Yanbo Wang, Hong Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We show that the currency risk embedded in the benchmarks of international mutual funds negatively affects fund performance. More specifically, a high benchmark-implied currency risk induces funds to invest in markets with less volatile currencies, leading to a higher degree of currency concentration in portfolio holdings. This currency concentration, however, departs from the optimal equity allocation strategy across countries and reduces fund performance. We document that funds resorting to high currency concentrations underperform funds with low currency concentrations by as much as 1%-2% per year.

Two Essays On Investor Emotions And Their Effects In Financial Markets, Jiancheng Shen

Finance Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation provides empirical evidences on media-based investor emotions in predicting stock return, conditional volatility, and stock and bond return comovements.

We first studied the interaction between US media content and the US stock market returns and volatility. We utilize propriety investor sentiment measures developed by Thompson Reuters MarketPsych. We select four measures of investor sentiment that reflect both pessimism and optimism of small investors. Our objective is two-fold. First, we examine the ability of these sentiment measures to predict market returns. For this purpose, we use dynamic Vector Auto-Regressive models. Second, we are interested in exploring the effects of …

Essays On The Equity Risk Premium, Mohamed Mehdi Rahoui

Finance Theses & Dissertations

The equity risk premium (ERP) is an essential component of any asset pricing model both for academics and practitioners alike. Nevertheless, the financial literature does not accord much attention to the ERP estimation issues (Damodaran, 2015). The first chapter of this dissertation gives a summary of the recent literature review on the subject of the ERP. The second chapter explores four of the most commonly cited models in literature for estimating the ERP: the Historical Mean of Realized Returns Model (HMRRM), the Dividend Discount Model (DDM), the Free Cash Flow Model (FCFM), and the Sharpe Ratio Model (SRM). The results …

Two Essays On Short Selling, Zhaobo Zhu

Finance Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation provides some new evidence that the information contained in short selling is informative about future returns, confirming the role of short sellers in the price discovery process.

The first essay examines the cross-sectional relation between the change in short interest and expected stock returns. NYSE/AMEX stocks with large decreases (increases) in short interest over past medium-term horizon experience significant and positive (negative) abnormal returns. Moreover, the positive abnormal returns are larger in absolute value and are more persistent than negative abnormal returns. The return spread between bottom and top deciles is economically and statistically significant and persistent. The …

Loan Counseling For Graduate And Professional Students, Patricia Steele, Chad Anderson

Commissioned Research

This report provides an overview of existing literature that examines loan counseling and financial literacy for graduate and professional students, and includes actionable recommendations for stakeholders to better support students in making optimal financial decisions about their loans and other aspects of their personal finances. The report was authored by Patricia Steele, Ph.D., and Chad Anderson with Higher Ed Insight.

Project Selection: Commitment And Competition, Vidya Atal, Talia Bar, Sidartha Gordon

Department of Economics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

We examine project selection decisions of firms constrained in the number of projects they can handle at once. A new project opportunity arises every period. Taking on a project requires a commitment of uncertain duration, preventing the firm from selecting another project in subsequent periods until the commitment ends. In our dynamic game, when two firms are free of commitment, they move sequentially in random order. Symmetric pure strategy Markov perfect equilibria always exist. In equilibrium, the first mover strategically rejects some projects that are then selected by the second mover, even when the value of the project is the …

The Impact Of Lending Rate On The Manufacturing Sector In Nigeria, D.B. Akpan, D.J. Yilkudi, D. C. Opiah

Economic and Financial Review

The study investigates the impact of lending rate on output of the manufacturing subsector using the Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) and annual data from 1981- 2014. The empirical results indicated that high lending rate had negative impact on manufacturing output in the long-run. This suggests that increase in lending rate undermines manufacturing output, thus retarding growth in the real sector. Specifically, the estimates revealed that a 1.0 per cent increase in lending rate reduces manufacturing output by 0.03 per cent. The study, therefore, recommends the implementation of investment friendly policies that narrows the lending rate by the deposit money …

Empirical Estimation Of Optimal International Reserves For Nigeria: The Sudden Stop Model, G. K. Sanni, T. S. Olusegun, Z. Sani

