Digital Commons Network^™

Two Essays On How Do Investors Perceive The Optimal Capital Structure And An Essay On Mutual Fund Volatility Decomposition And Manager Skill, Nima Vafai

Finance and Real Estate Dissertations

This dissertation explores the rational investment hypothesis proposed by classical theories at the stock and portfolio (mutual fund) level. My first two essays focus on the risk associated with the composition of debt and equity at the firm level. The third essay studies the total risk at the portfolio level in the mutual fund setting. In the first essay, we examine the association between deviations from the optimal capital structure and firm-level stock returns by comparing different proxies for optimal capital structure from the literature and constructing improved industry-specific optimal capital structure measures. After comparing the performance of each measure, …

The Impact Of Fresh Eyes: How A Change In The Engagement Team Impacts The Reporting Of Internal Control Material Weaknesses, Hannah Elizabeth Richards

Accounting Dissertations

Regulators have repeatedly debated mandatory auditor rotation. Proponents emphasize the benefits that a new auditor brings, specifically, improved independence and a fresh perspective, leading to higher quality audits. However, opponents argue that changing auditors is costly and impedes audit quality. The United States currently requires audit partner rotation, but it is not clear that partner change alone significantly impacts audit outcomes. In this dissertation, I provide evidence that the fresh perspective brought about by changes in the engagement team improves the detection and reporting of internal control material weaknesses (ICMW) after controlling for the likelihood of the existence of ICMW. …

Application Of Interpretable Machine Learning In Flight Delay Detection, Afroza Hossain

Information Systems & Operations Management Theses

Precise flight delay prediction is vital for the airline industries and passengers. This thesis focuses on applying several machine learning and auto-ML techniques to predict flight delays. A flight delay is said to occur when an airline lands or takes off later than its scheduled arrival or departure time, respectively. Conventionally, if a flight's departure time or arrival time is greater than 15 minutes than its scheduled departure and arrival times respectively, then it is considered that there is a departure or arrival delay with respect to the corresponding airports. Notable reasons for commercially scheduled flights to be delayed are …

The Power Of Good: Micro Level Outcomes From Corporate Social Responsibility And Social Mission Orientation, Michael Darin Mcdaniel

Management Dissertations

What happens to employees on an individual level when they see their organization doing good things for society? Whether the manifestation of good be in the form of corporate social responsibility (CSR) or social mission orientation (SMO), this paper seeks to explore the micro level outcomes from employee perceptions of these organizational attributes. Considered together, these three articles provide significant insight into the individual level outcomes from doing good as an organization, as well as the mechanisms through which those relationships flow. Specifically, CSR and SMO result in positive individual outcomes including increased organizational commitment, organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs), and …

International Evidence On The Effect Of Economic Policy Uncertainty On Stock Market Liquidity, Fnu Pratima

Finance and Real Estate Dissertations

In this dissertation, I investigate the impact of economic policy uncertainty on stock market liquidity across a broad cross-section of countries. My dissertation is composed of three distinct yet related essays. My first essay examines the impact of economic policy uncertainty on stock liquidity and various firm-level cross-sectional variables explaining the uncertainty-liquidity relationship. The focus of the second essay, using a sample for non-U.S. stocks cross-listed in the U.S., is to examine the role of cross-listing in moderating the above impact. In the third essay, I examine the market liquidity and country-level factors that explain the relationship between economic policy …

The Impact Of Fresh Eyes: How A Change In The Engagement Team Impacts The Reporting Of Internal Control Material Weaknesses, Hannah Elizabeth Richards

Finance and Real Estate Dissertations

Regulators have repeatedly debated mandatory auditor rotation. Proponents emphasize the benefits that a new auditor brings, specifically, improved independence and a fresh perspective, leading to higher quality audits. However, opponents argue that changing auditors is costly and impedes audit quality. The United States currently requires audit partner rotation, but it is not clear that partner change alone significantly impacts audit outcomes. In this dissertation, I provide evidence that the fresh perspective brought about by changes in the engagement team improves the detection and reporting of internal control material weaknesses (ICMW) after controlling for the likelihood of the existence of ICMW. …

