Effects of Wages of Government Officials on Corruption in Developing Countries
By Vansh Muttreja In a world where a majority of countries are suffering from corruption, it is important to study the causes of corruption and how it can be removed. There are many factors that affect corruption, and the one that this thesis focuses on is wages. The goal of this thesis is to understand […]
Motivation and Reasoning Behind Chinese Enterprises Overseas Listing
By Sjing Liang and Xiao Chen Starting from the early 90s, the number of Chinese firms going public overseas has been increasing rapidly. By running a probit regression, this paper investigates the different factors that affect a Chinese firm’s choice of listing location, either a domestic or a foreign stock exchange. Our data consists of […]
Do Vanguard ETF Investors Make Good Decisions? – Testing the Bogle Hypothesis
By Meng Xie John Bogle, the founder of Vanguard, is a notable opponent of frequent ETF trading. We test his hypothesis that Vanguard investors are not trading ETFs intelligently. A comparison of dollarweighted and time-weighted returns is the typical method used for assessing investor timing. We instead employ Sharpe’s style analysis techniques to compare the […]
A Further Exploration of Reverse Takeovers as an Alternative to Initial Public Offerings
By Matt LoSardo and Zhunliang Zhu In theory a reverse takeover (RTO) should be a viable alternative to initial public offerings (IPO) for private companies looking to access the public capital markets. Since the IPO process can be very timely and include significant costs, both direct and indirect, we analyze reverse takeovers as an alternative […]
The Determinants of Congressional Voting on the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008
by Ryan Miller Abstract The purpose of this paper is to discover the determinants of Congressional voting in the House on the two different versions the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, and to determine what caused Congressmen to switch their votes from the first bill to the second. Using a Probit model and independent […]
Merrill Lynch Consults® Program: An Analysis of Performance
by Megha Bisarya Abstract Compared to mutual funds, separately managed accounts are a relatively new product for the financial services industry. They are customized portfolios of stocks or bonds that are monitored by professional investment managers but owned by the individual. This study analyzes the performance of Merrill Lynch’s separately managed accounts program, known as […]
Time-Zone Arbitrage in Vanguard International Index Funds
By Katelyn Rae Donnelly Historically, mutual funds have often calculated their asset values for international mutual funds using stale prices, because some fund components register their last trades before the market close. These stale prices have caused daily fund returns to be predictable. This allows an arbitrage opportunity for investors who move their money at […]
An Empirical Analysis of Fundamental Indexation
by David Garver Abstract The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) and the case for efficient market equity pricing has been dealt a series of blows over the last twenty years. The recent emergence (Arnott, Hsu & Moore, 2005) of a set of strategies that purport to beat the capitalization weighted market portfolio suggested by the […]
Corporate Swap Use and Its Effect on Swap Spreads
by Christopher Paul Lin Abstract Interest rate swaps are financial derivatives that allow people to speculate on interest rates or hedge certain interest rate exposures. Corporations, in particular, can use the swap market to effectively change fixed rate debt into floating rate debt or vice versa. This paper empirically tests whether debt issuance by financial […]
The Closed-End Fund Puzzle: A Cross-Sectional Analysis of U.S. Closed-End Fund Discounts
by David Lefty Abstract This paper examines the effect of systematic beta risk, expense ratios, and fund size on the cross-sectional variation of closed-end fund discounts. Using a methodology similar to that of Gemmill and Thomas (2002) and Flynn (2004) on a sample of 50 U.S. closed-end funds, the data indicate that expense ratios have […]
