This paper dives into the economic theory behind credit and lending markets to uncover the driving forces behind financial exclusion in modern finance. It breaks down the market size and demographic of the unbanked population in the United States and highlights the market failures and bad actors responsible for causing financial exclusion in credit markets. Finally, it introduces Zivoe Finance, a new approach to financial inclusion that is designed to expand affordable credit access across the globe. Zivoe is a decentralized credit protocol started in part by the authors of this paper that empowers anyone to fund affordable, inclusive loans in underserved financial sectors. The remainder of this paper is dedicated to understanding Zivoe Finance, how it works, the challenges the authors faced in building it, and how one can participate in its mission moving forward.

This paper dives into the economic theory behind credit and lending markets to uncover the driving forces behind financial exclusion in modern finance. It breaks down the market size and demographic of the unbanked population in the United States and highlights the market failures and bad actors responsible for causing financial exclusion in credit markets. Finally, it introduces Zivoe Finance, a new approach to financial inclusion that is designed to expand affordable credit access across the globe. Zivoe is a decentralized credit protocol started in part by the authors of this paper that empowers anyone to fund affordable, inclusive loans in underserved financial sectors. The remainder of this paper is dedicated to understanding Zivoe Finance, how it works, the challenges the authors faced in building it, and how one can participate in its mission moving forward.

This thesis explores the profitability of various technical trading strategies to explore their ability, generate returns in the American stock market. All strategies are based on five popular technical indicators, including the volume-weighted average price, moving average convergent-divergent index, Bollinger bands, support/resistance, and simple momentum trading. Most strategies were tested from 2019-2022 and tested for the SPY and QQQ stocks, representing the S&P 500 and NASDAQ. 3 of the 26 strategies had win rates of over 50%, but several were able to greatly outperform broader market returns. The best performing strategies were based on simple momentum trading, while the MACD and Bollinger Bands produced the worst results. Some strategies based on simple momentum trading or Bollinger bands found results greatly exceeding standard market returns in recent years, but most do not.

In 1991, Jay R. Ritter published a paper titled The Long-Run Performance of Initial Public Offerings. In this paper, he found that companies performing an initial public offering (IPO) significantly underperform in comparison to companies that have not issued stock over the previous 5 years. It was in this paper that Ritter made the observation that the first 6 months after IPO and SEO had the closest performance with their matching non-offering firms. This led me to several questions. First, since it has been over 25 years since this research was performed, is this phenomenon still relevant? Second, if this phenomenon is still relevant, does the first 6-month performance after IPO still align with matching firms? Third, if this phenomenon is still relevant, is there a potential arbitrage opportunity for short-term investors?
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.

As more countries move toward renewable energy sources, universal acceptance is only a matter of time. It is no longer a question of if, but of when. For now, these types of energy sources can be too expensive or too complex for the average homeowner to acquire. A considerable financial investment and logistical specifications are required. My goal for this project is to create an analysis that will convey the most efficient and cost-effective way to move to a solar energy system without sacrificing output. There are many factors that go into the most practical and efficient strategy. These may include: solar tax credits, subsidies, rebates, panel type, utility company, among others. I hope to create an analysis that will enable anyone interested in taking advantage of solar power. The process outlined here will permit subjects to determine the best option for them, based on personal preferences and other related mitigating factors.

In this dissertation, I examine the source of some of the anomalous capital market outcomes that have been documented for firms with high accruals. Chapter 2 develops and implements a methodology that decomposes a firm's discretionary accruals into a firm-specific and an industry-specific component. I use this decomposition to investigate which component drives the subsequent negative returns associated with firms with high discretionary accruals. My results suggest that these abnormal returns are driven by the firm-specific component of discretionary accruals. Moreover, although industry-specific discretionary accruals do not directly contribute towards this anomaly, I find that it is precisely when industry-specific discretionary accruals are high that firms with high firm-specific discretionary accruals subsequently earn these negative returns. While consistent with irrational mispricing or a rational risk premium associated with high discretionary accruals, these findings also support a transactions-cost based explanation for the accruals anomaly whereby search costs associated with distinguishing between value-relevant and manipulative discretionary accruals can induce investors to overlook potential earnings manipulation. Chapter 3 extends the decomposition to examine the role of firm-specific and industry-specific discretionary accruals in explaining the subsequent market underperformance and negative analysts' forecast errors documented for firms issuing equity. I examine the post-issue market returns and analysts' forecast errors for a sample of seasoned equity issues between 1975 and 2004 and find that offering-year firm-specific discretionary accruals can partially explain these anomalous capital market outcomes. Nonetheless, I find this predictive power of firm-specific accruals to be more pronounced for issues that occur during 1975 - 1989 compared to issues taking place between 1990 and 2004. Additionally, I find no evidence that investors and analysts are more overoptimistic about the prospects of issuers that have both high firm-specific and industry-specific discretionary accruals (compared to firms with high discretionary accruals in general). The results indicate no role for industry-specific discretionary accruals in explaining overoptimistic expectations from seasoned equity issues and suggest the importance of firm-specific factors in inducing earnings manipulation surrounding equity issues.