Ndikimi I Tatimeve Në Zhvillimin E Bizneseve Në Kosovë Në Periudhën E Pas Luftës, Art Bekeri

Theses and Dissertations

Ndërtimi i politikave tatimore dhe zbatimi i tyre në mbushje të buxhetit të vendit kanë një rol të rëndësishëm në zhvillimin ekonomik të vendit si dhe për mbajtjen dhe zhvillimin e një sërë sektorësh të shoqërisë kosovare. Reformimi i sistemeve tatimore është njëri nga segmentet më të rëndësishme të tranzicionit ekonomik të udhëhequr nga aspirimi për t’u anëtarësuar në Unionin Evropian.

Politika Tatimore e një shteti është pjesë e politikës fiskale që lidhet me përcaktimin e llojeve të tatimeve të zbatuara në një vend, nivelet dhe llojet e përqindjeve tatimore si dhe për burimet e ndryshme të të ardhurave. Përveç …

The Effect Of Investor Sentiment On Earnings Management, Lin Chen

Accounting Dissertations

The association between investor sentiment and corporate reporting decisions/outcomes has been recently examined in the accounting and finance literature. As an important outcome of corporate reporting decisions, earnings management (EM) may be affected by investor sentiment. In this dissertation, I examine two research questions. The first is whether investor sentiment is associated with the propensity of firms’ engaging in the two primary forms of EM: accrual earnings management (AEM) and real earnings management (REM). The second question is whether firms’ internal governance strength and external audit quality would moderate the association between investor sentiment and AEM as well as REM. …

How Consumers Use And Propagate Information In Digital World, Meichen Dong

Marketing Dissertations

With the advent of technology and the emergence of social media, information-sharing amongst consumers has increased exponentially. Consumers now can discuss their purchases with different people in different formats, in person or online (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2010; Berger and Iyengar, 2013). Both researchers and marketers have acknowledged word of mouth (WOM) as a significant driver for consumption decisions (Akpinar & Berger, 2017). However, research regarding how consumer will use or share information in the digital world is still unclear.This dissertation research is trying to investigate the drivers of how consumers use, or share,information in digital environment – and how this …

Shah-Dissertation2020-Humancapitalofupperechelons, Tushar R. Shah

Management Dissertations

My dissertation studies strategic change in the context of digital transformation and the role of organization’s upper echelons (specifically the human capital of TMTs and CEOs) in predicting digital transformation. I concur with the prevalent belief that digital transformation is the fourth industrial revolution. It is already disrupting several businesses and business models as a result of which existing models of strategic change may have to be modified to explain these drastic transformations. I begin with defining the domain of strategic change as experienced by organizations when they intend to or are undergoing digital transformation. To support my theoretical assertions, …

Emotional Demands-Abilities (Ed-A) Fit, Emotional Labor, And Resource Depletion, Joohan Lee

Management Dissertations

Perceived emotional demands-abilities (ED-A) fit, defined as a perception of the congruence or fit between emotional demands of a job and abilities to fulfill these demands (Diefendorff, Greguras, & Fleenor, 2016), has been recently introduced to the area of management research. The main goal of this study is to test how a service employee’s psychological ownership of a job (POJ) predicts his or her ED-A fit and whether/how ED-A fit is related to emotional labor and depletion. I also look into the underlying mechanism by testing the mediation effect of commitment to display rules (CDR) on the relation of POJ …

Us And Them: The Impact Of Differing Founder Mindsets On Firm Strategic Orientation, Manisha M. Vaswani

