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This paper seeks to evaluate the research records of scholars contributing articles to the two premier financial education journals – Journal of Financial Education (JFED) and Financial Practice and Education (FPE) – as a means by which to obtain indirect evidence about the quality of the articles appearing in these education journals. The implicit assumption is that authors who publish in the best finance research journals will apply the same standards of excellence and rigor when preparing manuscripts for financial education journals.

The names of all authors appearing in the JFED and FPE during the 1972‐2010 period – and the number of such appearances – were summarized directly from the journals' table of contents. The number of appearances by each author in a set of 23 high‐impact finance journals was identified by reference to the table of contents of these journals.

The majority of the authors appearing in the two education journals have also penned one or more high‐impact article, with an average of over three high‐impact appearances.

The identification of a unique set of the 23 “best” journals in any academic field is an inherently subjective task. The exclusion of additional high‐quality journals from this list (especially those from the related fields of accounting and economics) might short change the research records of some education authors.

Evidence about the average quality of articles appearing in education journals could be useful to university administrators when evaluating faculty research records for purposes of tenure, promotion, and merit awards.

The purpose of this paper is to update and extend Danielson and Heck (2014) to provide additional evidence about the relative quality of a set of 23 high-impact finance journals. In particular, the paper summarizes the research records of all scholars contributing articles to each of the 23 journals from 1970 to 2014, and uses this information to identify journals that publish articles by similar sets of authors, and rank the 23 journals based upon publication activity from 2010 to 2014.

The names of all authors appearing in each of the 23 journals during the 1970 to 2014 period – and the number of appearances by each author – were summarized directly from the journals’ table of contents. From this data, the lifetime (1970-2014) research portfolio of each journal’s average author was quantified for two sub-periods: 1970-2009 and 2010-2014. Using the assumption that a journal’s quality is positively related to its ability to attract submissions from accomplished researchers, this data provides information about the authors’ subjective ranking of finance journals and about how these rankings have changed during the past five years.

The finance literature experienced rapid growth during 2010-2014, with almost 25 percent of all appearances from 1970 to 2014 occurring in the last five years of the period. Based upon publication activity during 2010-2014, the Journal of Finance, the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Financial Economics, and the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis remain the most prestigious finance outlets, followed by the Financial Analysts Journal, the Journal of Financial Markets, Review of Finance, the Journal of Financial Intermediation, Financial Management, and the Journal of Applied Corporate Finance.

The identification of a unique set of the 23 “best” journals in any academic field is an inherently subjective task. Adding journals to (or removing journals from) this population could cause the ranking of some individual journals to shift.

Evidence about the average quality of articles appearing in the leading finance journals is useful when evaluating faculty research records for purposes of tenure, promotion, and merit awards.

According to the Keynesian income determination model, as the level of expenditures is instantaneously increased through government or private investment a portion of that amount (b), the marginal propensity to consume, is immediately respent. This precipitates a perpetual turnover of each fractional amount throughout time such that the level of expenditures eventually amounts to (1/1‐b) times the initial increase in investment. The total impact on the level of income resulting from an increase in investment or government expenditures is called the multiplier. As derived in the macro‐economic models no leakages from the system to reduce the total impact are assumed, so that in reality the multiplier is considered to fall short of (1/1‐b).

In this study, a formula is derived for the period specific beta (market risk) for a portfolio of financial assets that has been formed on the basis of directional forecasts. This is an important contribution to the literature since measuring the risk of an actively managed portfolio is problematic due to the fact that managers may change fund risk conditional on market expectations. The period‐specific nature of the measure is a significant advantage since historical fund returns are not required and the beta is not influenced by prior fund returns' deviations from the bench mark. The methodology employed allows for the development of a time series of fund betas that permits investigation into a number of important empirical issues. This study is also of practical interest from the perspective of risk management and for both portfolio performance and attribution. Finally, there are many active strategies based on directional forecasts and the approach used here encompasses a significant proportion of these.

