Assessment Brief 2024/2025

Assignment Information

1. QUESTION/ DESCRIPTION OF ACTIVITY

This is an individual assignment where you are required to produce a short research paper.   You must download firm-level data of non-financial companies (excluding utility companies) for any country for the period of 2018-2022. Specifically, you will need to download data for the following variables: debt ratio, total assets, industry classification, profitability ratio, and tangibility ratio*.

The tasks for this assignment areas follows:

•    Provide descriptive statistics of your data and critically discuss the main findings.

•    Identify one interesting factor from the capital structure literature (other than firm size, tangibility, profitability, and industry classification) that has been shown to impact

capital structure decisions. This factor may be at the firm level or the country level.

•    Critically discuss the relevance of this chosen variable for capital structure decisions.

•    Conduct a regression analysis to examine the relationship between your variable of interest and capital structure, controlling for size, tangibility, profitability, industry   classification, and year effects.

•    Critically discuss the findings of your analysis, drawing on previous studies to explain your results.

*Ensure you apply trimming or winsorisation to your data if required.

This assignment addresses the following Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs) of the course:

o ILO 1: Critically evaluate the role of finance and the financial manager in organizations.

o ILO 2: Assess the interaction between organizations, investors, and financial markets.

o ILO 5: Appraise various sources of financing available to corporations and analyse capital structure theories and their implications in both perfect and imperfect markets.

o ILO 7: Synthesize major theoretical and empirical literature incorporate finance and produce acomprehensive academic paper on a relevant topic.

By doing this assignment well, you will:

•    Develop Analytical Skills: By handling firm-level data and performing statistical analyses, you will enhance your data analysis and interpretation skills, which are vital for financial   research.

•    Enhance Critical Thinking: Through reviewing literature and critically discussing findings, you will strengthen your ability to evaluate various capital structure factors and their implications.

•    Practical Application of Theory: The assignment provides an opportunity to apply theoretical concepts to real-world data, bridging the gap between academic knowledge and practical finance issues.

•    Strengthen Research Competencies: This task will help refine your research skills by requiring you to produce a structured and well-reasoned academic paper,a critical skill in both academic and professional settings.