Management Dissertations

Historically, small business founders were assumed to be motivated by profit-maximization. Today, we understand that founders also have non-economic goals for starting a business, including furthering their family legacy. This dissertation contrasts two types of founder mind-sets: an entrepreneurial mindset and a small business mind-set. I propose theoretical arguments which predict that founders who identify more with the small business mindset would pursue long-term, trust-based strategies that foster relationships with stakeholders such as suppliers and customers. On the other hand, founders who identify with the entrepreneurial mindset are more likely to pursue strategies that are ambitious, contractual, and profit-enhancing. Using …

Predictors Of Organizational Decoupling In The Context Of Corporate Sustainability, Ajith Venugopal

Management Dissertations

The gap between what firms say and what they do is referred to as organizational decoupling. Despite the fact that decoupling is a widespread phenomenon, there is a paucity of empirical studies that have examined individual level predictors of organizational decoupling, especially in the context of corporate sustainability. In this dissertation, utilizing upper echelon theory, I examine how CEO psychological charactersitics predict policy-practice decoupling in the environmental and social dimensions of corporate sustainability. Using a sample of U.S.manufacturing companies from S&P 1500 during the period 2009-2018, I test the relationship between CEO personality (FFM traits), CEO value (self-transcendence), and CEO …

Mutual Funds: Governance And Holdings, Jason Morrison

Finance and Real Estate Dissertations

In this dissertation I examine the role of governance and holdings within the mutual funds industry to determine if active managed fund strategies are affecting fund flows and increasing returns. My first two essays focus on dividend juicing and the results of this strategy and the types of boards of directors that would allow this strategy to be implemented. My third essay focuses on the concentration of holdings and the effect on the overall fund performance. I use hand collected data on the governance characteristics of the board of directors as well as the economic data and holdings of the …

Corporate Cash Holdings, Firm Performance, And Ceo Compensation, Dhruba Banjade

Finance and Real Estate Dissertations

The dissertation consists of three essays. The first essay investigates the relationship between corporate cash holdings and firm performance in new and old economy firms. Results show that firm performance increases when they maintain cash balances at or slightly above a certain level (optimum level). However, their performance degrades if they hold cash at levels beyond the optimum. Furthermore, I find that new economy firms hold more cash relative to their old economy counterparts. Corporate governance and balanced board structure also impact cash holdings and firm performance. I find that as institutional ownership increases, firm performance increases due to better …

The Effect Of Investor Sentiment On Earnings Management, Lin Chen

Finance and Real Estate Dissertations

The association between investor sentiment and corporate reporting decisions/outcomes has been recently examined in the accounting and finance literature. As an important outcome of corporate reporting decisions, earnings management (EM) may be affected by investor sentiment. In this dissertation, I examine two research questions. The first is whether investor sentiment is associated with the propensity of firms’ engaging in the two primary forms of EM: accrual earnings management (AEM) and real earnings management (REM). The second question is whether firms’ internal governance strength and external audit quality would moderate the association between investor sentiment and AEM as well as REM. …

Shareholder Activism: Does Gender Diversity Among Hedge Fund Managers Affect Activism Returns?, Ankita Agarwal

Business Administration Dissertations

Divergent and often contradictory arguments appear in organizational research on the relationship between gender-diverse top management team and performance. In the present study, I integrate several distinct literatures to test a theoretical model that examines the influence of gender diversity among hedge fund executives on the performance of the target firm. Specifically, I argue that gender diversity among hedge fund executives weaken the performance consequences because females are perceived to possess traits less suited for the leadership position, which in turn influence their performance. I further argue that because of stereotypes gender-diverse hedge funds are perceived negatively and hence are …

Behavioral Aspects In Operational Decisions. Applied Factor Investigations On The Micro (Individual) And Meso (Cluster) Levels, Lyudmyla Starostyuk

