Melissa Cyprus, CFA, is conducting an analysis of inventory management practices in the retail industry. She assumes the population cross-sectional standard deviation of inventory turnover ratios is 20. How large a random sample should she gather in order to ensure a standard error of the sample mean of 4?
Given the population standard deviation and the standard error of the sample mean, you can solve for the sample size. Because the standard error of the sample mean equals the standard deviation of the population divided by the square root of the sample size, 4 = 20 / n1/2, so n1/2 = 5, so n = 25.
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