Identify a particular good or service (Hand Sanitizer or other form of PPE) where its quantity traded is being influenced by a government policy. Is this product over-produced or under-produced? Who should be the winners and losers of welfare in this market? Does this seems to be true in the market for your product? Alternatively, identify a particular product being traded in a market you believe the government should intervene with a policy – whether it is a tax (or subsidy), or a price (or quantity) control. Since we know that this intervention will likely lead to market inefficiency, which group is likely to benefit from this intervention? What may be the greater reason to favor this group? Please use economic terms.

A small, private firm has approached you for advice on its capital structure decision. It is in the specialty retailing business, and it had earnings before interest and taxes last year of $ 500,000.

• The book value of equity is $1.5 million, but the estimated market value is $ 6 million.
• The firm has $ 1 million in debt outstanding, and paid an interest expense of $ 80,000 on the debt last year. (Based upon the interest coverage ratio, the firm would be rated AA, and would be facing an interest rate of 8.25%.)
• The equity is not traded, but the average beta for comparable traded firms is 1.05, and their average debt/equity ratio is 25%.

a) Estimate the current cost of capital for this firm

Alpaca corp. will pay 460,000 pounds (GBP) in 90 days. The current spot rate is USD 1.4883/GBP. The 90-day European call options on the pound with an exercise price of USD 1.6688/GBP are traded with a premium of USD 0.17 while the 90-day European put options on the pound with an exercise price of USD 1.7483/GBP are traded with a premium of USD 0.13. Suppose, Alpaca corp. wants to hedge its position using options. If the spot rate in 90 days is USD 1.8154/GBP, determine the company’s net payment in USD if it acts rationally.

Select one:

a. 894,884

b. 845,848

c. 835,084

d. 767,648

Consider a Specific Factors model of a competitive economy in which 2 goods (Manufacturing products and Agricultural products) are each produced with a specific input (capital and land respectively) and labour is an input in the production of both goods.

1. Assume that the economy exports agricultural products. Use a PPF diagram with Agriculture on the vertical axis to illustrate this equilibrium and clearly show how much of each good is produced, consumed and traded.
2. Illustrate the impact on the equilibrium of an increase in the relative price of manufacturing goods that does not eliminate the economy’s comparative advantage in agricultural goods . Again, show amounts produced, consumed and traded.
3. Will this increase raise or lower the return to land? Explain your answer in detail.

Suppose that France has 175,000 gallons of milk, Germany has 600,000 cookies, The U.S. has 1,000,000 cookies. France traded 50,000 gallons milk to Germany for 120,000 cookies; and the U.S. traded 192,000 cookies to France for 80,000 gallons of milk.

a) What is the price of milk in terms of cookies? (i.e. what is the amount of cookies you can get for one gallon of milk?)

b) What is the price of cookies in terms of milk? (i.e. what is the amount of milk you can get for one cookie?)

c) What is the final consumption opportunities for France, Germany, and the U.S. (what is the quantity of each product that is available to each of these countries as a result of trade?)

In investing, we would like to know the overall trend of the market. Is the market trending up? Or, is it trending down? If the market is trending up, we want to be invested in stocks or Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), such as DIA, SPY, QQQ, SSO, DDM, or QLD to name several. If the market is trending down, we really do not want to be in stocks, because we all know too well what happens to stock prices in a down market. In a down market, the best place to be is in a money-market fund or inverse Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), such as DOG, DXD, SDS or QID to name several. Now, how does one determine if the market is trending up or down?

Regarding underwriting considerations, what information may an employer have to provide to an insurance company to show that the company is insurable?

A. The firm's total number of employees B. The employees' health histories
C. References from customers
D. The employer's financial records

Java please. No "hard coding" please. Need to ask for the file and load the sample file information into the class.

There is a complete theory about how queues work. In this problem create a limited model to study the order in which a bunch of customers will be attended by their cashiers on a supermarket. The conditions for the experiment are:

• Each cashier spends the same amount of time with each customer (this is just an exercise, not real life).

• There will be a defined number of queues but never less than 2 and never more than 5.

• There is a variable number of customers, never less than 1 and never more than 20 and they are identified by a letter (A, B, C, …)

• The customers are distributed randomly among the different queues. • If two customers are served at the same time, we would consider that they will be ordered following the queue number they are at (first will be customer in queue 1, second customer in queue 2)

Write a program to give the order in which the customers are attended, for example:

• There are 4 queues:

• Cashier number 1 spends 3 minutes on each customer

• Cashier number 2 spends 2 minutes on each customer

• Cashier number 3 spends 4 minutes on each customer

• Cashier number 4 spends 1 minutes on each customer

• Customers are distributed as follows:

• Queue 1 (Cashier 1): Customer A, customer E, customer I

• Queue 2 (Cashier 2): B, F, J, N

• Queue 3 (Cashier 3): C, G, L

• Queue 4 (Cashier 4): D, H, M, O, P, Q

With this input the customers will have been served in the following order and timing:

D (after 1 minute)

B (after 2 minutes on queue 2)

H (after 2 minutes on queue 4)

A (after 3 minutes on queue 1)

M (after 3 minutes on queue 4)

F (after 4 minutes on queue 2)

C (after 4 minutes on queue 3)

O (after 4 minutes on queue 4)

P (after 5 minutes)

E (after 6 minutes on queue 1)

J (after 6 minutes on queue 2)

Q (after 6 minutes on queue 4)

N (after 8 minutes on queue 2)

G (after 8 minutes on queue 3)

I (after 9 minutes)

L (after 12 minutes)

The input from a data file will have the number of queues on the first line, followed by the information for each queue, first the time spent by the cashier on a customer, the number of customers on a queue and then the order of the customers separated by a space.