Information Systems & Operations Management Dissertations

Normative theoretical models in operations management have been widely utilized by businesses and scientists to explain multiple phenomena. They assume that operating systems are managed by fully rational decision-makers who always choose the most profitable solution. However, decision-makers are human beings with behavioral and cognitive biases which influence their choices. In this thesis we argue that a change in the social and operating environments explains the choice deviation from the normative theoretical predictions. We present three independent studies of behavioral patterns on the individual and cluster levels. In the first study we observe the effect of human faces on the …

Business Analytics In The 21st Century From The Perspective Of Academic Journals, Qiang Ruan

Information Systems & Operations Management Dissertations

Do research trends in business and statistics predict or even reflect the emergence of analytics in business practice and programs in the 21st century? My dissertation explores the answer to this question from several perspectives. The first and second essays explore knowledge sharing among statistics and business academic journals. Both essays use citation and abstract data from 24 business journals and 12 statistics journals for the years 2000, 2005, 2010, and 2015 from the Web of Science. The first essay employs multidimensional scaling with factor analysis simple structure groups to analyze both citations and abstracts. The similarity of citations among …

Product Photography For Agricultural Products, Madison Ann Somerday

Agricultural Education and Communication

The E-commerce space is growing and E-commerce is dependent upon product photography. The product photograph is one of the most important elements of an online visual marketing strategy. When selling online, the only sense a customer can use to judge the product is sight. The picture is what your customers will utilize to decide whether they want to purchase the product or not. In the 2017 Bazaarvoice’s Shopper Experience Index, product photos are shown to be able to create a 111% conversion boost and a 180% revenue boost per visitor for top retailers and brands. The picture of a product …

Inferring Big Five Personality Factors Using Text Analysis Its Assessment And Impact On Prosocial Behavior And Is Security Compliance, Bouabre Jean Baptiste Koffi

Information Systems & Operations Management Dissertations

Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in general and text mining in particular have resulted in a number of services and applications that infer and provide personality measures from text. The validity of these services, however, has not been subjected to serious empirical scrutiny. The first essay is conducted to validate three services/programs, namely, IBM Watson Personality Insights, Indico, and Personality Recognizer. Specifically, this essay compares the results of these services with those obtained from traditional personality questionnaires. Simple and short essays written by two hundred and fifty-six university students/subjects served as inputs to the personality service programs, while traditional personality …

Essays Of The Power Of User-Generated Contents And Online Communities, Yuan Zhang

Information Systems & Operations Management Dissertations

How the internet and mobile technologies shape users’ online content generation and how user- generated content on social media and online communities influence their subsequent behaviors are under-researched in the IS field. This dissertation contains three essays that examine three aspects of user-generated content (UGC) and online communities. The first study examines the spillover effects of location-based mobile applications on local businesses’ performance through analyzing the entry and penetration of a location-based augmented reality application under a natural experiment setting. A rich-get-richer effect is identified in that the internalization of the reputation spillover varies with the current reputation of the …

International Compensation: An Examination Of The Relationship Between Societal Culture And Preferred Compensation Policies, Divyanshu Vardhan V. Sharma

Management Theses

In my thesis, I review the research literature on the influence of national culture on reward preferences and compensation practices. I first review the major models of culture used to examine reward practices and then detail the convergence and divergence debate in international management by highlighting constraining forces in the host and home business environment that lead to standardization or localization. Finally, I review the research on cultural dimensions and preferred compensation practices and propose an integrative model.I conclude that culture is one of the many macro-variables that influence international compensation decisions and argue that the adaption of compensation practices …

Rational Expectations Or Behaviorally Inefficient Markets, Arati Devendra Kale

Finance and Real Estate Dissertations

In this dissertation, I examine the rational investment hypothesis, postulated by classical theories, in mutual fund and portfolio management settings. My first two essays focus on mutual fund investors. I study whether mutual fund investors display racial or ethnic prejudices, which can be observed by mutual fund flows. I hand-collect data on characteristics of mutual fund managers in addition to their names and photographs. I use machine learning algorithms from computer science literature to calculate the probabilistic race from photographs and the probabilistic ethnicity from names. In my third essay, I construct a portfolio comprising of the small growth firms …

