I will begin my paper by briefly describing the background which led to this paper, as well as stating my thesis. Next, I will define the term terrorism and explain the difference between it and the associated terms of insurgency and guerrilla warfare. Further, I will briefly go over the history of terrorism and the methods employed by terrorist organizations. After this introductory element, I will proceed to explore how terrorism has been funded in the past and how it is being funded at present. Lastly, I will present an overview of future methods of financing and make a proposal as to how the United States and the rest of the world could possibly disrupt these forms of financing. This paper is not intended to be comprehensive in nature, as this would be too large in scope, but rather use specific examples to illustrate certain methods and uses of terrorist financing

Every year, major companies buy Super Bowl advertisements (‘ads’) to fuel growth through the creation of brand awareness among a large, diverse audience. Although measuring the effectiveness of these marketing tactics is difficult, evaluating the abnormal returns (‘alpha’) of company stocks in the five days following the Super Bowl is effective because it provides insight into how actual returns compare to expected returns (calculated using data from the preceding 250 days). Analysis of a comprehensive sample, which includes all Super Bowl ads for public companies between the years 2015 and 2019, accurately demonstrates the relationship between these returns, illustrating the effectiveness of this type of marketing. To account for variation resulting from different inputs in different financial models, it is important to evaluate alpha based on several, reputable models of expected return to best capture the result. In this study, alpha will be analyzed using the Capital Asset Pricing Model (‘CAPM’) and the Fama and French 3 and 5 factor models. Although the ideology that increased marketing improves stock returns through brand awareness suggests a positive alpha, these models all indicate a statistically significant negative alpha for large, public companies who bought Super Bowl ads over the past five years. Therefore, actual returns, on average, are lower than projected returns for the evaluated five-day window following the Super Bowl. In examining alpha and statistical significance according to these financial models, this thesis will explore different market factors that may explain this counterintuitive result, primarily focusing on the investors’ opinions about this type of marketing. Therefore, in researching various discrepancies contributing to the negative alpha result, this study will accurately assess the effectiveness of Super Bowl advertising in terms of stock performance.

The sense making process is a part of our everyday lives. The way we make sense of the world around us can have a big factor in our ability to make judgments and decisions. That is why it is important to establish a valid model in which we can run through the thought process that allows us to come with high quality solutions to problems in an efficient manner. Once I have established this model and given examples on how it operates, I will move onto potential impediments. Impediment are biases that can hinder us from running through the sense making process in an efficient manner. These impediments can vary from affecting our previous knowledge to affecting our ability to process new information. The end result of these impediments when effective means they have negatively impacted our ability to rationally make decisions. This can cause the overall quality of solutions provided by the sense making process to be degraded. After I have discussed the most relevant impediments to this process, I will begin to discuss external factors such as complexity, dynamism, and uncertainty. These external factors can directly affect the validity of our sense making process, as well as empower the impediments to do more damage than what was possible before. I will discuss how the external factors operate, and their individual ability to affect the sense making process and impediments. Finally, I will conclude this thesis by taking the research I have done so far and apply it to how we make sense of financial markets. This will involve analyzing how we make decisions with regards to the stock market, and how external factors and our impediments can impact the validity of those decisions made. Finally, I will summarize my findings, and discuss the biggest factors that impact the sense making process.

When making investment decisions many different indicators are taken into consideration before picking a stock/corporation to invest in (retail or institutional). Traditionally these indicators tend to be financial measures such as earnings per share, price to earnings ratio, price to book value ratio, dividend yield/payout ratio, etc. Often these indicators do not take into consideration the actual running intricacies of a company as they are simply based on historical financial statements, thus limiting an investor's decision-making ability. In this paper I analyze several companies stock performance to see if analyzing operational factors such as supply chain management before making an investment decision would have resulted in a profitable investment and thus prove as a reliable investment indicator. To do this I focused my analysis over a period of 5 years on two companies within three different industries; Fast Food, Processing, and Ecommerce. These industries were selected as the nature of their businesses require intensive supply chains thus this strategy would be most applicable to them as opposed to a software or IT company. Of the two companies selected from each respective industry one company would be listed/analyzed in Gartner's ranking of the "Annual Supply Chain Top 25" while the other company would not be. This Gartner ranking would serve as a measure of whether or not a company had a good supply chain. These companies then had their traditional financial metrics evaluated to see if supply chain analysis indirectly encapsulated some of these metrics as well. The goal of this analysis was to find if there was a strong correlation between companies listed on Gartner's rating scale and strong stock performance. If this was true this would suggest that there is a benefit to be captured by investors through using supply chain analysis as an indicator when making investment decisions.

The goal of this paper is to document a relation between the price of a company's stock and release of public information. I examine how accounting scandals and earnings reports change the price of a company's stock. I run my data through EVENTUS and check for statistical significance. If there is a statistical significance, then it can be stated that accounting information matters. The test results from my study revealed that there was no statistical significance between accounting scandal and stock market prices but there did exist a positive correlation between surprise earning announcements and stock market prices.

The pharmaceutical industry is heavily regulated. This regulation results in a high number of recalls in this industry compared to other industries. The pharmaceutical industry is subject to high regulation because of the harmful effects pharmaceuticals can have on consumers. In this paper I examine the valuation effects that a drug recall has on both the recalling firm and the recalling firm's rivals. I perform an event study analysis on the data. I show that there exists a statistically significant negative effect for a drug recall on the recalling firm's market value immediately surrounding the announcement. Additionally, there is a statistically significant positive effect for a drug recall on the recalling firm's rivals after the announcement.