This research study seeks to identify what graduating students and alumni perceive to be of most value in courses, and in turn the relationship of those perceptions with the information in evaluations conducted by students at the conclusion of courses.

The project involves empirical research utilizing standard student course evaluation data, and rigorous matching alumni survey data. A focus group, as well as prior academic research, informs the design.

There are several key conclusions from this study comparing student and alumni perceptions of course satisfaction. Consistent with end‐of‐program survey and focus group observations, career relevance clearly grows with time in importance for determining course satisfaction. Career relevance is not a statistically significant factor for course satisfaction using end‐of‐course student survey responses, but grows to a statistically significant determinant utilizing alumni survey data, larger than both the extent of learning and instructor performance; moreover, instructor performance appears to become less important.

While survey responses for individuals as both students and alumni cannot be linked in this study, the high response rate of alumni and the pooling of data suggest results are robust.

If instructors want students, once they become alumni, to be satisfied with their course experience, they need to teach material which will be truly useful in their careers, even if students do not fully appreciate it during class. And if university presidents want satisfied alumni, they need to ensure their school's curriculum includes material that may be applied in the real world, and that the measures of teaching effectiveness utilized for compensation purposes do not stress too highly traditional measures of student satisfaction.

Educators can provide students with a more long‐term satisfying educational experience by ensuring curriculum includes practical material that is truly relevant for careers.

Student evaluations have been commonly used in determining the success of a course, and the effectiveness of their instructors. However, there has only been limited analysis of student evaluations as a measure of what matters most – the benefit to the student once they graduate and move into the working world. Empirical results based on student and alumni survey data identify differences in perceptions between students and alumni, and suggest key recommendations for both instructors and university administrators.

The purpose of this study is to develop an investment strategy designed both to enable student‐managed investment fund (SMIF) students to more quickly build out their portfolio at the beginning of the academic year and to give them some exposure to quantitative approaches to investment management.

This study uses data and software that would be readily available to typical SMIF students to develop both an asset‐allocation model and a security‐selection model that can be described as a long‐flat (or synthetic protective put) equity strategy with a momentum‐based style‐rotation overlay.

Over the time period since the requisite style‐based ETFs began trading, the composite strategy would have outperformed the S&P 500 index during both market downturns and market upturns, providing better than market returns at lower than market levels of risk.

The key innovation of this paper is the development of a quantitative investment strategy tailored specifically to meet both the educational and the portfolio management needs of SMIF students; a secondary innovation is the demonstration of the efficacy of a style‐rotation strategy, in contrast to the more typical sector/industry‐rotation type of strategy.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between predictability in return and investment strategy performance. Two measures that characterize investment strategies within a mean‐variance framework, an activity measure and a style measure, are developed and the performance of alternative strategies (e.g. contrarian, momentum, etc.) is examined when risky asset returns are mean reverting.

Returns are assumed to follow a multivariate Ornstein‐Uhlenbeck process, where reversion to a time‐varying mean is governed by an additional variable set, similar to that proposed by Lo and Wang (1995). Depending on its parameterization, this process is capable of producing an autocorrelation pattern consistent with empirical evidence, that is, positive autocorrelation in short‐horizon returns and negative autocorrelation in long‐horizon returns.

The results, for four uninformed investment strategies and assuming that returns are generated by a simple univariate Ornstein‐Uhlenbeck process, show that the unadjusted returns from the contrarian (momentum) strategy are greater than those from the other strategies when the mean reversion parameter, α, is greater than (less than) one. The results are expected, given the relationship between α and the first‐order autocorrelation in returns. The risk level (measured by either the standard deviation of returns or beta) of the contrarian strategy is the lowest at essentially all levels of mean reversion and the risk‐adjusted returns from the contrarian strategy, measured by the both the Sharpe and Treynor ratios, dominate those from the other strategies.

