Partnership P ("P") has two individual partners (A and B).  Each are 50% owners in P.  At the beginning of Year 1, A's outside basis was $1,000 and B's outside basis was $10,000.  During Year 1 P earned $2,000 of income from operations, $1,000 of tax exempt income, and paid off $10,000 of a recourse liability.  What income, gain or loss, if any, will A report on A's individual income tax return (for Year 1) as a result of being a partner in P?

The council of higher education wants to compare the percentage of students that score A in two universities. In a random sample of 50 students from university one, 16 received a grade of A; and in a random sample of 40 students from university two, 8 received a grade of A. The 95% confidence interval for the difference in the proportion of students who received a grade of A is:

a. -0.0638 to 0.3038

b. -0.0691 to 0.2983

c. 0.0365 to 0.04302

d. -0.0591 to 0.2991

The Trump government in the US has adopted trade protectionism since the first day that president Trump came to the oval office in the white house. During 2018 and 2019, the US had increased tariffs on the majority of the imported goods from China. Meanwhile, China also retaliated by increasing its tariff on imports from the US.

1. a) What will be the impacts of the tariff on the trade volume between the US and China?

2. b) Who pay for the US tariffs on the imports of Chinese goods?

3. c) Conduct welfare analysis for the US import tariff.

4. d) President Trump blamed China for the large goods trade deficits. Explain why the goods trade deficits are not a good measure of bilateral sale balance.

5. e) Who are the winners and losers of the US-China Trade War?

1. What is the difference between legal and equitable remedies?
A buyer contracts to buy a 1941 four-door Cadillac convertible from a seller for $75,000. The seller, having found a third party who will pay $85,000 for the car, refuses to sell to the buyer. What is the buyer’s remedy? Assume the third party had paid the $85,000 and the seller was ordered to sell to the buyer. What is the third party’s remedy?
Professor Smith contracts to teach business law at State University for the academic year. After the first term is over, she quits. Can State University get an order of specific performance or an injunction requiring Professor Smith to return for the second term? Now suppose that the reason Professor Smith quit work at State University is because she got a better job at Central University, fifteen miles away. Can State University get an injunction prohibiting her from teaching at Central University?

Question 2
Part (a) Consider a firm called Health-R-Us that is a monopoly. How does Health-RUs
decide the price to charge and quantity to sell of the good it has a monopoly on?
Illustrate your answer using a fully labelled and explained market diagram. Assume
Health-R-Us is making monopoly profits and illustrate these on the same diagram. In
addition, indicate the area on your diagram that illustrates the efficiency cost (the
dead weight loss) of the monopoly, and explain why this dead weight loss arises.

Part (b) Assume Health-R-Us is a legal monopoly: it is a monopoly due to legal
protection from the government in the form of a patent issued to the company.
Imagine that the government withdraws the legal protection for Health-R-Us such
that the market becomes competitive. Will a typical individual firm in this
competitive market make economic profit in the long run? Why or why not? Use an
appropriate firm-level diagram to illustrate and explain your answer.

Part (c) Your answers to parts 2a and 2b illustrated different levels of profit made by
an individual firm in both a monopoly market structure and a competitive market
structure respectively. In part 2a you also indicated the dead weight loss of a
monopoly.
Assume now that Health-R-Us has discovered a vaccine for coronavirus. Why might
the government be willing to grant (and allow to remain in place) a patent to Health-
R-Us, despite the dead weight loss and the ensuring monopoly profits caused by
such a patent? Explain your answer. For simplicity assume the vaccine is only
relevant for the domestic market (i.e., there is no global market for vaccines).

Here is a short history of the Eastman Kodak company (adapted from Wikipedia):

Kodak was founded by George Eastman (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. and Henry A. Strong (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. on September 4, 1888. During most of the 20th century (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. Kodak held a dominant position in photographic film used in cameras. The cameras were used to take photos, and once the film roll was filled with pictures it was taken to a drugstore or someplace else such as a kiosk in a mall to be developed and the photos printed on paper stock.

