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CASE 1: GOALS AND GOVERNANCE.
Assuming you are the financial manager of a company recently taken over and you now discover is losing €100.000 a week. At the rate things are going, the company will not have any cash left in 6 months to pay its creditors. What are your goals as a financial manager? Explain
We want to know if there is a correlation between Housing Starts and National Unemployment Rate
You can find the data sets here. https://www.macrotrends.net/charts/economy
(1) Create a dataset showing Date / Housing Starts / Unemployment Rate
Screenshot and paste the dataset here
(2) Do a scatter plot of the data and screenshot and paste it here. Be sure to include (A) A tile and your name in the chart (B) the trendline and (C) The equation and R squared value in the chart.
(3) Explain in at least 4 sentences what your observation is of that data
We want to visualize the incidence rate, which is the total observations per 100,000 people to see the “Rate” of Crime per 100,000 people in the year 2019
(1) Download the data file for the global distribution of homicides here https://ourworldindata.org/homicides
Simply download the full data (CSV) file and paste a screenshot of that dataset here.
(2) Use datawrapper to create a “heat map” aka Choropleth map to visualize this data
Simply create a new chart, choose Choropleth and input the data for at least 50 countries
Be sure to include both (A) an appropriate Title and (B) Your full name as the creator
Go to the website of the US Federal Reserve and download the data for the annual percentage change of inflation from 1914 to 2022.
(1) Create a dataset of the annual CPI index and the CPI rate of change
Like this:
Date / CPI Index / CPI Rate of Change
1914 / 10.0 / 1.3%
1915 / ….Etc …. Etc…
Paste your excel work creating the dataset here:
(2) Create a chart that shows both data series using two different Y axis using excel
Be sure to include both (A) an appropriate Title and (B) Your full name as the creator of the chart and cite the Federal Reserve as the source of the data.
Paste that chart here.
You are asked by a fast food restaurant Henrietta’s Chicken Shack to give some summary statistics on customer wait times and then present that data in a table.
Use excel to input the following wait times
[5, 8, 6, 7, 4, 10, 2, 9, 3, 7, 6, 8, 1, 4, 3, 2, 5, 7, 9, 10, 4, 6, 8, 3, 5, 7, 1, 2, 9, 4]
(1) Calculate the summary statistics of time spent waiting
Min Wait Time
Max Wait Time
Mean Wait Time
Median Wait Time
Standard Deviation
Variance
(2) Screen shot your work and answers from excel here
(3) Input your data into Datawrapper and create a Table with (A) an appropriate Title and (B) Your full name in the data source
Case Study 7.1
Suppose you decide to start a company. Your product is a software platform that integrates a wide range of media devices, including laptop computers, desktop computers, digital video recorders, and cell phones. Your initial market is the student body at your university. Once you have established your company and set up procedures for operating it, you plan to expand to other colleges. At some point, you plan to go public with an IPO. With these issues in mind, you need to answer for yourself, and potential investors, the following questions.
What is an agency relationship? When you first begin operations, assuming you are the only employee and only your money is invested in the business, would any agency conflicts exist? Explain your answer.
If you expanded and hired additional people to help you, might that give rise to agency problems?
Suppose you need additional capital to expand and you sell some stock to outside investors. If you maintain enough stock to control the company, what type of agency conflict might occur?
Suppose your company raises funds from outside lenders. What type of agency costs might occur? How might lenders mitigate the agency costs?
What is corporate governance? List five corporate governance provisions that are internal to a firm and are under its control.
What characteristics of the board of directors usually lead to effective corporate governance?
How is it possible for an employee stock option to be valuable even if the firm’s stock price fails to meet shareholders’ expectations?
What is the possible agency conflict between inside owner/managers and outside shareholders? What are some possible agency conflicts between borrowers and lenders?
If you have a strong understanding of financial principles and reports, you’ll have a better chance at success. This is true whether you’re pursuing a career in finance or not. Financial management requires much more than analyzing accounting records. It’s important to note how financial data and calculations are used to support an organization’s work, finances, and decision making.
In this discussion, you’ll introduce yourself to the class and reflect on finance, your experience, and this course.
Create one initial post and follow up with at least two response posts.
For your initial post, address the following:
Please tell the class about yourself and your educational or professional background.
Have you ever used financial documents (such as tax returns and financial statements) to make a personal or business decision? Explain.
What terms or concepts come to mind when you think about finance?
What concerns or excites you about the course?
Please provide short responses to 4 discussions below
1. One of the largest impacts that human capital is involved with is talent retainment. The importance of recruiting and retaining talented goes beyond basic operational needs to the degree that it affects the longevity of the company (Cascio & Aguinis, 2019). Human resource teammates must identify open positions and whether they will fill these positions internally or externally. Many different organizations are attempting to streamline the employment process by using new technologies to interpret the exact skills, experience and educational requirements that are needed for success (Aggarwal et al., 2015). The purpose behind building up this process is to reduce costs and investments by better identifying what exactly a company needs staffing wise to be successful.
In addition to acquiring the talent, another facet is retaining the talent. An effective HR management system can emphasize the importance of building long-term relationships with employees and rewarding high performance (Boudreau et al, 2016). By focusing a building of relationships and valuing employees as more than a metric of operational success, one can develop a work culture that someone would want to keep a career with.
Understanding these concepts will be beneficial as a leader, as one cannot successfully operate without the appropriate work force. What I enjoy from this discussion is the application to my immediate career. We are currently working on reaching a full level of staffing, and what I am seeing is the desire from teammates to feel that they are more than just a number in our roster. Topics such as this discussion emphasize the importance of effective team building and development.