Large bodies of empirical evidence show that policies and practices that support failure in schools does little to improve student outcomes, yet course failure remains widespread in secondary schools. Further, there is a growing body of evidence indicating these policies and practices are costly in fiscal terms. This study builds on this body of evidence to ask the question: how much money does course failure in secondary schools cost the Ontario public education system annually? Borrowing from Levin & McEwan’s resource cost modelling approach, the study calculates the volume of course failure across all secondary schools in the province and establishes estimates of the annual cost of secondary course failure taking into account some factors known to be systematically related. This work aims to better understand the costs of providing public secondary school education in order to make more effective use of resources. In the 2008–09 school year 7.9% of course registrations in Ontario secondary schools resulted in failure. Fail rates are greater for students who receive special services and vary considerably by subject area. The annual cost is estimated to be $472 million.

Large bodies of empirical evidence show that policies and practices that support failure in schools does little to improve student outcomes, yet course failure remains widespread in secondary schools. Further, there is a growing body of evidence indicating these policies and practices are costly in fiscal terms. This study builds on this body of evidence to ask the question: how much money does course failure in secondary schools cost the Ontario public education system annually? Borrowing from Levin & McEwan’s resource cost modelling approach, the study calculates the volume of course failure across all secondary schools in the province and establishes estimates of the annual cost of secondary course failure taking into account some factors known to be systematically related. This work aims to better understand the costs of providing public secondary school education in order to make more effective use of resources. In the 2008–09 school year 7.9% of course registrations in Ontario secondary schools resulted in failure. Fail rates are greater for students who receive special services and vary considerably by subject area. The annual cost is estimated to be $472 million.

Doctor of Education / Department of Educational Leadership / David Thompson / Information gained from the present study should provide important policy insights into whether adjustments to the School District Finance and Quality Performance Accreditation (SDFQPA) Act funding formula have supported the original goal behind SDFQPA, which was to provide more equal funding to public elementary and secondary pupils in Kansas. The study assessed selected fiscal and pupil performance impacts following changes to the SDFQPA funding formula during the years 2002 - 2011. The information gained from the present study also can be compared with the insights gained from the DeBacker study of 2002 which analyzed SDFQPA funding formula impacts from 1992 - 2001. The result of extending and expanding the DeBacker study to new data in 2011 is significant. When considered jointly, information from the two studies should provide insight about selected school funding variables impacted by the SDFQPA funding formula over a twenty-year span. The population for the study included all 289 Kansas school districts in existence in 2011. The study sample, 112 school districts, was arranged into decile groups based on assessed property valuation in 2002. The design resulted in 28 school districts in four decile groups of Deciles 1, 5, 6, and 10. Decile 1 school districts were considered poor, Deciles 5 and 6 were considered average wealth, and Decile 10 school districts were considered wealthy. The study was conducted in two phases. The first phase consisted of an extensive data review based on the critical element of local fiscal capacity to support schools across two book-end years 2002 and 2011. The following represent the fiscal and student performance variables analyzed in the first phase: enrollment, general fund amounts per pupil, supplemental general fund amounts per pupil, capital outlay fund amounts per pupil, bond and interest fund amounts per pupil, number of pupils per certified employee, and average teacher salaries. Other pupil performance variables examined included: graduation rates, dropout rates, and state reading and math assessment results. The second phase of the study attempted to expand on researcher observations made during the first phase through the use of surveys and telephone interviews. Surveys were mailed to the 112 school districts in the study sample to gather contextual information about the specific variables and also to gather information not available from the data. Survey information included the following: construction or remodeling of facilities, closing or combining of schools, and changes in secondary curricular offerings. Telephone interviews were also conducted with 5 randomly selected school districts from each of the four studied deciles to clarify the survey data and to gather school leaders’ perceptions about changes to the SDFQPA funding formula. Results of the study indicated that adjustments to SDFQPA from 2002-2011 did indeed increase the level of fiscal resources available to average wealth school districts at a greater rate than resource increases experienced by wealthy school districts. Pupil performance across all deciles improved, with the most dramatic improvements occurring within the average wealth school districts. The school districts within Decile 1 experienced the most improvements to facilities, and increases in curricular offerings when compared to other deciles. The results indicated that positive changes have occurred in the educational experience offered by Kansas school districts from 2002-2011. The positive changes were discovered with only cautious optimism, however, as more recent changes to SDFQPA could potentially undo the growth experienced by Kansas school districts from 2002 to 2011.

