FINA 1007 Research Methods Assignment Brief | University of Greenwich

Assignment Brief

Section 1 Overview of assessments

Expected study time

For every 1 hour of formal tuition, you should be spending 3 hours on independent study

Section 2 Dataset assignment – details

This coursework involves testing the CAPM theory. You will use one market index, one risk-free rate, and 15 companies’ daily stock price data, and these companies should be from at least two different sectors. The sample period should be the latest 2 years in length (i.e., from Jan 2022 to Jan 2024). The required data can be downloaded from Yahoo finance: 

The tasks are as follows:

• Provide a brief description of the capital asset pricing model. 
• Using data for the entire sample period, regress each company’s excess return on the market excess return, making sure to include an intercept. Verify, in each case, that the beta estimate is statistically significant. Report and interpret the t-statistic for your alpha estimate.
• Discuss your results and their implications for the capital asset pricing model.
• Discuss whether your results are sensitive to sector characteristics. 

These tasks must be submitted in a report with the following sections:

Introduction
Regression results

• Results for company 1
• Results for company 2
• Results for company 3
• …etc etc…
• 2.15 Results for company 15

Implications for CAPM
Sensitivity to sector characteristics
References
Appendix

In the introduction, you must provide a brief description of the capital asset pricing model, in order to complete task (1). You must also include a description of your data.

In each of the regression result subsections, you must include a table of regression results as well as a discussion of these results, in order to complete task (2).

Tasks (3) and (4) must be completed in sections 3 and 4, and references must be included (in the appropriate format) in section 5.

The appendix must contain a screenshot of the first 10 rows of your dataset, including columns for date, stock closing price, market index, returns, a risk-free return, and excess returns.

The maximum word count is 1500 words, excluding the appendix.

Section 3 Research Proposal – indicative marking scheme and details

Overview

Your research proposal is preparation for your dissertation/research project. You will be allocated to a supervisor who will guide you in updating a published academic study for both research proposal and dissertation. The topics have been selected based on your programme and are designed to ensure you are educated in a basic set of research methods and methodologies. A group of students will work on the same topic, with variations to accommodate your interests. Your group will meet for 6 formally timetabled sessions, one hour per fortnight. Advantages of this approach are:

• You will learn about the specific research methods required to undertake a high-quality research project
• You can adapt it to match your interests and skills
• It reduces stress because you have a clear template to follow
• It enables you to share the workload – eg you could collect data on one industry and swap with another student who has collected data for a different industry
• It enables you to discuss concepts with other students in your group eg analytical tools
• It reduces the risk of plagiarising because the supervisors know what you should be doing

Indicative marking scheme

General guidance for Research Proposal:

The more time you spend reading, re-writing, editing and evaluating your work, the better it will be. This will also enable you to answer many of your own questions – an essential element of demonstrating that you are capable of the independent study required for dissertation. For example, students often ask whether a particular paragraph should be moved to another section of the dissertation. Your supervisor does not know the answer to this question! Try moving it to another part of your document to see if it fits better somewhere else. This will help you to develop your ability to evaluate your own work, and will ensure that you make better use of your supervisor’s time.

You will also benefit from swapping your work with students in a different group and giving each other feedback, whatever the topic. You might not be able to comment on the content but you can easily evaluate each other’s work for logical argument, structure, consistency, etc. Students who do poorly often write in a confused or illogical way. The actual content is not usually the main problem.

Introduction/Aims and Objectives/Literature review sections

• Are the aims and objectives clearly set out?
• Are all terms clearly defined and referenced?
• Have you organised your paragraphs into themes/topics, rather than by author?
• Have you drawn on the relevant academic literature, rather than relying on textbooks and other sources?
• Is your referencing accurate and correct?
• Do you have too many/few sub-sections?
• Is all the information directly relevant to your topic? Eg., if your topic is on banking in China, then do not write everything you can on banking and everything you can on China – you should focus first on ‘banking in China’.
• Have you concluded with a research question or hypotheses?

Method section

IMPORTANT: You are NOT required to describe the general theory relating to research methods that you will find in a textbook. Irrelevant material includes describing the difference between inductive and deductive research, or comparing qualitative and quantitative data, or providing a picture of the ‘research onion’ – you will lose marks if you include this type of material without explaining its relevance to YOUR project. you are required to explain what you plan to do in a way that demonstrates your knowledge of research methods and its applicability to YOUR study.

You must justify your intended choices in terms of methodology and method, including data collection and analysis. It should address the following issues that justify the choices you have made (not necessarily in this order)

• Why have you selected this methodology?
• Why have you selected this particular method? (which published studies have used this and why does it make sense?)
• Why have you selected this industry? (eg. previous studies have or have not been conducted in this area)
• Why have you selected this particular dataset/organisation/population (ie. how does it exemplify this particular problem?)
• Data collection – how will you collect your data? From where?
• Data analysis – how will you analyse your data? (ie. What method/technique?)

Other

• Are your plans and timings for data collection and analysis realistic?
• Do not waste time using fancy graphics/colour or a detailed contents/index page – you will not gain extra marks and they waste time