Report Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Report - Assignment Example The four year court battle resulted into a hefty $1.5bn dollar penalty to the affected regulators in the US, UK and Switzerland. It is against this backdrop of failures by such financial institutions entrusted with this critical role that this report is compiled. The scope of this report is to try and quantify the effect of risk attitude on company performance indicators and the impact this may have on their perceived change of attitude (Shotter, 2012). To achieve this goal, Chief executive officers (CEOs) of large financial institutions in the City of London were asked to fill in a questionnaire aimed at assessing their attitude towards risks. The so called large financial institutions were those listed in The Financial Times as so, based on the size of their workforce. Data Primary data was collected from 100 CEOs where their responses on the questionnaire were scored out of 30 -one being the most conservative towards risks and 30 being the highest risk assessment. Baseline informa tion provided the secondary data for the same set of financial institutions, gathered from two articles published in 2007 and in 2009 that had measured the risks in these same institutions. Data on three additional variables was also collected in order to assess the volatility in performance of the companies. Table 1 summarizes the variables of interest for this analysis. Table 1: Variables description Variable Description RISKATT_AFTER CEOs questionnaire score RISKATT_BEFORE Baseline data from publications MAX_SHARE The maximum share price of the company in the last 30 days MIN_SHARE The minimum share price of the company in the last 30 days SD_SHARE The standard deviation of the share prices of the company in the last 30 days Objectives With this information, we sought to answer the following objectives: 1) To assess the change of CEOs attitude towards risk before and after the UBS bank scandal 2) To quantify the correlation (if any) between the companies’ risk attitudes an d their volatility. Methodology In seeking to meet the above set objectives, statistical analysis tools were applied. In particular SPSS statistical software version 20 was used for the analysis. Moreover, the nature of the data was taken into account in choosing the methodology to use. For instance, for the first objective, we wished to assess the difference in risk assessment before and after the UBS bank scandal. The data was collected from the same companies hence forming dependent pairs. For this objective therefore, an appropriate test was the paired t-test. For the second objective, an extra variable coded as the SHARE_RANGE was derived by getting the range in the company’s share price for the past 30 days. This was to be used as a predictor for a regression model. Scatter plot matrices as well as Pearson’s correlation estimates were obtained as a guide to assessing the linear relation between the variables of interest and where appropriate, linear regression mo dels were fit and the necessary diagnostics performed. Results Results of performing a paired t-test on the companies’ score on risk assessment before and after the UBS bank scandal are summarized in the following section. To begin with, a