The research examines the effect of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics on return on sales (ROS), return on assets (ROA), and stock returns. It also identifies the challenges of past and future research in this area. The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) introduced industry-based disclosure for material sustainability issues in each sector. Using the 2014 and the 2018 SASB guidelines, I constructed a data set by mapping sustainability items classified as material to the ESG rating categories for each industry. I focused on the impact of material ESG scores on firm performance measured by accounting financial metrics and stock returns. Material ESG scores are calculated using SASB’s guidelines that identify industry-based disclosures and metrics it believes are most likely to be valuable for investors. SASB provides “material” ESG metrics that are expected to affect a firm’s cash flows, access to finance, and cost of capital. I found that consistent with KSY (2016) findings, material ESG scores based on the 2014 SASB guideline for six sectors and 45 industries are significantly and positively associated with future accounting performance measured by ROS and ROA. However, material ESG scores defined based on the 2018 SASB guidelines with 11 sectors and 77 industries are not significantly related to future accounting performance.Further analysis suggested that the insignificant results are driven by the five newly added sectors under the 2018 SASB guideline. Interestingly, material ESG scores defined based on the original 2014 SASB and the updated 2018 SASB guideline are significant predictors of future stock returns. These results have implications for financial regulators, asset managers, and individual firms committed to integrating sustainability (ESG) metrics in their capital allocation decisions. / Business Administration/Finance

ABSTRACTIn recent ten years, especially after the financial crisis, more and more equipment manufacturing industries have begun engaging in leasing business. Because of its promotion function, Financial Leasing has a direct influence on both sales revenue and accounts receivable. This study, covering listed equipment manufacturers from 2008 to 2019, examines the impact of Financial Leasing on sales revenue, accounts receivable and the quality of accounts receivable. In this paper, theoretical analysis and empirical analysis are used, including panel regression model and factor analysis. Firstly, related literatures are reviewed, encompassing the basic theories of Financial Leasing, the relationship between Financial Leasing and sales revenue, as well as accounts receivable. Then, the background of Financial Leasing and equipment manufacturing industry in China are outlined. Furthermore, with the regression model, the relationship between Financial Leasing and sales revenue is analyzed. By constructing a series of evaluation index of accounts receivable, factor analysis is employed to measure the quality of accounts receivable, comparing companies engaged in leasing with those that are not. The findings lead to some policy recommendations. The main conclusions are as follows: Firstly, Financial Leasing has a positive and significant impact on sales revenue in China’s equipment manufacturing industry, indicating its effective promotion effect in this sector. From the results of sub-sectors, Financial Leasing has a positive and significant impact on the manufacture of computer, communication and other electronic equipment, manufacture of railway equipment, ships, aerospace equipment and other transport equipment, manufacture of general purpose machinery, but this impact is not significant in the manufacture of metal products, motor vehicles, special purpose machinery, and measuring instrument and meter. Secondly, by establishing a series of indicators to measure the quality of accounts receivable, it is found that finance leasing can significantly improve the quality of accounts receivable in the equipment manufacturing industry as indicated in the consolidated statement. When equipment manufacturers utilize financial leasing to promote their products, they can not only promote product sales but also expedite cash flow. Additionally, manufacturers using financial leasing have smaller bad debt losses and shorter receivable aging. Meanwhile, the quality of accounts receivable is better in automobile manufacturing and instrument and meter manufacturing industries, which is closely related to the development of financial leasing in these industries in recent years. Key Words: Financial Leasing, leasing, manufacturing, sales revenue, accounts receivable, factor analysis / Business Administration/Finance

The trading range of a security is the difference between the high and low recorded price over some time interval. Prior theoretical research has shown that the trading range of a security contains more information about the security's variance than does the return. These results were derived under the restrictive assumption that prices follow a geometric diffusion process. A growing body of research suggests the geometric diffusion process does not sufficiently describe security returns. A number of alternative return-generating processes have been proposed in recent years, and in many cases these alternative processes have been empirically shown to describe security returns better than the geometric diffusion process. This dissertation focuses on the statistical properties of the trading range when security returns are not generated by a geometric diffusion process. Five alternative processes are considered: A binomial random walk, an autoregressive random walk, a mixture of normal distributions, a mixture of binomial distributions, and a stable law model. For each of these processes, a closed-form solution to the distribution of the trading range is derived. Using historical data for Treasury Bond and SP500 futures contracts, goodness-of-fit techniques are employed in order to determine which models best explain observed trading ranges. Results show that the geometric diffusion process does not describe returns well, and that a mixture distribution is a more suitable candidate. The variance of a security's return-generating process is an important unobservable variable. Several researchers have devised ways to use the trading range to estimate the variance of a security when the security's returns follow a constant-variance diffusion process. In this dissertation, those results are extended to allow variance estimation under less restrictive assumptions about the underlying process. Results show that the binomial random walk model provides the most accurate forecasts of variance. Results also provide support for prior research that indicates a security's variance is not stationary through time.

