Tag: Accounting and Finance

Project Description

Based on the Trinity study from the 1990s, it is common for financial planners to use as a baseline that retirees can safely spend 4% of their nest egg each year and run little risk of outliving their money. This implicitly assumes the retiree is not legacy minded and is comfortable spending the corpus of the nest egg. Our study will aim to ask how much a retiree can spend each year and run little risk of touching the corpus. We also aim to update the investment assumptions of the Trinity study to include both updated stock/bond returns from the 21st century as well as potentially consider other “alternative” asset classes that have become more popular.

Prerequisites

Passion for personal finance a must, as well as basic proficiency using Microsoft excel.

Special Comments

Project Information (subject to change)

Estimated Start Date: 6/2/2025

Estimated End Date: 8/8/2025

Estimated Project Duration: 10 weeks

Maximum Number of Students Sought: 3

Research Location: Remote

Contact Information: Joey Smith (email: jsmith3@wlu.edu)

Project Description

Following the Covid pandemic school shutdowns, school districts began announcing plans for reopening during the summer of 2020. Plans included full reopening with in-person class, remote learning only, and hybrid formats. The reopening status of school districts affected local labor markets as families with school age children balanced hours allocated to work with childcare needs as well as the level of human capital investment in the local labor market. Firms utilize labor as an input in production, exposing firms to the risk that school reopening plans affected local labor productivity. The purpose of this project is to explore how stock prices reacted to the news that school districts adopted a particular reopening policy, and subsequently to explore how stock price reactions are correlated with future educational outcomes. Students will search for data on educational outcomes (including but not limited to reading and math scores, graduation rates, and attendance) at the district level from 2019 to 2024 and match the data at the geographic level to firm financial and socio-economic data. The project may require searching for and reading academic articles in education and finance (with an emphasis on the event study literature). For a short application of event studies, see Yousaf and Goodell (2023) ìResponses of US Equity market sectors to the Silicon Valley Bank implosionî Finance Research Letters 55. For background on the pandemic and labor supply, see Garcia and Cowan (2022) ìThe impact of school and childcare closures on labor market outcomes during the covid-19 pandemic.î Technical report, National Bureau of Economic Research.

Prerequisites

Required prerequisite: Students should be comfortable organizing and manipulating data in Excel.

Special Comments

Suggested prerequisites: At least one previous course in statistics and knowledge of or a willingness to learn software such as SAS or Stata would be helpful.

Project Information (subject to change)

Estimated Start Date: 6/2/2025

Estimated End Date: 7/11/2025

Estimated Project Duration: 6 weeks

Maximum Number of Students Sought: 1

Research Location: Remote

Contact Information: Sara Holland (email: sholland@wlu.edu)