Economic and Financial Review

The study examined the issue of optimum external reserves for Nigeria during 2010 – 2014, using Jeanne and Ranciere (2006) and Goncalves (2007) sudden stop model approach. The study showed that resident foreign currency deposit accounted for over 90 per cent of the total foreign currency deposit, while non-resident foreign currency deposit accounted for the remaining. The result of the model suggested that external reserves were adequate in 2010 but beyond that period, it was far below optimal level. On average, the optimum external reserves were around 15.7 per cent of GDP in the past four years, translating to US$54.52 …

Violence In Mexico And Its Effects On Labor Productivity, Rene Cabral, André Varella Mollick, Eduardo Saucedo

School of Economics and Finance Faculty Publications

This paper examines the evolution of Mexico’s labor productivity (GDP per worker) across its 32 sub-national entities from 2003 to 2013, during a period of rising drug-related crimes. Using quarterly data and economic controls, fixed effects models suggest the effects of crime are small and differ depending on whether such crimes are prosecuted by state/local or federal authorities. However, results from System Generalized Methods of Moments regressions generate stronger responses for (endogenous) wages and labor productivity. First, crime has negative effects on Mexican labor productivity across states during the “war on drugs” period. Second, increases in expenditures on public security …

Subsidies And Countervailing Duties, Gea M. Lee

Research Collection School Of Economics

This survey pays attention to a recent development of the literature that analyzes two important regulatory features found in the Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures (the SCM agreement): the restrictive treatment of domestic subsidies and the general prohibition of export subsidies. The WTO's restriction on domestic subsidies is challenged by the existing terms-of-trade theory that offers an efficiency foundation for the market-access focus of the GATT rules. On the other hand, against the backdrop of the SCM agreement and preferential trade agreements (PTAs), a recent literature attempts to provide a rationale for the WTO to restrict the use of …

How Much Should You Pay For A Financial Derivative?, Boyan Kostadinov

Publications and Research

We explain some key mathematical ideas behind the no-arbitrage pricing of financial derivatives by replication, starting from a simple coin toss model and ending with the continuous-time limit of a multi-step coin-toss model using a geometric random walk model. In the limit, we obtain the classical Black-Scholes-Merton formula for pricing European call and put options.

Ipo Markets In Asia Financial Centers : How The Different Ipo Locations Affect Firms’ Stock Prices, Yuanzhen Jiang

Lingnan Journal of Banking, Finance and Economics

For most of non-listed corporations when they are confronting the issues of cutting capital cost, to increase the base of their investors, to develop the firm business quicker, or even to diversify the pool of investors, one of the most important alternatives that the executives and shareholders of these corporations may think is to do IPO (Initial Public Offering); which could be done in the domestic or in the foreign IPO markets. This paper firstly introduces the situation and differences among different IPO markets in Asia major financial centers that includes Mainland China, Hong Kong and Singapore. Then it will …

Should Hong Kong Maintain A Linked Exchange Rate System?, Hoi Yin Tsoi

Lingnan Journal of Banking, Finance and Economics

The linked exchange rate was implemented in 1983. This paper finds that over these 32 years, this system did bring lots of benefits to Hong Kong. Nevertheless, as Hong Kong is a vastly different place now relative to what it was 32 years ago, the costs for the adoption of the link outweigh the benefits so this system is no longer suitable for Hong Kong. It is suggested that in order to serve the best interest of Hong Kong, it should not maintain the linked exchange rate system and should switch to the managed floating exchange rate system.

Empirical Study : Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connection Sign Of Efficiency Improvement?, Ming Cheung Fok

Lingnan Journal of Banking, Finance and Economics

Stock market connection encourages local corporations cross-listing in overseas stock markets which will, theoretically, enhance the information flow between countries and the stock market efficiency. In view of a closed economy like China and a free economy like Hong Kong, the announcement of Shanghai-Hong Kong stock connection program seems to be a great opportunity for testing the well-known Efficiency Market Hypothesis (EMH). Employing Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) and the random walk model suggested by previous studies, this paper will present the comparison of market performance before and after the connection as evidences for the hypothesis testing.