This dissertation contains two essays in empirical finance. The first essay studies the mutual fund industry, and the second essay looks into the stock market. Both studies provide insights in the underlying mechanism of some asset return patterns identified from the data currently available. The first essay investigates the sources of a recently identified performance pattern in mutual funds. Specifically, actively managed mutual funds, in general, underperform a passive benchmark; however, some recent studies find they, in fact, outperform the benchmark in bad economic states. I examine whether a state dependent risk shifting behavior of mutual fund managers contributes to this performance difference across states, and find supportive evidence. As shown in prior studies, the risk shifting behavior is motivated by a non-linear flow-performance relationship. Using a piece-wise linear regression, I demonstrate that the non-linearity exists mainly in good states; whereas in bad states, the flow-performance relationship is close to linear. Thus, non-zero risk shifting incentives are only expected in good states. I empirically measure these incentives in good states, and show that managers do react to the ``gambling'' (i.e., positive) incentives. In addition, higher ``gambling'' incentives are found to be associated with lower fund performance. The second essay, based on joint work with Hai Lu and Kevin Wang, examines how stock price shocks in the absence of public announcement of firm specific news affect future stock returns. We find that both large short term price drops and hikes are followed by negative abnormal returns over the subsequent twelve months. The pattern of asymmetric drifts, the return continuation for negative shocks versus the return reversal for positive shocks, is puzzling. We explore whether investor disagreement can explain the puzzle and find that the evidence is consistent with predictions of disagreement theory. Moreover, price shocks with public news disclosures are followed by weaker drifts, suggesting that reduction of information asymmetry from public disclosures mitigates disagreement-induced overpricing.

This thesis argues that consumer financial literacy is not a solution but a tool that mystifies and supports the very problems it could help solve: exploitation, economic crises, the spread of neoliberalism, alienation and the further disempowerment of the citizen. The characterization and implementation of financial literacy programs influence the resources and subjectivities that we use to act, see, reflect, create the world and create ourselves, resources and subjectivities that should support our free actions and enable us to do more than conform to the dictates of capital and be more than neoliberal entrepreneurial consumers. In the place of consumer financial literacy, we need a critical financial literacy that supports active citizens. The citizen is not the alienated investor or consumer who can only choose what the market provides; instead, he or she can assist in altering or abolishing the market to create a new economic system that offers better choices. A critical financial literacy would encourage citizens to reflect on and transform the social relations of production in order to create a world, free from capital’s dictates, in which individuals are as free from necessity as possible and better able to develop their human capacities to the fullest.

This thesis argues that consumer financial literacy is not a solution but a tool that mystifies and supports the very problems it could help solve: exploitation, economic crises, the spread of neoliberalism, alienation and the further disempowerment of the citizen. The characterization and implementation of financial literacy programs influence the resources and subjectivities that we use to act, see, reflect, create the world and create ourselves, resources and subjectivities that should support our free actions and enable us to do more than conform to the dictates of capital and be more than neoliberal entrepreneurial consumers. In the place of consumer financial literacy, we need a critical financial literacy that supports active citizens. The citizen is not the alienated investor or consumer who can only choose what the market provides; instead, he or she can assist in altering or abolishing the market to create a new economic system that offers better choices. A critical financial literacy would encourage citizens to reflect on and transform the social relations of production in order to create a world, free from capital’s dictates, in which individuals are as free from necessity as possible and better able to develop their human capacities to the fullest.

