Digital Commons Network^™

The Consumer Behavior Impact Of Data Capture Through Artificial Intelligence, Sally Emory Hiott

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

Artificial intelligence is changing the way consumers search for information and purchase items and, thus, how people behave across generations. Due to the nature of this cutting-edge technology, organizations are investigating how much to wisely invest, but the artificial intelligence offerings are outpacing the research. Academic scholars and marketing professionals have issued timely prompts for additional studies to supplement the existing literature, which is limited. This research provides insights into privacy concerns surrounding the data collection of artificial intelligence and whether people feel exploited or served by it. Across two articles, surveys were deployed and collected to provide quantitative data …

Audit Report Timeliness In Local Governments: An Observation Of North Carolina Governmental Units’ Response To State-Imposed Deadlines And Consequences, Amber N. Daniels

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

To provide citizens with transparent financial information regarding the health of their respective districts, local government unit leaders must furnish governmental audit reports in a timely manner. Further, for management to effectively implement auditor suggestions for improvements, leaders must have accessibility to timely audited information. Many governmental units in the state of North Carolina have demonstrated significant lags in reporting timeliness and often miss state-mandated deadlines. Therefore, this research utilized ordinary least-squares regression to estimate the effects the variables representing report message and managerial competency, accountability, and audit environment groups had on the time required for each unit to file …

Sem Leadership Impact On Psychological Empowerment, Interorganizational Trust, And The Value Co-Creation Environment, Rick Blume

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

An unabating drive for continuous innovation in B2B manufacturing occurs due to global competitive pressures and shareholders demanding firm growth. Companies may emphasize partnerships and strategic alliances in this competitive environment to build value and create competitive advantage through innovation and worker ingenuity. This study investigates whether and how a combination of servant, empowering, and mindful leadership styles (SEM Leadership) influences the group culture by increasing the presence of psychological empowerment (PE), interorganizational trust (IOT), and cultivating a value co-creation context (VCC). The value co-creation process between supplier and customer is within management influence and represents a vital management lever …

An Analysis For Understanding The Impacts Of Healthcare Leader Emotional Intelligence On Employee Engagement: Differences Between Clinical And Non-Clinical Employees, Adam Wilkins

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

While leadership theory and its applications have been studied by academic researchers since the 1800s, the study of emotional intelligence (EI) did not become a focus until 1990. Since EI’s conceptualization, this form of intelligence has remained a key focus area in the study of what motivates employees to best keep them engaged in their work. However, some critical aspects of the relationship between EI and employee engagement have not yet been explored. This research provides insight into the importance of EI in healthcare leadership. The narrowed focus of this study provides a better understanding of what role, if any, …

Are Generational Attitudes Toward Digital Marketing Technology Exhibited In Automobile Purchase Behaviors?, Scott Whitaker

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

This dissertation was focused on the current digital purchasing trend in the used automotive industry in order to understand which factors impacted the growth of this trend through the lens of generational cohort theory. The growth of consumer informedness in the automotive sector has created drastic changes in how consumers are able, and willing, to purchase vehicles. Used car dealerships who adopt successful internet marketing techniques can capture and engage potential customers and then convert that engagement into sales. Companies like Carvana, Vroom, and CarMax have seized this opportunity and created a digital marketing phenomenon with major impacts on consumer …

The Impact Of Attribution Theory On Information Technology Professionals’ Perceptions Of Glass Ceilings, Shanda Phillips

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

As of 2021, women comprised almost half of the United States workforce, nearly 47%. Despite this, women represent only 24% of top earning officers and only 6% of chief executive officer positions. Glass ceilings are a phenomenon that represent an invisible barrier that prevents professional advancement for minority populations, including women, in business. Glass ceilings can impact several minority groups, but mostly appear to be a distinctive gender phenomenon. The challenges for women are well documented, but less understood are the attributional causes of glass ceilings as perceived by information technology (IT) professionals. The framework for this dissertation is the …

Essays In Mutual Funds, Aadhaar Verma

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

This dissertation examines mutual fund portfolio formation, the economic forces that determine how fund managers construct their portfolios, and the market effects of fund portfolio disclosures.

