Finance Commons^™

Kila Wakati Ni Wakati Wa Chai: Mapping The Regional Commodity Chain Of Tea In The Village Of Sagara, Rebecca Gourlay

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Tracing the commodity chain of tea from leaf to cup is a complex process that involves many actors at the production, distribution, processing and consumption levels. This study focuses on the regional tea commodity chain in the village of Sagara in the West Usambara Mountains of Tanzania in order to help explain the change in livelihood of tea as a cash crop. Semi-structured interviews with tea farmers were used to gain perspective on the nuances of the regional tea commodity chain at the production level. Several external actors, including Tanzania Smallholder Tea Development Agency (TSHTDA) and the Tea Research Institute …

Is It Worth Your Time? Biggest Contributors To Starting Salary For Bryant University Students, Brittany Sarza

Honors Projects in Finance

Students often wonder what curricular, co-curricular, and extra-curricular activities contribute to initial starting salary. Previous studies on this topic have indicated that the factors GPA, major/field of study, gender, and having an internship all increase starting salary. Prior research showed a positive and significant relationship between GPA and starting salary (Jones and Jackson, 1990), fields that require mathematical abilities had higher starting salaries in comparison to those fields without quantitative abilities (Paglin and Rufolo, 1990), 95% of the gender gap in starting salaries with women earning less than men could be attributed to college majors selected (McDonald and Thorton, 2007), …

Women In Microfinance And Its Social Effects On The Community: A Case Study In Hue, Vietnam, Madison Spigel

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Microfinance, a form of micro lending with no collateral, has been used as a way to finance the poor since the foundation of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh by Muhammad Yunus in 1983. Since the Doi Moi period, the Vietnamese government has showed great interest in microfinance and has made this loan system available to both its rural and urban citizens through organizations like the Women‟s Union. Through detailed surveys and semi-structured in depth interviews of both women in the Union as well as related parties in Hue, I was able to study how microfinance is used by these women …

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 …

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.

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 …

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 …

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.

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 …

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

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 …

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 …

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.