This dissertation contains two essays in empirical finance. The first essay studies the mutual fund industry, and the second essay looks into the stock market. Both studies provide insights in the underlying mechanism of some asset return patterns identified from the data currently available. The first essay investigates the sources of a recently identified performance pattern in mutual funds. Specifically, actively managed mutual funds, in general, underperform a passive benchmark; however, some recent studies find they, in fact, outperform the benchmark in bad economic states. I examine whether a state dependent risk shifting behavior of mutual fund managers contributes to this performance difference across states, and find supportive evidence. As shown in prior studies, the risk shifting behavior is motivated by a non-linear flow-performance relationship. Using a piece-wise linear regression, I demonstrate that the non-linearity exists mainly in good states; whereas in bad states, the flow-performance relationship is close to linear. Thus, non-zero risk shifting incentives are only expected in good states. I empirically measure these incentives in good states, and show that managers do react to the ``gambling'' (i.e., positive) incentives. In addition, higher ``gambling'' incentives are found to be associated with lower fund performance. The second essay, based on joint work with Hai Lu and Kevin Wang, examines how stock price shocks in the absence of public announcement of firm specific news affect future stock returns. We find that both large short term price drops and hikes are followed by negative abnormal returns over the subsequent twelve months. The pattern of asymmetric drifts, the return continuation for negative shocks versus the return reversal for positive shocks, is puzzling. We explore whether investor disagreement can explain the puzzle and find that the evidence is consistent with predictions of disagreement theory. Moreover, price shocks with public news disclosures are followed by weaker drifts, suggesting that reduction of information asymmetry from public disclosures mitigates disagreement-induced overpricing.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Family Studies and Human Services / Martin Seay / Retirement savings and income projections are among the most financially complex calculations individual Americans will encounter. The movement towards self-directed employer retirement plans has shifted the responsibility for securing an adequate retirement increasingly to the employee, who may lack the financial understanding needed for proper calculations and decisions. There is an expressed preference among employees for the delivery of financial education in the workplace, where a majority of their financial knowledge is obtained. However, adoption of workplace comprehensive financial education programs has been slow due to the cost, time commitment, and lack of empirical support for their value. While there have been some mixed findings, literature has generally supported associations between financial education programs and improved literacy and behaviors. A great deal of these mixed results can be explained by the lack of consistency among definitional frameworks for financial literacy, the lack of consistent measures, and the variety of topics and methods used, all of which limit the ability to establish causal support for the educational program’s effectiveness. However, the preference for financial education in the workplace among employees suggests both the need and desire for more comprehensive financial education offered by employers. The purpose of this research was to investigate and test the links between the components in the framework for financial literacy by testing participation in a worksite comprehensive financial education program. In Essay One, the link between financial education and change in financial literacy was tested. Essay Two tested the link between the financial education program and financial well-being. In Essay Three, the link between financial literacy and financial behavior was explored. The results indicated associations between all three links in the financial literacy model, utilizing both primary research employing quasi-experimental methods, and secondary research from a larger national data sample. For financial educators who are interested in developing and facilitating comprehensive financial education programs for employee or other groups, this research can help provide support and guidance for those efforts. If comprehensive financial education programs can be better positioned to help improve the levels of financial literacy among Americans, fewer negative associated behavioral effects, such as lack of planning and under saving for retirement, may occur.

Paying back student loans is a challenge for many Canadians. Seven female students who belong to the category of the first generation group shared their experience of student loan-debt. Since the amount of financial support is limited or unavailable, student loans are an option for those families who cannot provide financial support for their children to participate in higher education. This thesis deploys the experience of first generation women student loan borrowers as a part of the growing role of finances in higher education. It examines their stories of negotiation and challenges from the perspective of feminist social enquiry. Participants shared their present situation, future planning, and overall experience of taking student loans. Above all, this study attempts to explore those aspects of life of first generation females which are affected through the process of repaying student loans.

Paying back student loans is a challenge for many Canadians. Seven female students who belong to the category of the first generation group shared their experience of student loan-debt. Since the amount of financial support is limited or unavailable, student loans are an option for those families who cannot provide financial support for their children to participate in higher education. This thesis deploys the experience of first generation women student loan borrowers as a part of the growing role of finances in higher education. It examines their stories of negotiation and challenges from the perspective of feminist social enquiry. Participants shared their present situation, future planning, and overall experience of taking student loans. Above all, this study attempts to explore those aspects of life of first generation females which are affected through the process of repaying student loans.