Module 5 – Case

Scholars vs. Practitioners

Assignment Overview

For this assignment, take a look through both the practitioner-oriented and scholarly-oriented journals discussed in the background readings. Pick a topic in finance that interests you. Then find two articles that relate to this topic from any of the four practitioner journals featured on the background page. Then find two articles on the same topic in any of the scholarly journals. These can be articles in any of the Google Scholar rankings, or any of the top 50 finance journals listed on Scimago. You will be writing about these four articles for this assignment.

Case Assignment

Once you have found your four articles and have reviewed them carefully, write a 5- to 6-page paper answering the following questions:

1. Provide a brief overview of each article and also explain why you chose the article and what you found interesting about it. Don’t devote too much space to summarizing the articles, it is more important to emphasize what you found interesting.
2. What major differences in substance and style did you find between the practitioner articles and the scholarly articles? Be clear and specific. This portion should be one and a half to two pages in length.
3. Which of the four articles did you find the most interesting or useful? Which did you find the least interesting or the least useful? Be as specific as you can. Rate the articles both on substance and presentation.
4. Based on these articles, what type of future research would you propose on this topic to follow up on the research of these authors? Is there anything from your own workplace or industry that could be used to investigate this topic further?

Assignment Expectations

• Follow the assignment instructions closely and follow all steps listed in the instructions.
• Stay focused on the precise assignment questions. Don’t go off on tangents or devote a lot of space to summarizing general background materials.
• List supporting references and cite sources in proper format.
• Use appropriate writing style in essay form (organization, grammar, and spelling).
• Include both a bibliography and in-text citations. See the Student Guide to Writing a High-Quality Academic Paper, including pages 11-14 on in-text citations. Another resource is the “Writing Style Guide,” which is found under “My Resources” in the TLC portal.

Module 5 – Background

Scholars vs. Practitioners

To start off this module, take a look at the following practitioner-oriented finance journals. These journals have a mix of opinion articles, statistical studies, and guidance and suggestions for financial practitioners. Below is a link to each of the journals’ home pages. To access the journals you will need to go Business Source Complete in the Trident Online Library (click “Additional Library Resources” at the bottom of the Online Classroom and Library section of the main TLC portal page). Note that articles from the past year are not always available in the library, but previous issues of these journals are. Take a look at both the general description of the journal as well as a few recent articles in each journal:

Journal of Applied Corporate Finance was originally started by the investment bank Morgan Stanley and covers a range of issues from the perspective of corporate financial strategies.

Journal of Portfolio Management covers financial issues from the point of view of the investor.

Financial Analysts Journal is the official journal of the CFA Institute, the organization that gives out the Certified Financial Analyst Certificate. Articles in this journal tend to be a bit more technical than articles in other practitioner journals.

Journal of Wealth Management presents research from a financial planning perspective.

Now that you’ve reviewed the practitioner-oriented journals, take a look at some of the academic finance journals that specialize in more scholarly and theory-oriented research.

Here are a couple of scholarly finance journals that are highly ranked and are available in Business Source Complete:

The Review of Financial Studies is one of the toughest finance journals in the world to get published in and has highly technical articles.

Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis: As you can probably tell its name, this journal also publishes highly technical papers.

For a list of additional prestigious scholarly finance journals, check out Google Scholar’s Top Publications in Finance list. Google Scholar is also a good way to find scholarly finance studies, as many of the papers are available online.

Check out at least a few articles from top-ranked scholarly journals in finance. You don’t have too read too much in depth, as these articles are often extremely complex. But try to get an idea of the kind of technical or theoretical articles they publish and see if you can find any articles that interest you.