CSB Commentary
Behavioral Finance:Two Cases of Stock Price Manipulation
By Nguyen Nguyen–On November 6th, the financial world was flooded with news of the indictment of a man using Twitter to manipulate stock market prices. It rang the bells of behavioral finance: noise trading, overreaction, and psychological biases. It is not new that individual investors “trade on noise as if it were information”(Black, 1986). However,…
Read MoreA Mathematical Gem from Euler
By Dr. Hassan Shirvani–The Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707–1783) is widely considered as one of the greatest mathematicians who ever lived. He made fundamental and path-breaking contributions to many areas of mathematics and physics. In the following example, Euler displays the inspired ease with which he managed to crack some of the most difficult mathematical…
Read MoreCan There Be Too Much Finance?
By Dr. Pierre Canac –Finance certainly plays an indispensable and positive role in promoting economic growth and overall employment. However there is some evidence that the relationship between financial development and GDP growth is not linear, but instead has an inverse U-shape. As the size of the financial sector gets larger, at first GDP growth…
Read MoreThe Satisfaction and Stress of Being a Market Maven: A Social Network Perspective
By Dr. Shouyang Zhang— Who are Market Mavens? Market mavens are “individuals who have information about many kinds of products, places to shop, and other facets of markets, and initiate discussions with consumers and respond to requests from consumers for market information” (Feick and Price, 1987, p. 85). Market mavens are information transfer agents and…
Read MoreA Critique of Behavioral Finance
By Dr. Hassan Shirvani—The recent global financial crisis has raised serious questions about the rationality of the securities markets. In rational markets, prices tend to closely track their fundamental values, so that there is little or no chance of getting price bubbles. During the run-up to the recent crisis, however, many asset prices, including those in the housing sector, seemingly deviated from their correct values, resulting in subsequent financial crashes around…
Read MoreCreating Firm Value as a Team: A New Case Study From Turkey
By Dr. Gulfem Bayram–Executive compensation has been one of the most researched topics in business literature. There is even a sub-discipline within corporate finance that investigates corporate governance and executive compensation issues. Finance literature reports that corporate governance and executive compensation practices are closely related to firm value. While there are many different perspectives to…
Read MoreEconomic Inequality in America
By Dr. Hassan Shirvani–The impressive body of empirical evidence recently furnished by the French economist Thomas Piketty and his associates clearly demonstrates that there is a worsening trend of income and wealth inequality in America. This trend, in effect since the beginning of the 19th century, managed to take a breather in the first half of the…
Read MoreMarketing Lessons from the Beach
By Dr. John Story–I am sometimes amazed at what I can learn during a day at the beach. Watching crowds of people walk down the beach collecting shells reminded me of some of the challenges of marketing. In particular, I thought about what I call the curse of abundance. (https://theresagreen2.wordpress.com/sotogrande/paraje-natural-lagoon-beach-guadiaro-estuary/the-reserve-in-december/) COCKLE SHELLS Cockle shells…
Read MoreDefining Moments: Building Character One Decision at a Time
By Dr. Michele Simms—–We love reading the classics or watching classic films because of what they teach us about ourselves and about life; they are timeless gateways to authenticity. When we return to them years later, we continue to pull from the meaning of their deeper message. The HBR generates a list of its classic…
Read MoreTools of the Trade: A Day in My Tech Life
By Dr. Jack Follis—Earlier this week Apple announced their latest iPods. As someone who uses their iPod Touch on an almost daily basis, and as a tech geek, I have been waiting for this announcement for the past year. While trying to decide if I should upgrade, I began thinking about the tech products I…
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