Liberia, Africa's oldest democracy, has made several efforts in becoming a developed economy and ending poverty, but these efforts have been hampered by lack of appropriate financing mechanisms to achieve this goal. The most recent challenge which was the purpose of this study was to understand how Liberia can finance and achieve the sustainable development goals adopted by the United Nations in September 2015. Despite substantial external aid, Liberia was only able to meet 3 out of the 8 Millennium Development Goals, and more than 60% of the population remain extremely poor. The main research question was to understand what policy shifts are need for Liberia to finance its post-2015 development goals. Using Kingdon's multiple streams theory as the lens, a qualitative case study design was used to analyze literature, public reports, government reports, and the loosely-structured interviews of 15 purposefully-selected participants. The interview data were coded and categorized for thematic analysis. Results reveal that Liberia needs to make a policy shift in key areas including domestic resource mobilization, natural resource governance, combating corruption, strengthening the justice system, strengthening capacity for policy processes, and improving political leadership. The positive social change implication of this study includes recommendations for policymakers, the Ministry of Finance, and the donor community to strengthen domestic resource mobilization and undertake pro-poor tax reforms in order to reduce aid dependence, support Liberia's long-term plan to eradicate extreme poverty and become a middle-income country by 2030.

Corporate social responsibility is presently defined by the World Business Council of Sustainable Development as persistent commitment by businesses to behave ethically and contribute to economic development while also increasing the quality of life of employees, their families, and the community. Guided by Freeman's stakeholder theory, this study examined the relationship between corporate social responsibility and the Nigerian bankers' reported satisfaction with the Nigerian banking sector. Survey data were collected from a convenience sample of 99 Nigerian bankers, including branch managers, zonal managers, tellers, marketers, and investors. A single-stage sampling procedure was used to elicit their satisfaction with the Nigerian banking sector and their perceptions of corporate social responsibility. Corporate social responsibility was conceptualized as a composite variable, with dependent sub-variables of ethics, human rights, and employee rights. A Pearson's r correlation test indicated a significant relationship between corporate social responsibility and Nigerian banker satisfaction (p < .05). These findings suggest that a majority of Nigerian bankers are satisfied with the banking sector which they feel, overall, behaves in a socially responsible way, although they also noted concerns related to insider abuse and a lack of transparency among internal processes. Implications for positive social change include informing policy makers and regulatory agencies in Nigeria about changes to public policy and the regulatory banking environment about risks associated with insider abuse and other internal processes in the banking industry that may damage efforts to improve corporate social responsibility with the goal of enhancing economic development in Nigeria.

The significant problem addressed in this research was the increasing default rate among federal student loan borrowers who attended non-degree-granting proprietary colleges in Florida (i.e., career and technical colleges). The purpose of this study was to identify, better understand, and predict which borrower characteristics increased the likelihood of student loan default at proprietary non-degree-granting colleges. The research was based on the structural-functional and planned behavior theories and utilized a quantitative, non-experimental, cross-sectional design to explore the relationship between academic success, age, college graduation status, ethnicity, gender, high school class ranking, and federal student loan default. Self-reported data were obtained from students who attended private, for-profit, less than 2-year colleges in Florida. To determine which student borrower characteristics predicted an increase in the likelihood that borrowers would default on their student loan payments, one hypothesis was proposed to evaluate six borrower characteristics. Logistic regression analysis was used to explore the statistical relationships and found that academic success, age, and gender were statistically significant in predicting student loan default among students who attended private, for-profit, less than 2-year colleges in Florida. This study may facilitate positive social change by aiding educational institutions in identifying at-risk borrower characteristics and by providing various default prevention strategies that could be incorporated into specific counseling messages to reduce future student loan defaults and lower institutional cohort default ratings.

This paper examines the effect of the mandatory adoption of the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) on transparency for investors by measuring the increase in earnings management during the post-adoption period of IFRS. One sign of earnings management is current year earnings being only slightly higher than the previous year’s earnings. An increase in earnings management means a decrease in accounting quality and a decrease of transparency for investors. By comparing firms that mandatorily adopted IFRS to similar benchmark firms in terms of strength of legal enforcement, book-to-market ratios, market values and net incomes, I am able to run empirical regressions examining variables of growth, equity issuance, leverage, debt issuance, turnover, size, cash flow, and time period in order to determine the effect of the adoption on IFRS on earnings growth. After looking at 516 firms from 20 countries for the years of 2002-2007, I conclude that IFRS is decreasing financial reporting quality and decreasing transparency for the investing public, and therefore is not accomplishing its goal of bringing efficiency, accountability, and transparency to global financial markets.