Getting Them In The Door: A Study Of Programming Within Boys & Girls Clubs Of Vermont, Hannah Macon

Capstone Collection

While it is clear that strong, evidence-based youth-centered programming has a significant impact within an organization, there are often challenges and barriers which can significantly impact these programs. To understand these barriers more fully, it is important to understand the context through which these programs are being operated in, and by analyzing the perceptions surrounding what makes a program successful or sustainable over time. The Boys and Girls Club of Brattleboro is a local non profit which strives to grow and increase its impact on the youth members of the community. The purpose of this research was to collect and …

Essays Of The Visual Effects On Online Human Decision-Making And Data Science Applications, Jian-Ren Hou

Information Systems & Operations Management Dissertations

How human makes decisions online is an important research area in IS, many different techniques and online scenarios are used to probe into the related issues. In the first essay, this study investigates the crowdfunding platform. This study uses a deep neural network to extract the emotion metrics from the project images on the crowdfunding platform. The result shows that emotions in project images such as sadness and contentment can positively affect the performance of crowdfunding projects. This study also provides possible designs to change the emotions in the project images. In the second essay, this study investigates how to …

Three Essays On Text Analytics & Behavioral Operations Management, George Kurian

Information Systems & Operations Management Dissertations

My dissertation is about the use of textual analytics in the field of operations management and behavioral operations management. My first chapter analyses the growth of the area of operations management over the past 21 years using a combination of Author Co-Citation Analysis, topic modeling, and term co-occurrence maps. The results indicate that the field of operations management has evolved considerably over the past twenty-one years with the introduction of new topics such as behavioral operations management, healthcare operations management, knowledge-based capabilities, etc. Based on the findings of my first paper, my second and third chapters were developed. My second …

Color Lightness And Inter-Item Hierarchy: When People Associate Darker Colors With Higher Hierarchical Items, Myungjin Chung

Marketing Dissertations

While a rich collection of literature demonstrates the influence of packaging color on consumer decision making, little is known about how packaging color affects consumer behavior for bundled products. Bundled products are defined as two or more items in a single package for a special price. Often bundles consist of items with varying hierarchy: a higher-hierarchical product paired with a lower-hierarchical product (e.g., a fabric detergent and a fabric softener). I argue and show that there is a universal association between color lightness of the products’ packages and the perceived inter-item hierarchy, with darker packaging signifying a higher hierarchical product …

“Can Entrepreneurs Sell Their Firms And Still Own Them?”: The Adoption Of Dual-Class Structures And Their Effects On Ipo Performance, Nitin Kumar Singh

Management Dissertations

Dual-class Structures enable entrepreneurs to separate voting rights and cash-flow rights in arbitrary proportions to exercise control of the firm. Dual-class structures allow entrepreneurs to retain the benefits of being private and reap the benefits of going public. This dissertation identifies the governance, firm-specific, and strategic antecedents of firms that adopt dual-class structures and determines its effect on IPO performance. This study finds that firms that adopt fewer governance mechanisms, have a greater number of insiders, are younger, have a higher level of sales, pursue risky strategies (such as internationalization, acquisition, and innovation) are more likely to adopt dual-class structures. …

Women Entrepreneurs In Egypt: A Qualitative Study Of Perceptions And Challenges, Rwan Zakria Abdelrhman

Theses and Dissertations

Although all entrepreneurs and business owners encounter obstacles and barriers, the challenges that female entrepreneurs face in Egypt are surmount. Female entrepreneurs in Egypt lack the requisite training and basic advising services that would keep them updated with new technological skills. Moreover, women are more likely to discontinue their businesses due to limited access to finance. Furthermore, women face restrictive legal and institutional burdens when establishing their business or when starting a new one. In addition, cultural constraints are another challenge that negatively influence women's credibility, their empowerment and self-confidence. The current study, intends to investigate the challenges that female …