In the first chapter of my dissertation, I study how funds modify their portfolios around disclosure dates in order to cater to their investors’ non-financial preferences. Using social norms and investor boycotts surrounding tobacco and firearm sectors as a proxy for non-financial preferences, I find that these stocks experience significant negative returns on portfolio disclosure dates and significant positive returns on the day after the portfolio disclosure. I also find that funds accelerate their …

Banks Vs Shadow Banks: Evidence From The 2015 Fha Mortgage Insurance Premium Cut, Pornteera Tungtrakul Jefferson

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

My paper uses the 2015 surprise mortgage insurance premium (MIP) cut in the FHA loan market to study banks’ and shadow banks’ role in the residential mortgage market and how shadow banks increase their market share or take away the mortgage demand from traditional banks. I use the triple-differences method to study the rise of shadow banks, a MIP cut experiment. My results found that shadow banks are much more active in the FHA market and that they expand access to credit to borrowers by taking away some demand from traditional banks. I also study the impact of the MIP …

Losing Altitude: The Impact Of Asc 842: Leases On The Reported Liquidity Of Large U.S. Airlines, Philip Slater

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

The airline industry in the United States represents fertile ground for research due to its susceptibility to extraneous demand shocks such as fuel price hikes, terrorist attacks, and global pandemics coupled with high leverage and high reliance on leasing. Accounting Standards Codification (ASC) 842: Leases became effective January 1^st, 2019, requiring capitalization of the majority of leased assets. This study was motivated by how the act may have affected both reported airline liquidity and attempts to restructure leases to avoid capitalization, which may provide an initial impact. The objective of this study was to examine whether passage of …

Effects Of Advance Refunding Municipal Bonds After The U.S. Tax Cuts And Jobs Act, Sarah Curry

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

The process when U.S. municipalities retire callable bonds early and refinance them with bonds of a lower coupon rate is called advance refunding. The advance refunding of debt is a widespread practice in municipal finance; however, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 removed the option to keep this debt tax-exempt and now requires municipalities to convert from tax-exempt to taxable. The purpose of this research was to evaluate the impact eliminating advance refunding of municipal debt into tax-exempt status has on the municipality’s advance refunding decision making process, specifically at the state level. Municipal governments are still …

Social Determinants Of Health: The Impact On Health Outcomes And Hospital Profitability, Danielle Mcpherson

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

Hospitals are experiencing decreasing profitability due to increasing healthcare cost. In this paper, I demonstrate that there is financial value to hospitals by addressing social determinants of health (SDOH) as this strategy improves health outcomes and yields cost savings. I estimate the impact of SDOH on the health outcomes using an IV probit regression analysis and estimated the impact of health outcomes on cost using a basic linear regression. I estimate that improving SDOH by one standard deviation will result in hospital cost savings as follows: addressing Violent Crime will decrease hospital cost between 0.16% and 0.21%, addressing Supplemental Nutrition …

Does Debt Matter? Empirical Analysis Of Sovereign Debt Default, Juan Pablo Espinosa

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

Sovereign debt default can have significant economic, social, and reputational costs. For this reason, policy makers across the globe are constantly trying to balance fiscal policy and economic growth. Many of them, however, are still unable to do so and fall into sovereign debt default. This research paper looks at 52 sample countries from 1980 to 2018 and examines whether sovereign debt default can be explained by the gap between GDP growth and interest rates and/or debt-to-GDP levels. Through a series of empirical analysis, I find that if GDP growth is higher than interest rates, risk of default is typically …

Vega, Capital Ratios, And Real Estate Lending, Muna Alsheikh

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

The 2007 financial crisis revealed how excessive bank risk threatens financial system stability. This paper studies two aspects of the risk-taking incentives of banks– CEO compensation and capital. The vega of a bank executive’s equity compensation measures how compensation changes relative to the banks’ stock volatility. If CEO compensation vega is high, I expect the CEO to take more risk in areas where he exercises control. Conversely, if regulators demand that banks invest their own capital to encourage conservative behavior, then I expect risk-taking to be lower. This paper confirms that higher vega and lower capital ratios are associated with …

