Female Labor Force Participation in Turkic Countries: A Study of Azerbaijan and Turkey
By Natasha Jo Torrens Encouraging female labor force participation (FLFP) should be a goal of any country attempting to increase their productive capacity. Understanding the determinants and motivations of labor force participation requires isolating the factors that influence a woman’s decision to enter or leave formal employment. In this thesis, I utilize data from the […]
An Analysis of Passive and Active Bond Mutual Fund Performance
By Michael J. Kiffel and Surya Prabhakar The literature on the performance differential between passively and actively managed equity mutual funds is thorough: passively managed funds generally outperform their active counterparts except in the rare presence of highly-skilled managers. However, there exists limited academic research regarding fixed income mutual funds. This study utilizes the Fama-French […]
Vanguard’s Index Funds vs. Vanguard’s Managed Funds: a Nine Style Box and Fama-French Multi-Variable Regression Approach
By Susheel Nalla Many investors struggle to determine whether they want to invest in managed funds or indexed funds when they build portfolio. Vanguard, founded by John Bogle, a strong advocate for indexed investing has seen his company grow to over $3.9 trillion in funds. In the last three years $1 trillion of new money […]
BIDDING FOR PARKING: The Impact of University Affiliation on Predicting Bid Values in Dutch Auctions of On-Campus Parking Permits
By Grant Kelly Parking is often underpriced and expanding its capacity is expensive; universities need a better way of reducing congestion outside of building costly parking garages. Demand based pricing mechanisms, such as auctions, offer a possible solution to the problem by promising to reduce parking at peak times. However, faculty, students, and staff at […]
Variations in Turkey’s Female Labor Market: The Puzzling Role of Education
By Rachel Anderson Although Turkey ranks among the world’s 20 largest economies, female labor force participation in Turkey is surprisingly low. Relative to other developed countries, however, the proportion of Turkish women in senior management is high. One explanation for these contrasting pictures of Turkey’s female labor force is education. To better understand how women’s education and household characteristics explain variations in Turkey’s female labor market, I use annual Turkish Household Labour Force Survey data from […]
Dealing with Data: An Empirical Analysis of Bayesian Black-Litterman Model Extensions
By Daniel Roeder Portfolio Optimization is a common financial econometric application that draws on various types of statistical methods. The goal of portfolio optimization is to determine the ideal allocation of assets to a given set of possible investments. Many optimization models use classical statistical methods, which do not fully account for estimation risk in […]
Conditional Beta Model for Asset Pricing By Sector in the U.S. Equity Markets
By Yuci Zhang In nance, the beta of an investment is a measure of the risk arising from exposure to general market movements as opposed to idiosyncratic factors. Therefore, reliable estimates of stock portfolio betas are essential for many areas in modern nance, including asset pricing, performance evaluation, and risk management. In this paper, we […]
Corporate Financial Distress and Bankruptcy Prediction in North American Construction Industry
By Gang Li This paper seeks to explore the application of Altman’s bankruptcy prediction model in the construction industry by measuring its percentage accuracy on a dataset consisting of 108 bankrupt & non-bankrupt firms selected across the timeline of 1985-2013. Another main goal this paper is to explore the predictive power of an expanded variable […]
Forecasting Beta Using Conditional Heteroskedastic Models
By Andrew Bentley Conventional measurements of equity return volatility rely on the asset’s previous day closing price to infer the current level of volatility and fail to incorporate information concerning intraday influntuctuations. Realized measures of volatility, such as the realized variance, are able to integrate intraday information by utilizing high-frequency data to form a very […]