Futures and options markets offer various economic functions. Futures markets have been shown to offer price discovery, asset management and risk management services. Options markets provide similar price discovery and risk management alternatives. In addition, options markets provide a market based estimate of the underlying asset's implied volatility. In the finance literature implied volatility has been employed, in various ways: (1) forecasting future cash market volatility, (2) testing the efficiency of the options markets, and (3) measuring the effect of macroeconomics releases on changes in market and firm volatility. This study contains three essays which extend previous research in implied volatility. The existence of non-stationarity in investors' desired risk premia remains a central topic in financial research. Chapter 1 gives a brief introduction to the study. Chapter 2 reviews the related recent literature. In Chapter 3 implied volatilities are used to investigate empirically the volatility risk premium of S&P 500 Index options. In addition we test for the effects of endogenous and exogenous variables in explaining the volatility risk premium during varying periods of expected uncertainty. In Chapter 4 various statistical methods (ARCH, GARCH) are analyzed and used to test the additional information content of implied volatility on S&P 500 options that are not captured by lagged market variances. Finally previous research has suggested a relationship between expected return and relative expected risk. Under these theoretical models expected asset return should reflect expected risk. In Chapter 5 a test for effectiveness of implied volatility as a basis for market timing decisions between stock and bond markets has been conducted.

This paper reviews the adoption gap between mobile point-of-sale (POS) in China and the United States and explores the relationship between economic fluctuations, technical innovation, and mobile payment adoption. We conduct empirical analysis from two distinct perspectives: the industrial and macroeconomic. Using panel data collected from reliable sources such as the United Nations, International Monetary Fund, and audited annual financial reports, we investigate two sets of correlations between: mobile point-of- sale payment adoption and a country's macroeconomic, and mobile point-of-sale payment adoption performance and technical progress. Our regression models and robustness test models reveal that the performance of capital markets and the operating proficiency of mobile payment companies have significant impacts on the mobile point-of-sale payment industry's performance in the sample countries. Furthermore, our findings show a statistical significance between mobile point-of-sale payment adoption among the sample countries' populations and their GDP. / Global Finance

This paper is mainly based on the rapid economic development that China has achieved in the 40 years of reform and opening up since 1978, and the wealth owned by Chinese residents is getting better and better. Because Deng Xiaoping once put forward the initiative of letting some capable people get rich first, the wealth of some Chinese has increased exponentially. With the increasing wealth of residents, and the influence of the financial industry and wealth management concepts, the main body of financial awareness of Chinese residents has awakened, and the demand for wealth management professionalism is increasing. China is now the world's second largest wealth management market. Based on this, this paper comprehensively analyzes the formation and development process of the wealth management market with bank wealth management as the main body from the perspective of the domestic macro environment and domestic demand. Including securities company asset management, public funds, private equity funds, custodial asset management and trust industries. At the same time, the development and prospects of China's wealth management industry market are analyzed. This paper focuses on the analysis of the impact of the development of wealth management on the financial industry, and discusses the impact of the development of bank wealth management, private equity, public offering, fund custody, securities company asset management, insurance and trust on the financial industry. This paper verifies the above argument through the actual analysis of the impact of the development of the wealth management market on the operation of financial institutions. The paper concludes with: 1.Strengthening the construction of the evolution system of the financial ecosystem plays an important role in accelerating the construction of the basic economy and improving the level of the regional economy. 2. It is an important measure to promote economic development to improve the policy arrangements for the innovation mechanism of the financial ecosystem, improve the reform of the financial mechanism, and optimize the financial ecological structure. 3. It is of great significance for the development of wealth management to improve the construction of a soft environment for the evolution of the financial ecosystem, accelerate the development of financial intermediaries, and improve the financial level. / Global Finance

The use of jewelry and jade and the jade culture has a history of thousands of years in China. They were regarded as exclusive luxuries only available to nobles in ancient times. Luxurious jewelry and jade represented by diamonds have entered the homes of ordinary people since the 1980s as a result of the development of the national economy and the growth of people's income after the continuous implementation of China's reform and opening up. The past studies by Chinese researchers on the diamond industry paid more attention to consumption, processing technology, policy support, and marketing and seldom identified problems in the development of the diamond industry from the perspective of industrial development. Little literature deals with the future demand and development prospects of the diamond industry from the perspective of industry clusters. Moreover, the collaborative innovation activities within industry clusters cannot thrive without financial support. While academia has made some research achievements in this area, a study in depth on the current status and the improvement strategies about the financial efficiency for collaborative innovation by industry clusters has not been conducted yet.Based on a review of the related literatures and theories about the collaborative innovation by industry clusters and financial support, this study conducts empirical analysis on listed companies of the lab-growth diamond industry cluster in Henan, China, with the DEA model that measures the relative efficiency of input, showing that the efficiency of the sample cluster companies has kept improving in general from 2017 to 2021, and the level of collaborative innovation in the cluster was also increasing. However, there is a large room for improvement in terms of the absolute value of efficiency. A typical example is their pure technical efficiency fell behind the improvement in the scale of efficiency. Accordingly, the dissertation proposes appropriate measures and recommendations aimed at accelerating the improvement of financial service system, which is of practical significance for facilitating the dual progress and development of both the industry clusters and the financial sector. The financial needs of industry clusters are different from those of individual enterprise. To promote effective collaborative innovation in industry clusters, it is necessary to provide innovative and targeted financial service products and enhance the quality of financial services for collaborative innovation in industry clusters with various development stages and development focuses. / Global Finance

Thesis (M.A. (Research Psychology))--University of Pretoria, 2003.

Thesis (M.B.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1955. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [304]-313).