Machine Learning And Empirical Asset Pricing, Yingnan Yi

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

In this paper, I conduct a comprehensive study of using machine learning tools to forecast the U.S. stock returns. I use three sets of predictors: the past history summarized by 120 lagged returns, the technical indicators measured by 120 moving average trading signals, and the 79 firm fundamentals, which helps to understand the weak-form market efficiency, algorithm trading and fundamental analysis. I find each set independently has strong predictive power, and buying the top 20% stocks with the greatest predicted returns and shorting bottom 20% with the lowest earns economically significant profits, and the profitability is robust to a number …

The Cross Section Of Expected Returns: Evidence From Implied Beliefs Of Active Mutual Funds Managers, Jorge Sabat

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

I develop a new test to compare the performance of asset pricing models. Using the industry allocations of active US mutual funds, I employ a structural model to estimate the implied expected returns on industry portfolios. For each asset pricing model, I use the factor loadings and the implied expected returns to calculate the implied expected factor risk premium. I compare the models based on the implied Sharpe ratio of the market portfolio. My methodology identifies the asset pricing model that not only generates the highest Sharpe ratio for the market but also best tracks the ex-ante Sharpe ratio. I …

Is A Pension Fund's Mix Of Fair Value Investments, Audit Type, And Audit Quality Associated With The Firm's Credit Rating?, Trevor England

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

There has been a proliferation of alternative investment holdings by defined benefit pension plans during the 21^st century. While holdings of alternative investments may advantage pension plans and their sponsoring firms through diversification and/or less volatile returns, they may also present valuation problems because underlying investments in opaquely valued (or marked-to-model) securities contain larger estimation error and uncertainty. Such valuation problems may concern credit reporting agencies because the sponsoring firm’s pension plan liability is uncertain. This problem is exacerbated through agency relationships within pension plans that enable executives and investment managers to engage in opportunistic financial reporting of fair …

Intuition In Employee Selection: Examining The Conditions For Accurate Intuitive Hiring Decisions, Vinod Vincent

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

In complex organizational environments, managers often rely on intuition to make decisions. Research has found intuition to be helpful when the task is complex; the decision maker is a domain expert; and when the decision environment has a high level of uncertainty, complexity, time pressure, insufficient data, and more than one reasonable solution. However, in employee selection, which is a decision environment that typically has the aforementioned characteristics that are conducive for intuition, scholars discount the usefulness of intuition in favor of more objective, analytical selection methods such as specific aptitude (e.g. sales ability) tests. A reason for the lack …

Social Capital And Dynamic Capabilities In A Top Management Team, Blaine Schreiner

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

Top management teams greatly influence the performance of their organizations based on their interpretations of the situations they face and the decisions they make built on those interpretations. In addition, the long-term success of the organization relies upon the top management team’s ability to properly balance the exploration and exploitation capabilities of the organization. The literature regarding the impact of the top management team’s social capital is limited and even less is known about the intra-organizational social capital of this group. This study examines the effect of the top management team’s intra-organizational social capital on exploratory and exploitative dynamic capability …

Investigating Information Security Policy Characteristics: Do Quality, Enforcement And Compliance Reduce Organizational Fraud?, Dennis T. Brown

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

Organizational fraud, a deceitful practice or willful device resorted to with intent to deprive another of his right, or in some manner to do harm or injury, is a growing global concern. While cyberattacks from the outside are more expected, the internal security threat from trusted insiders is responsible for significantly more information compromise than external threats. Information systems make life easier but are increasingly used by employees to perpetrate fraudulent activities. For example, a trusted insider employee with access to sensitive customer databases could misappropriate information and sell it to a competitor for personal gain. These type losses are …

Trust And Distrust Scale Development: Operationalization And Instrument Validation, John D. Rusk

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

Trust and distrust have been studied at great length by researchers in the field of information systems and various other fields over the past few decades without reaching consensus on conceptualization and measurement. The goal of this study was to determine if individual trust and distrust are separate constructs or opposite ends of the same continuum. To this end, based on theoretical rationale, an aggregation of extant, validated trust and distrust instruments combined with newly created trust and distrust items were used as input into a rigorous Q-sorting procedure. The Q-sorting process led to the first contribution of this research: …