In future research, a number of issues not considered in this study may be investigated. The style measure developed here can be used to determine whether the results obtained hold when an informed, mean‐variance efficient active strategy is employed. In addition, the performance of both the informed and uninformed strategies may be examined under the assumption that the risky return process follows a multivariate Ornstein‐Uhlenbeck process. This work should provide findings that facilitate the separation of fund risk due to dynamic strategies from that due to time‐varying expected returns.

The methodology used here may be easily extended to consider a number of important issues, such as the frequency of portfolio rebalancing, transactions costs, and multiple asset portfolios, that are encountered in practice.

The approach used here provides insight into how predictability affects the relative performance of tactical investment strategies and, thus, may serve as a basis for determining the magnitude and persistence in autocorrelation required for active investment strategies to yield profits significantly different from those of passive strategies. In this sense, this study may have appeal for both academics and investment professionals.

The purpose of paper is to provide students with a sorting methodology to select securities and build portfolios.

This paper uses various accounting variables for all firms in the S&P 500, sorted by sector. The fundamental metrics are converted into standardized Z‐scores and then combined into a single score used to rank individual firms within each industry. Equity portfolios are then constructed using the aggregate Z‐scores.

In the authors' experience with student‐managed investment funds (SMIFs), students at the start of the course consistently ask how to begin selecting securities or seek to learn a new model for selecting securities. Discussions on stock selection are helpful to engage students in this area, but an attempt is made to further this by providing a comprehensive stock‐selection exercise to help students better understand how to appropriately pick stocks and create a portfolio.

In this exercise, students are reminded of the limitations surrounding the stock‐screening process and are provided with an alternative, more robust method for selecting securities that is commonly utilized by investment professionals. While the exercise described in this paper is done in reference to SMIFs, it is equally applicable to standard investment courses.

This paper provides an exercise which provides students a way to dive deeper into stock selection through stock sorting. Stock selection is typically a hot topic for most students in finance courses. Stock screens may permit a search on multiple variables simultaneously but typically do not allow for applying specific weights to each metric. A sorting method, avoids these issues by permitting the user to create custom variables, affords the opportunity to view all of the variables used in the screening process simultaneously, and includes the option to apply specific weights to each variable.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the perceptions that undergraduate students formed and provides further insight into the relationship between perceived teaching quality (with its descriptors) and student motivation.

The paper reports the findings from a survey of student perceptions of quality teaching and its interaction with various motivational orientations that students exhibit in higher education. The proposed hypotheses and conceptual model were tested using regression and correlation analyses, as well as analysis of variance from a survey of 271 undergraduate students in programs at two different universities.

The findings document the explanatory role of various motivations in students' perceptions of teaching quality: correlation analysis found intrinsic motivation to be positively correlated with the perceived teaching quality, while extrinsic motivation was found to be moderately correlated, suggesting that motivational orientation dimensions are influential in students' assessments of their teaching experience in school. Intrinsic motivation with its possible states and factor loadings showed strong positive impact on the teaching quality and students' evaluation, even after accounting for the reputation (general opinion) of the educational institution (or program). Thus, we cannot ignore the value‐added nature of various motivational orientations and their influence upon the perceptions of students. Surprisingly, few differences in perception based on gender, age, and country of birth (ethnicity) were found. Young students (less than 25‐year old) and Canadian‐ and American‐born students exhibited significant negative reactions (difference) to perceived teaching quality; in contrast, female students exhibited positive reactions towards it.

The results presented here will assist researchers, professors, and higher‐education administrators by capitalizing on students' existing intrinsic motivation and understanding the relationship between student perceptions of teaching quality and their degree of motivation to further expand and implement a better quality‐assurance educational system. A viable strategy to enhance and further motivate students extrinsically and intrinsically in their learning will significantly enhance their perceptions.

The article explores for the first time the link between students' motivational orientations and their perceptions about teaching quality.