An Empirical Analysis Of Factors Influencing China's Real Estate Prices-Based On The Var Model, Pan Xiao

Lingnan Journal of Banking, Finance and Economics

The real estate industry has an increasingly significant position in our national economy. It is important for real estate investment and national macro-control to analyze the main factors that affect its prices, in order to predict its future movements. In this paper, the dynamic econometric analysis method was used to analyze these macroeconomic factors that influence the real state prices on a empirical research. And the results show that the expected prices of real estate, money supply, real estate development investment and household income are the dominant factors influencing them.

Factors In The Returns On Stock : Inspiration From Fama And French Asset Pricing Model, Yuanzhen Jiang

Lingnan Journal of Banking, Finance and Economics

Under the inspiration of Fama and French asset pricing model, this paper mainly studies the relationship between the month return of A shares and the factors that may have an effect on the stocks’ month return. It also compares the differences in the reaction of all shares and GEM board shares to these factors. It is important to highlight that these factors include the market, firm size, earnings and book-to-market information. The data used in this project comes from the quarterly data of China stock market from March of 2000 to December of 2011 and was used in panel model …

Predictability Of Bond Risk Premia With An Affine Term Structure Model, Sibel Korkmaz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis focuses on zero-coupon bond risk premia. In chapter 1 first I summarize the literature that defines expectation hypothesis, time variation in bond risk premia, well known macroeconomic and variety of technical indicators which predict bond return forecasts. Then, I continue with introducing a high dimensional affine dynamic term structure model and unscented Kalman filtering as its estimation technique.In chapter 2, I explore predictive capacity of the estimated latent states of this term structure model. I constructed a single return forecasting factor by using these states. I report comparison of well known excess bond return forecasting factors' predictive performance …

Essays In Chinese Financial Markets, Chang Xia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Chapter 1 adopted the constraint dummy variables regression model in Cao, Harris and Wang (2007) to examine seasonality in the returns, volatility, and turnover of Shanghai ‘A’, Shanghai ‘B’, Shenzhen ‘A’, and Shenzhen ‘B’ composite indexes in the Chinese Stock Market. Daily data of four composite indexes (Shanghai ‘A’, Shanghai ‘B’, Shenzhen ‘A’, and Shenzhen ‘B’) was collected: the opening index value, the closing index value, the maximum index value, the minimum index value and the volume traded. Volatility (a realized volatility that is based on the daily trading range), trading volume, and three return series of the four indexes …

Constrained Inefficiency And Optimal Taxation With Uninsurable Risks, Piero Gottardi, Atsushi Kajii, Tomoyuki Nakajima

Research Collection School Of Economics

When individuals' labor and capital income are subject to uninsurable idiosyncratic risks, should capital and labor be taxed, and if so how? In a two-period general equilibrium model with production, we derive a decomposition formula of the welfare effects of these taxes into insurance and distribution effects. This allows us to determine how the sign of the optimal taxes on capital and labor depend on the nature of the shocks and the degree of heterogeneity among consumers' income, as well as on the way in which the tax revenue is used to provide lump-sum transfers to consumers. When shocks affect …

Analysis Of The Factors Impacting Etfs Net Fund Flow Changes, Stoyu Ivanov

Faculty Publications

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to identify the factors that impact the exchange-traded funds net fund flow changes on a daily basis.Design/methodology/approachA total of 1,212 different exchange-traded funds with a proprietary daily net fund flow data and logistic regressions were studied because the majority of the 1,212 exchange-traded funds have mostly zero daily net fund flow changes.FindingsIt was documented that in the period December 22, 2005 to July 28, 2010 autocorrelation at the daily frequency is not universally present for the 1,212 exchange-traded funds that we study, despite the fact that this is the case in the monthly data …

How Long Does Savings Last When Retirees Need More Money (Or Less) Than Theory Suggests?, Steven Welch

Accounting and Finance Faculty Publications

Popular convention is to initially withdraw approximately 4% of the retirement savings and increase that dollar amount each year by inflation. But, what if 4% isn’t enough? How long will retirement funds last if a newly retired person needs 5%, 6%, or even 10%? Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) suggests that an investor only needs to choose between 2 assets, the risk free rate and an optimal risky portfolio. In this paper, five U.S.-based assets are tracked from 1934 until 2015 to see how long they survived independently and in combination with one other asset. Obviously the more a person needs …