From the time of its founding, Kodak followed the razor-and blades-strategy (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. of selling inexpensive cameras while making large margins from consumables, namely the film, chemicals, and photo paper. As late as 1976, Kodak commanded 90% of film sales and 85% of camera sales in the U.S.

Kodak began to struggle financially in the late 1990s as a result of the decline in sales of photographic film and some believe because of its slowness in transitioning to digital photography (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.. In 2012 Kodak filed for bankruptcy and announced that it would stop making digital cameras, pocket video cameras, and digital picture frames. It also announced its intention to sell its photographic film (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. and photo kiosk operations.

Task:

In the article "Marketing Myopia," Levitt discusses the crucial distinction between a “market-based” and “product-based” definition of the business a firm is in. Using these concepts, briefly describe the business frame that Kodak appeared to use up until 2012. Discuss the value (and limitations) of Kodak adopting the other frame. Needs to be less than 250 words.

Assume today is March 16, 2016. Natasha Kingery is 30 years old and has a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science. She is currently employed as a Tier 2 field service representative for a telephony corporation located in Seattle, Washington, and earns $38,000 a year that she anticipates will grow at 3% per year. Natasha hopes to retire at age 65 and has just begun to think about the future.

Natasha has $75,000 that she recently inherited from her aunt. She invested this money in 30-year Treasury Bonds. She is considering whether she should further her education and would use her inheritance to pay for it.*

She has investigated a couple of options and is asking for your help as a financial planning intern to determine the financial consequences associated with each option. Natasha has already been accepted to both of these programs, and could start either one soon.

One alternative that Natasha is considering is attaining a certification in network design. This certification would automatically promote her to a Tier 3 field service representative in her company. The base salary for a Tier 3 representative is $10,000 more than what she currently earns and she anticipates that this salary differential will grow at a rate of 3% a year as long as she keeps working. The certification program requires the completion of 20 Web-based courses and a score of 80% or better on an exam at the end of the course work. She has learned that the average amount of time necessary to finish the program is one year. The total cost of the program is $5000, due when she enrolls in the program. Because she will do all the work for the certification on her own time, Natasha does not expect to lose any income during the certification.

Another option is going back to school for an MBA degree. With an MBA degree, Natasha expects to be promoted to a managerial position in her current firm. The managerial position pays $20,000 a year more than her current position. She expects that this salary differential will also grow at a rate of 3% per year for as long as she keeps working. The evening program, which will take three years to complete, costs $25,000 per year, due at the beginning of each of her three years in school. Because she will attend classes in the evening, Natasha doesn’t expect to lose any income while she is earning her MBA if she chooses to undertake the MBA.

1. Determine the interest rate she is currently earning on her inheritance by going to the U.S. Treasury Department Web site (treasury.gov) and selecting “Data” on the main menu. Then select “Daily Treasury Yiled Curve Rates” under the Interest Rate heading and enter the appropriate year, 2016, and then search down the list for March 16 to obtain the closing yield or interest rate that she is earning. Use this interest rate as the discount rate for the remainder of this problem. --> the identified rate for March 16th on a 30 year bond is 2.73
2. Create a timeline in Excel for her current situation, as well as the certification program and MBA degree options, using the following assumptions:
   • Salaries for the year are paid only once, at the end of the year.
   • The salary increase becomes effective immediately upon graduating from the MBA program or being certified. That is, because the increases become effective immediately but salaries are paid at the end of the year, the first salary increase will be paid exactly one year after graduation or certification.
3. Calculate the present value of the salary differential for completing the certification program. Subtract the cost of the program to get the NPV of undertaking the certification program.
4. Calculate the present value of the salary differential for completing the MBA degree. Calculate the present value of the cost of the MBA program. Based on your calculations, determine the NPV of undertaking the MBA.
5. Based on your answers to Questions 3 and 4, what advice would you give to Natasha? What if the two programs are mutually exclusive? That is, if Natasha undertakes one of the programs there is no further benefit to undertaking the other program. Would your advice be different?

* If Natasha lacked the cash to pay for her tuition upfront, she could borrow the money. More intriguingly, she could sell a fraction of her future earnings, an idea that has received attention from researchers and entrepreneurs; see M. Palacios, Investing in Human Capital: A Capital Markets Approach to Student Funding, Cambridge University Press, 2004.