Liquidity risk is a large issue faced by mutual funds. Large funds typically trade in size, and these large sizes often have a significant impact on prices. My hypothesis is that large funds will not invest in illiquid assets as much as smaller funds due to the price sensitivity of illiquid assets. While this seems obvious, the results from this study are not in agreement with this hypothesis. My paper finds that as the illiquidity of a stock increases, so does the probability that a large fund invests in the stock.

In this thesis, I analyze the effect that a professional sports team has on its local real estate values. Using data from 2005-2016, I use an OLS regression to analyze two aspects of professional sports that could affect home values; presence of a team, and success of a team. I find that there is no significant correlation between presence of a team and increase in home values. However, statistically significant at the 1% level, I find that a 1 unit increase in winning percentage leads to a .0216 unit increase in percent change of home value. These results indicate that professional sports have a significant effect on home values, but it is more important for the team to be successful than to merely have a team.

This paper uses regression analysis on a national data set from the United States from 2001-2016 to analyze racial or ethnic group disparities in home ownership between whites and blacks, Asian and Pacific Islanders, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Mexicans, other Hispanics and American Indians. I employ Integrated Public Use Microdata combined with Bureau of Labor Statistics data and Federal Reserve Economic Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Controlling for demographic, educational, income and wealth, employment and housing characteristics, I find no significant differences between whites and Asian and Pacific Islanders, Mexicans and American Indians. However, blacks, Puerto Ricans, Cubans and other Hispanics face racial disadvantages in regard to home ownership. All minority racial or ethnic groups, except American Indians, lost home ownership parity to whites from 2007-2011, the years primarily affected by the economic crisis.

In the past two decades the Latin American region has experienced a number of credit crises stemming from large sovereign debt levels and sharp currency devaluations. This study aims to discover whether or not the sovereign credit default swaps (CDS) in the Latin American region lead equity markets prior to these sovereign credit events. Through a sample of the seven largest Latin American economies and daily return data from 2001 to 2018, I try to empirically test this question through a Generalized Least Squared model. The paper finds little significant evidence of CDS leading equity markets in price discovery prior to sovereign credit events. Additionally, the paper observes a potential momentum effect present amongst Latin American equity market returns. However, this effect is more likely serial correlation amongst equity market returns due to the illiquidity of these equity markets.

Many past literatures have examined the predictive power of implied volatility versus that of historical volatility, but they have showed divergent conclusions. One of the major differences among these studies is the methods that they used to obtain implied volatility. The VIX index, introduced in 1993, provides a model-free and directly observable source of implied volatility data. The VIX futures is an actively traded VIX derivative product, and its prices are believed to contain market’s expectation about future volatility. By analyzing the relationship between the VIX futures prices and the realized volatilities of the 30-day period that these VIX futures contracts cover, this paper finds that the VIX futures contracts with shorter maturities have predictive power on future realized volatility, but they are upwardly biased estimates. The predictive power, however, decreases as the time to maturity increases. The outstanding VIX futures contracts with the nearest expiration dates outperform GARCH estimates based on historical return data at predicting future realized volatility.

This paper investigates the reliability of the stock market’s initial reaction to M&A announcements as a predictor of actual post-acquisition performance. The two prevailing methods for evaluating M&A performance are event studies (stock market-based measures) and accounting-based measures. The present study combines these two performance evaluation approaches in a single empirical examination. Both the post-merger buy-and-hold abnormal returns and changes in ROA are used as actual post-acquisition performance variables. The acquirer’s cumulative abnormal return (CAR) around the announcement is used as the market predictor variable. An econometric model is employed to test the predictive power of the announcement-period CAR on the actual performance variables using a sample of 3,208 acquisitions by U.S. public companies from 2010 to 2014. This paper’s main contribution lies both in its methodology and its findings: on the one hand, long-term market and accounting variables are used as dependent variables measuring post-acquisition performance. On the other hand, this paper finds that short-term CAR is not a good predictor of subsequent M&A performance. The results suggest that the acquirer’s prior M&A experience is a positive predictor of post-acquisition performance.