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.
Fantasy football is a game derived from America’s National Football League and involves players managing “teams” of fantasy football players. Given that the game contains elements of value, risk, and reward, this project aims to draw parallels between fantasy football and Modern Portfolio Theory, a well-regarded theory describing portfolio construction and performance in financial markets. This hypothesis is tested through a simulation of the 2019 – 2020 fantasy football season using this strategy; a sample team is generated, the team is adjusted as per the rules outlined in the risk-reducing and value-preserving strategy, and the results are tabulated per the team’s fantasy football scoring output. The results show that a volatility-reducing strategy fails to achieve a consistent, good performance from the fantasy team portfolio, but can result in a relatively successful season. Key issues to consider in this outcome are the low volume of data, the high volatility and situational nature of the underlying statistics from which fantasy scoring is derived, and the inefficiency of financial markets. The value of this research demonstrates that strict algorithmic, numerical, or technical methods are insufficient to succeed in fantasy football, and that information availability, access, and speed, along with a significant allotment of luck, are needed to succeed. The implication for the financial field is that the rules and theories formulated for it are based on certain crucial assumptions such as a centralized supply and demand for securities, an objective theory of value, and efficiency of markets, which cannot be translated directly to fantasy football.
In this paper, I show that this phenomenon of underperformance is still relevant today for initial public offerings within the technology sector. Additionally, I show that the 6-month performance for IPOs no longer aligns with matching firm performance. The mean performance of companies performing IPOs is significantly less than their matching firms. The average 6-month return of IPO companies was -8.43%, versus an average return of 16.46% for matching firms within the same industry and an average return of 24.22% for matching firms in different industries. Finally, I discuss the potential arbitrage opportunity for short-term investors looking to capitalize on this performance disparity.
Chandler Unified School District (CUSD), a large school system in Arizona that serves 45,000 students from preschool through high school, has been unable to escape similar structural and frictional inequities within its schools. One instance of a racially charged student performance at Santan Middle School motivated CUSD to take a more immediate look at equity in the district. It is during this response that our team of New Venture Group consultants engaged with Matt Strom, Assistant Superintendent of CUSD, in analyzing the important question of “how CUSD can take steps towards closing equity gaps within the district?”
CUSD defines an equity gap as any difference in student opportunity, achievement, discipline, attendance, etc. contributable to a student’s ethnicity, gender, or socioeconomic status. Currently, certain student populations in CUSD perform vastly different academically and receive different opportunities within schools, but as was our problem statement, CUSD is aiming to reduce (and eventually close) these gaps.
Our team approached this problem in three phases: (1) diagnosis, (2) solution creation, and (3) prevention. In phase one, we created a dashboard to help principals easily and visually identify gaps by toggling parameters on the dashboard. Phase two focused on the generation of recommendations for closing gaps. To achieve this goal, a knowledge of successful gap-closing strategies will be paired with the dashboard. In our final phase, the team of consultants created a principal scorecard to ensure equity remains a priority for principals.
