Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection

This thesis will be exploring the situation of one of the most vulnerable groups during the COVID-19 pandemic, low-income renters. As businesses and whole states were shutdown, jobs and wages were lost and the over 100 million renters in the United States, many of whom spend a significant chunk of their income on their rent, were forced into a precarious situation. <br/><br/>The Federal Rent Moratorium that is currently in effect bars any evictions for missed rent payments, but these are expenses that if left unpaid, are just continuously accruing. These large sums of rent payments are currently scheduled to be dropped on struggling individuals at the end of the recently extended date of June 30th, 2021. As these renters are unable to pay for their housing, landlords lose the revenue streams from their investment properties, and are in turn unable to cover the debt service on the financing they utilized to acquire the property. In turn, financial institutions can then face widespread defaults on these loans.<br/><br/>The rental property market is massive, as roughly 34% of the American population consist of renters. If left unaddressed, this situation has the potential to cause cataclysmal consequences on the economy, including mass homelessness and foreclosures of rental properties and complexes. Everyone, from the tenants to the bankers and beyond, are stakeholders in this dire situation and this paper will seek to explore the issues, desires, and potential solutions applicable to all parties involved. Beginning with the pre-pandemic outlook of the rental housing market, then examining the impact of the coronavirus and the resulting federal actions, to finally explore solutions that may prevent or mitigate this potential disaster.

This thesis explores the benefits of tax loss harvesting by examining the time period from 1999-2000 to determine the potential profits investors could realize from utilizing this strategy. The first step to accomplishing this was to collect data from the past 20-plus years from the SPDR S&P 500 Exchange Traded Fund (SPY) and its 11 sectors: Energy (XLE), Consumer Staples (XLP), Consumer Discretionary (XLY), Communication Services (XLC), Real Estate (XLRE), Technology (XLK), Utilities (XLU), Materials (XLB), Industrials (XLI), Financials (XLF), and Health Care (XLV). The next step was to clean the data from hundreds of months of opening prices, closing prices, and quarterly dividends into an annual opening price and total annual dividends to calculate a rate of return. Finally, I found the weightings of the S&P 500 and its sectors on January 1st of every year and input this data into a model whose output reflected the growth of a portfolio with and without the use of tax loss harvesting. Once this model was created, I determined the benefits of tax loss harvesting in the present and the value of carrying these losses forward. The outcomes of this thesis solely reflect the benefits of using tax loss harvesting through a passive investment strategy. This research will enrich academic and professional understandings of tax loss harvesting through its clear demonstration of how much tax loss carryforward can be accessed, as well as the opportunity for gains from compounding interest on previous tax savings due to tax loss harvesting.

This honors thesis for Barrett, the Honors College at Arizona State University provides an analysis of a leveraged buyout (LBO) of Foot Locker. This thesis serves to demonstrate how a fictional private equity firm would acquire a company through an LBO. The project provides insight onto what private equity firms do, the background of Foot Locker, and an industry analysis on the sector that Foot Locker operates in. The thesis looks to provide a deeper understanding of the fair value of Foot Locker using a discounted cash flow (DCF) analysis, comparable company analysis, and precedent transaction analysis. Included is a pitchbook, the DCF model, and LBO model.