TzeMay was one of the first women engineering students at ABC University. She graduated in 1995 with a first class honours degree and immediately continued her studies with an MSc programme, gaining recognition for her work into environmentally friendly car engines, a largely untapped field in those days. On completion of her Masters degree she was offered a post as a research assistant where she could have developed her Masters research and worked towards her doctorate. However she decided that she needed to gain some commercial experience and joined Wallace-Price, a blue-chip engineering consultancy where, apart from a sponsored year out to study for an MBA in the United States of America, she has remained ever since.

Her tenacity and loyalty to Wallace-Price have paid off and she was made a partner in the firm, primarily responsible for bringing in work to the consultancy. With the promotion came various executive privileges including an annual salary of £80, 000, a chauffeur-driven car, free use of one of the company-owned London flats, a non-contributory pension scheme, various gold credit cards and first-class air travel. TzeMay herself would not describe these as benefits, however, but as necessities to enable her to do her job properly. In order to meet her business target of £2 million of work for Wallace-Price she spent forty weeks overseas, working an average of ninety hours a week.

She cannot remember the last time that she had a weekend when she was not entertaining clients or travelling but was totally free to indulge herself. During her time with Wallace-Price she has earned a reputation both as a formidable but honest negotiator and as an innovative engineer, often finding seemingly impossible solutions to problems. Known for her single-minded dedication to her job, she does not suffer fools gladly. She is frequently approached to work for rival firms with promises of even greater privileges and has been the subject of numerous magazine profiles, some concentrating on her work and reputation as a high flier but the majority focusing on her gender. Her fortieth birthday last year was spent alone in the Emergency Room of a Los Angeles hospital where she had been rushed with a suspected stomach ulcer. Deprived of her portable telephone, fax and computer she had little else to do but to reflect on her life thus far. On her return to health she was working her way through the pile of technical journals, which had accumulated during her absence and there she saw the advertisement for ABC University, an institution that had close links with her company and whose Professor of Engineering she knew well. Ignoring the instructions relating to applications she put through a telephone call to the ABC University.

Question 1 : Making reference to the appropriate theories of motivation, explain TzeMay‟s main motivating factors.

Conch Republic Electronics is a midsized electronics manufacturer located in Key West, Florida. The company president is Shelly Couts, who inherited the company. The company originally repaired radios and other household appliances when it was founded over 70 years ago. Over the years, the company has expanded, and it is now a figure manufacturer of various specialty electronic items. Jay McCanless, a recent MBA graduate, has been hired by the company in its finance department.

One of the major revenue-producing items manufactured by Conch Republic is a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA). Conch Republic currently has one PDA model on the market and sales have been excellent. The PDA is a unique item in that it comes in a variety of tropical colors and is preprogrammed to play Jimmy Buffett music. However, as with any electronic item, technology changes rapidly, and the current PDA has limited features in comparison with newer models. Conch Republic spent $1.2 million to develop a prototype for a new PDA that has all the features of the existing one, but adds new features such as cell phone capability. The company has spent a further $250,000 for a marketing study to determine the expected sales figures for the new PDA.

Conch Republic can manufacture the new PDA for $210 each in variable costs. Fixed costs for the operation are estimated to run $5.3 million per year. The estimated sales volume is 64,000, 106,000, 87,000, 78,000, and 54,000 per year for the next five years, respectively. The unit price of the new PDA will be $515. The necessary equipment can be purchased for $38.5 million and will be depreciated on a seven-year MACRS schedule. It is believed the value of the equipment in five years will be $5.8 million.

Net working capital for the PDAs will be 20 percent of sales and will occur with the timing of the cash flows for the year (i.e., there is no initial outlay for NWC). Changes in NWC will thus first occur in Year 1 with the first year's sales. Conch Republic has a 22 percent corporate tax rate and a 12 percent required return.

What is the payback period?

What is the profitability index?

What is the IRR of the project?

What is the NPV of the project?

Show all work.