Financial Regulation and Ethics

The course is “Financial Regulation and Ethics”

Current Event Research Paper:
One of the best things about studying securities regulation is that the topic is in the news every day. Every day a new company chooses to go public, another executive at a public company is charged with violating anti-fraud provisions, or another public company is investigated for attempting to bribe foreign government officials. The current event research paper assignment asks that you choose one current event relevant to any of the topics we will study this semester, and write a research paper describing what happened, the relevant law, and the significance of the story for the industry, the company, the law, and/or you.

How to choose your current event:
The current event must have been in the news within the last year or so. To find a topic of interest, start reading the financial and business news now. You might also visit the SEC’s website for press releases, or some of the many blogs on securities regulation, white-collar crime, or corruption. You can also follow the SEC on Twitter. Once you find a news story, you will research it more deeply, including the relevant law. Your story does not have to be a case that has gone to court already. It can be an investigation, a proposed new rule or regulation, or any other story that implicates the legal issues we discuss in class.

What to include in your paper:
· a detailed description of the current event
· a detailed discussion of the relevant law – explain the law from the very beginning, as if your reader knows nothing about the topic; this is how you demonstrate your understanding of the law
· an analysis of the current event – Why is it important to the industry? What companies will care about this news story? What will its impact be? Who will win? Why? You can choose to answer any or all of these questions (or any other question). The goal is to demonstrate meaningful application of law to facts, and deep thinking about the issues presented by the news story

Logistics:
· 8 pages, single spaced
· Citation required anytime what you just wrote down did not originate in your own brain.
· The paper should be prepared using the APA writing style and guideline for references’ format. You must provide a bibliography, and all direct quotations and data sources must be properly cited.
· The Department uses the APA style to facilitate reading the paper and understanding references without being as cumbersome as some other citation styles (such as Chicago or MLA).
· Students can download the student style guide from the American Psychological Association (http://www.apastyle.org/elecref.html) web site or you can purchase the APA style guide from the book store. There is even a help disk that can be purchased for about $ 40 (http://www.apa.org/software/) that will walk you through the process as you write the paper if you desire a more “personal assistance”.
· Papers are to be RESEARCH PAPERS. Remember that work that you use from other authors MUST be referenced. Since it is assumed that you are not an authority on the topic that you are writing, it is expected that this paper is an overview of many different sources of information. Each of these must be attributed to the author using the APA format.
· This is your paper and not the cut and paste of someone else’s work. The internet has led to a false sense of what research is all about. Those new to research tend to think that it means spending an afternoon surfing the internet and then an afternoon cutting from material available.
· Keep in mind that the Internet: (1) is not quality oriented as it has good materials and not so good materials, and does not know the difference; (2) is NOT a sole source location. In particular, sources such as Wikipedia are the works of individual submitters which are not reviewed. Thus while many entries provide excellent information, some are fundamentally flawed or just plain wrong.
· Keep in mind that the local, state and the national US Library of Congress have extensive online services. USE THEM.

GENERAL INSTRUCTIONS on PAPERS ( Term Paper)
1. To avoid even the appearance of plagiarism, references must be clearly linked to the text through parentheses (Smith, 2016), footnotes, or endnotes. It is not acceptable to just put references at the end with no way to see which text connects with each reference.
2. The most common form of plagiarism in student papers is to have exact or approximate quotes of material, with a reference, but without quotation marks or indentation. Any direct quote must be in quotation marks or, if more than one sentence, in a paragraph indented to the right of the normal text. For example, one might write:
Expressing both the brutality and revolutionary power of international trade, Marx & Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto (1848):
The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves.
3. Material which is a paraphrase of another work, even if not a direct quote, should be explicitly acknowledged with expressions like ‘to paraphrase,’ ‘to put it another way,’ ‘in other words,’ or something similar. Changing a few words in a passage you are copying does not make it uncopied. If uncited, it is still plagiarism.
So, for example, we might use the above quotation to write, “As Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto (1848), the world market system forces all countries to adopt bourgeois property relations.” Notice that the only word that was directly copied here is “bourgeois.”
4. For your term paper, you should begin with a clear thesis, and then assemble economic models, logic, and evidence to support that thesis
5. A thesis is not just a topic. A topic is something you write about, a subject that you report on. A thesis is a claim about reality, something you must argue for. You cannot get a top grade for a paper that is just a report on some current financial development, no matter how interesting, well-written, or researched.
6. In order for something to be a thesis, it should be possible for a reasonable and well-informed person to disagree, or to not see immediately why it is true. That is, it can’t be something that is true by definition, obvious, or generally well-known and understood.
7. The previous point implies that a thesis must have at least one reasonable counterargument, and usually several. If you do not raise and answer one or more of these in your paper then either (a) you don’t have a thesis or (b) you haven’t adequately defended it. The easiest (but not the only or even the best) way to find counterarguments for is to pick a thesis that is controversial.
8. To answer a counterargument is not to say, ‘a little of this, a little of that, somewhere in the middle.’ I’ve seen that in too many student papers. If something in a counterargument is true, then you can incorporate that into your revised thesis statement. A real counterargument should run counter to your thesis.
9. To make sure you have a real thesis, I require you to submit a thesis abstract (1 or 2 paragraphs) for my approval before you submit your paper.
10. Your paper should be about 8-10 pages, single-spaced, at standard typeface (12 or 14 point). There is no fixed formula for length; this is just to give you an idea.