Open Questions In Open Source: Exploring Incentives, Licensing And Competition, Vidya Atal, Kameshwari Shankar

Department of Economics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Open Source Software (OSS) has grown in importance over the last few decades and now constitutes an important part of the software market particularly in mobile and web technology. In this paper, we provide a preliminary theoretical framework for analyzing currently unexamined issues regarding developer participation in OSS and competition between open source and proprietary software. We start by looking at the upstream market where developers voluntarily contribute effort into the development of OSS without claiming any copyright for their contributions. We explore the relationship between open source licensing and developers' effort provision and suggest an empirical test of developer …

لتحليل الاقتصادي للنفقات الاستثمارية والتشغيلية لمحافظة ذي قار للمدة ( 2006 – 2014 ), علي كاظم هلال

Muthanna Journal of Administrative and Economics Sciences

المستخلص : تعد هذه الدراسة كاشفة لطبيعة وحجم الانفاق الاستثماري والتشغيلي لديوان محافظة ذي قار ومجلس المحافظة للمدة ( 2014 – 2006 ) . اذ كشفت الدراسة وجود هدراً كبيراً في النفقات الاستثمارية دون تحقيق انجاز حقيقي على أرض الواقع ، اذ بلغت النفقات الاستثمارية للمدة المذكورة ( 2.050.005 ) ترليون دينار ، وهذا المبلغ لو انفق على مشاريع حقيقية ومدروسة يمكن ان ينقل المحافظة من حالة التخلف الى حالة النمو والتقدم . وبينت الدراسة حجم الهدر الكبير في الموارد المالية والتبذير والفساد على مشاريع غير أساسية وقصيرة الاجل وكثيرة العدد بدلاً من التركيز على المشاريع الاستراتيجية كبناء المدارس ومحطات …

دور جودة التدقيق الخارجي في زيادة فاعلية عملية الفحص الضريبي, فرقد فيصل جدعان

Muthanna Journal of Administrative and Economics Sciences

تعد دراسة الفحص الضريبي ذات أهمية بالغة لغرض ترصين العمل الضريبي وإقامته على أسس علمية وفنية دقيقة وتحقيق العدالة الضريبية، والفحص الضريبي هو دراسة وتحليل وتقييم التقارير المالية وحسابات الشركة بهدف التأكد من صحة صافي الربح. ولزيادة كفاءة عملية الفحص الضريبي وتحقيق العدالة الضريبية وإضفاء الثقة والمصداقية في التقارير المالية يتطلب ان تتم عملية التدقيق الخارجي بجودة عالية لذلك يهدف هذا البحث الى:- 1- التعرف على مفهوم واهداف وانواع الفحص الضريبي والعوامل المؤثرة في فاعليته. 2- تسليط الضوء على مفهوم واهمية جودة التدقيق الخارجي والعوامل المؤثرة عليه.3- بيان دور جودة التدقيق الخارجي في زيادة فاعلية عملية الفحص الضريبي وأختتم البحث …

Filling The Regulatory Void In The Fx Spot Market: How Traders Rigged The Biggest Market In The World, Colleen Powers

Fordham Urban Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Detecting Stock Market Bubbles: A Price-To-Earnings Approach, Austin F. Murphy

Honors Theses

To this day, economists argue about the existence of stock market bubbles. The literature review for this paper observes the analysis of four reputable bubble tests in an attempt to provide ample qualitative proof for the existence of bubbles. The first obstacle for creating an effective bubble detection test is the difficulty of estimating true fundamental values for equities. Without adequate estimations for the fundamental values of equities, the deviation between actual price and fundamental price is impossible to observe or estimate. Additionally, these tests are reliant on strong underlying assumptions, which tend to cloud results.

This thesis applies a …

Order Behavior In High Frequency Markets, Brian Roseman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In Part 1, I study the characteristics of short orders in stock markets. Fleeting orders are quick limit orders that remain on the limit order book for only a few seconds before being canceled, and are significantly different than more patient, static, limit orders that are added to the limit order book and await execution. I investigate the impact that fleeting orders have on spread and depth measures of market quality, and how fleeting orders differ from static orders. Attention is also given to the extent that total depth can be decomposed into the two components of fleeting and static …