ABSTRACT
Stock Markets and Corporate Finance: A Primer examines the nature of the stock market and its implications for corporate management. In the historical context of financial institutions and business finance, students are stimulated to learn that traditional totems of corporate finance can no longer be presented as dogma, but rather as exceedingly frail models of reality. At the core of this text is the philosophy that financial institutions and corporate/business finance are more satisfactorily understood in relation to one another. This revised text from the 2017 Stock Markets and Corporate Finance has allowed for a reshaping of the material with the deletion of a number of chapters considered "interesting" but overly academic. This additional space has allowed for an update on the chapter "Financial Institutions and a History of Stock Markets" as well as accounting for the circumstances of a post-COVID-19 era. The chapter "Financial Planning and Working Capital" has been reworked to demonstrate how a firm's financial management team might interrogate its financial accounts to assess the viability of the firm and the management of its working capital. From reading this book, the reader will achieve insight into the behaviour and importance of financial institutions and firms as they are presented in the media, and how they impact on their own lives. Exercises and solutions are designed to re-enforce chapter material, while animated PowerPoint presentations are available as supplementary material to the book. © 2023 by World Scientific Publishing Europe Ltd. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
Since a pandemic was declared in 2020, Irish higher education institutions transitioned from on-campus to online delivery. This disruption created challenges to students' acquisition of hard and soft skills. With greater employee mobility, there is an increased emphasis on soft skills development, especially those skills that enhance employability, i.e., creativity, leadership, communication, innovation, teamwork, adaptability, resilience, time management, organization, self motivation, ability to work under pressure, critical thinking and problem solving and organizational ability. The purpose of this study was to understand the effects of COVID-19 on fears for the future and on soft skills development. In this study, 111 Software Engineering university students were surveyed. The results show heightened fears for the future with regard to job opportunities, the loss of time and the lack of control. While females reported to being more fearful, they also reported enhanced empathy and strengthened resilience. Postgraduate students were less fearful about the future compared to undergraduate students whilst also reporting better time management and organization skills. This study showed that despite disruptions to education, the Software Engineering students self-reported enhancements to resilience, empathy, time management and organizational skills, with the greatest impact on resilience and time management. © 2023 The Author(s). This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.
ABSTRACT
As part of a research study to examine first-year college students’ preparation for college-level research, students at six U.S. institutions of higher education were surveyed in the spring semester of 2021. The pandemic continued to affect the delivery of information literacy (IL) instruction and library services across the United States throughout the 2020-2021 academic year. When students completed this survey in April and May of 2021, the majority of instructional services were offered in synchronous and asynchronous remote formats. The students' engagement with librarians and librarian-created instructional resources were captured via the survey and analysed to determine whether students were able to leverage these interactions and materials despite the remote contexts. Students who did not interact with an academic librarian were less likely to use library resources, had more problems accessing information, and felt more overwhelmed by the quantity of resources and services offered by the library. Results show that intentional student-librarian interactions are a bridge to the acquisition and development of knowledge practices and dispositions of the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. The findings suggest considerations for moving forward when it comes to communicating with students and delivering IL support in academic libraries around the world as countries emerge from pandemic conditions. © 2022, CILIP Information Literacy Group. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
Financial Risk Management and Derivative Instruments offers an introduction to the riskiness of stock markets and the application of derivative instruments in managing exposure to such risk. Structured in two parts, the first part offers an introduction to stock market and bond market risk as encountered by investors seeking investment growth. The second part of the text introduces the financial derivative instruments that provide for either a reduced exposure (hedging) or an increased exposure (speculation) to market risk. The fundamental aspects of the futures and options derivative markets and the tools of the Black-Scholes model are examined. The text sets the topics in their global context, referencing financial shocks such as Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic. An accessible writing style is supported by pedagogical features such as key insights boxes, progressive illustrative examples and end-of-chapter tutorials. The book is supplemented by PowerPoint slides designed to assist presentation of the text material as well as providing a coherent summary of the lectures. This textbook provides an ideal text for introductory courses to derivative instruments and financial risk management for either undergraduate, masters or MBA students. © 2021 Michael Dempsey. All rights reserved.