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Finance Question
Question
Download non-financial company-level data for any country for the period of 2000-2019. Specifically, download the data for debt ratio, total assets, industry classification, profitability ratio, and tangibility ratio. You are required to:
Provide a descriptive statistic of your data and critically discuss the main findings.
Identify ‘one’ interesting factor from the literature of capital structure other than firm size, tangibility, profitability, and industry classification, that has shown to impact capital structure decisions. This can be a firm level or country level factor.
Critically discuss the relevance of this variable for capital structure decisions.
Conduct a regression analysis to examine the relationship of your variable of interest on capital structure by controlling for size, tangibility, profitability and industry and year effects. Critically discuss the findings of your analysis. Ensure you bring in arguments from previous studies to explain your results.
*Ensure you do trimming or winsorization if required.
Note: You have to exclude all financial companies as well as all utility companies.
Assessment criteria
Marking will take into account:
Whether you have been able to understand the task and conducted the analysis as described.
Whether you can interpret your results in light of previous literature.
Choice of literature (what type of journals you are referring to and how relevant they are)
Understanding of literature (whether you have a clear grasp of the literature in the area)
Quality of arguments (shows critical thinking, deep and thorough understanding, whether your arguments are systematically backed up by references)
Clarity of language (including spellings and grammar)
• Overall structure (including formatting and whether references to other works are accurately cited)
• Conclusion
Word Requirement: 1000 words. Note that your coursework will be processed through Turnitin for similarity checking. You can submit a draft of your coursework to Turnitin before submitting your final copy.
Formatting
You won’t be penalised if you don’t follow this good practice on formatting, but it will help your markers.
Use a Sans Serif font in black, e.g. Arial, Avant Garde, Calibri, Helvetica and Geneva.
Use font size 12.
Use 1.5 or double line spacing.
Align your text to the left margin.
Add page numbers.
Referencing and bibliography
You should reference your sources appropriately and list these in a bibliography. The bibliography is excluded from your word limit. You should use the ‘Harvard’ referencing system, as detailed below for written coursework.
In the text, use the following referencing conventions:
Smith (1999) argues that…. or
It has been argued that……. (Smith, 1999).
If you use a direct quote, use quotation marks and cite the page number as well as the author and date, i.e. (Smith, 1999, p. 4).
If you have two items by the same author in the same year, refer to one as ‘a’ and the other as ‘b’, i.e. Smith (1999a) and Smith (1999b).