Output to the screen the list of served customers ordered by the time spent in the queue separated by spaces.

Must use a queue data structure.

Refer to the sample output below.

Sample File: the following information is on the queues.txt file

4

3 3 A E I

2 4 B F J N

4 3 C G L

1 6 D H M O P Q

Sample Run:

Enter file name: queues.txt

The list ordered by time spent: D B H A M F C O P E J Q N G I L

In April 2015, CEO Dan Price of Gravity Payments made a shocking announcement. Price, who is also founder and co-owner of Gravity, decided to cut his own salary by 93 percent, and then to use that money—along with a big chunk of corporate profits— to ensure that every single one of his employees makes a minimum of $70,000.1

The news was certainly welcomed by Gravity’s employees. (For the lowest-paid employees, the raise to $70k meant a doubling of their salaries.) And Price was widely applauded by commentators and on social media.

Price’s move was especially noteworthy in an era in which many CEOs have been criticized for accepting astronomically high levels of pay. In a 2015 article on executive compensation, Bloomberg.com reported,2 for example, that Elon Musk, the entrepreneurial CEO of Tesla Motors Inc., earned just over $100 million in 2014. But that’s far from the high end of executive compensation: The same article noted that Nicholas Woodman, CEO of GoPro Inc., had earned a whopping $285 million that year. Criticism of CEO pay has not focused solely on the absolute amount earned, but also on the ratio of CEO pay to what those CEOs’ employees are paid. According to the Bloomberg article, “The CEOs of 350 Standard & Poor’s 500 companies made 331 times more than their employees in 2013.”

Some people defend high levels of pay for CEOs, pointing out that the highest levels of compensation are achieved through stock options, which means that CEOs do well only when the value of the company’s stock goes up, a sign that the CEO is actually doing a good job. Others, however, are skeptical. As the Bloomberg article points out, “Stock options, once believed to align executives with shareholders because they appreciate when the stock price rises, are now derided for encouraging short-term financial engineering at the expense of long- term planning.” In other words, stock options encourage CEOs to find short-term ways to boost stock prices (such as reducing costs by cutting employees), even if those moves aren’t in the long-term interests of the company and its shareholders.

Let’s turn back to Price’s decision. Different people had different reactions to the decision. Some applauded it as a move toward justice or fairness in compensation. Others thought it was a savvy business move, aimed at producing better outcomes for Gravity Payments by motivating employees and gaining free publicity for the company. Still others thought it spoke well of Price’s character; to them, Price looked like what a good CEO ought to look like, in comparison to the greedy CEOs of so many other companies.

questions:

1. Do you think Dan Price is a hero? Why or why not?

2. Are there any further facts that you would want to know before making a judg- ment about this case?

3. GravityPaymentsisprivatelyownedbyDanPriceandhisbrother.IfGravitywere a publicly traded company with thousands of shareholders, would that change your view about the ethics of his decision? If so, in what way?

4. If you were an employee at Gravity Payments, already making $70,000, how would you feel about employees who made half what you make suddenly mak- ing the same amount as you?

High Kite is one of the foremost performance kite makers in Australia. The company has always prepared a budget that is calculated using only one estimated volume of sales. You recently joined the company as a junior accountant. You are required to set up a spreadsheet for sensitivity analysis in the budgeting process. This year it appears that the company may not meet expectations, which could result in a loss. Top manager is concerned that the company will incur a loss again next year, and he wants to develop a budget that will easily reflect changes in the assumptions.

The senior accountant provided you with the following data about the year 2021’s planned operations:

Required:

a) Prepare a sales budget (in dollars) for 2021.

b) Prepare a production budget (in units) for 2021.

c). Prepare a direct material purchases budget for all the required materials (in dollars) for 2021.

d) Prepare a direct labour budget (in dollars) for 2021.

e). Prepare a budgeted income statement for the year ending December 31, 2021. You are provided the following budgets: (1) Manufacturing overhead budget shows expected costs to be 100% of direct labour cost, (2) selling and administrative expenses are expected to be 12% of the expected sales revenue, and (3) expected interest expense is $200,000. The company’s income tax rate is expected to be 30% of its income before tax.

The top manager would like to prepare a budget for cash flows on a monthly basis so that they can plan short-term investments and borrowings.

The company’s sales are highest during the spring and summer. Sales are fairly even within each quarter (sales are even within 3 months of each quarter), but sales vary across quarters as follows:

Payments from customers are usually received as follows:

f) Prepare monthly budgets for cash receipts for 2021. (Hint: you may have to present a table of monthly sales, receipts of the month and from the prior month, and the monthly total receipts.)