I wrote this thesis in the summer of 1992 after I had written a program in SAS to experiment with economic event studies. While experimenting with that program, I tried the day of the Challenger accident and discovered that Morton Thiokol was the main recipient of the market's wrath, so to speak. After I investigated a little further, I realized I had a great topic for my thesis (in economics).
This repo contains the updated thesis files that build with the latest version of LaTeX. I added the original Stata and SAS code I wrote to do event studies. It's probably so out-of-date that it should be considered harmful or damaging, maybe toxic.
I even corrected some typos and redrew the graphs after seeing the gnuplot output up close and cringing at ugly pixellated line graphs. So I wrote a little hack in Go to recreate the graph lines as polylines. Those fixed files are in the graphs-source directory, and they're Affinity Designer files. The Go hack is included too.
Unfortunately I don't have any of the original data I used. It's a miracle that I still have this thesis after all of these years.
I didn't keep track of all the LaTeX dependencies required to build the thesis (sorry, really, really sorry), and it doesn't have proper makefile, just two sad "scripts": cleanit and makeit. I'm embarrassed.
One of my thesis advisors, Mike Maloney, wrote a paper that goes into much more detail about the intraday trading that affected Morton Thiokol's stock and a whole lot more. It's definitely worth a read.
The popular book The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki discusses Maloney's paper in Chapter 1, section II. I hate the idea that this research is being used to support the idea of crowds having some sort of wisdom when it's really individuals acting in their own self interest---there are no crowds here. Ideas like wisdom of crowds gives us bad stuff like team rooms, groupthink, and the Challenger accident. (By the way, that link to The Wisdom of Crowds is an affiliate link.)
And, finally, the Rogers Commission Report is available online here.