Data Analytics In An Audit: Examining Fraud Risk And Audit Quality, Sondra Smith

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

ABSTRACT

DATA ANALYTICS IN AN AUDIT: EXAMINING FRAUD RISK AND

AUDIT QUALITY

by

Sondra Smith

This study is comprised of two papers which examine, through interviews and an experiment, the current practices of data analytics of CPA firms, whether and how fraud risk impacts the usage of data analytics in an audit, and the effect data analytics has on the efficiency and effectiveness of an audit. The implementation of data analytics in an audit is relatively new, and there is not a good understanding of how it is currently being used in practice. Although historically the auditing profession has been …

Skewness Risk, Jump-Diffusion Modeling And Pricing In Carry Trade, Chitsun Chen

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

This paper investigates jump risk and return characteristics of currency carry trades by employing both empirical approach and analytical method. With country-level stochastic discount factor, a mathematical model is proposed to describe carry trade return dynamics that capture jump risk. Carry trade returns are modeled as jump-diffusion processes where types of jumps involve global and idiosyncratic jumps. We derive the first four moments of return process on exchange rates and use the method of moments to estimate parameters, which show the model matches excess carry trade returns in data quite well. Empirical findings show that carry trade returns exhibit an …

Can Relationship Banking Reduce Firms' Ipo Underpricing, Kai Lu

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

IPO underpricing harms pre-existing shareholders and reduces the capital firms can raise to fund their growth. This paper shows that relationship banking can reduce IPO underpricing by decreasing information uncertainty. I develop a theoretical model showing that good firms – those with a lower dispersion of market value – are harmed and bad firms benefit from IPO price uncertainty when there is no borrowing and, thus, no distinguishing information on firm quality. When investors receive signals about firm value only from publicly observable transaction lending, good firms benefit while bad firms suffer. However, when firms have access to loans through …

Sex May Sell But Gender Identity Predicts: An Investigation Of College Students’ Propensity To Join Entrepreneurship Clubs, Jerald Wallace

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

A rich and diverse stream of research has focused on assessing different outcomes between men and women entrepreneurs. Popular stereotypes maintain that women are neither as interested, or successful as entrepreneurs compared to men. However, most past research has used biological sex as a proxy to measure differences between women and men dichotomously. The problem with this approach is that it is an oversimplified approach to a complex issue. To address this problem, the more recent literature suggests the inclusion of more meaningful variables, such as gender identity, an individual’s concept of their traits both masculine and feminine, to assess …

Audit Committee Oversight Of Internal Control Over Financial Reporting, Andrea B. Weickgenannt

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

This study investigates the processes audit committees employ to fulfill their obligation to oversee internal control over financial reporting (ICFR). Specifically, I explore audit committee processes within five fundamental internal control components: control environment, risk assessment, control activities, information and communication, and monitoring (COSO, 2013). I consider agency theory and institutional theory, investigating the degree of substantive versus ceremonial processes used by audit committees. Additionally, this study considers comfort theory as it reveals details about how audit committees get “comfortable” with ICFR.

The research questions in this study are examined through a cross-sectional survey of 167 public company audit committee …

Fees, Going Concern Opinions And Auditor Dismissals: An Empirical Assessment, Frances Ann Stott

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

Auditors issue going concern modified opinions when there is substantial doubt about the company’s ability to continue its operations into the foreseeable future. Companies frequently respond to this type of audit opinion by changing auditors. Critics, such as the SEC, suggest that this may be done in order to opinion shop (i.e., find an auditor who is likely to issue a more favorable unqualified opinion). However, prior research has indicated that opinion shopping may not be effective. Since firms receiving a going concern modified opinion are clearly under significant financial distress, the effect a change in auditor has on subsequent …

Built To Last: Exploring Family Strategy In Dynastic Business Families, Mark William Auger

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

Dynasties entwine family and fortune. They are organizational longevity outliers. Society offers a conflicting view of dynasties. On one hand, dynasties are associated with conflict, divisiveness, conspicuous consumption, and entitlement. On the other hand, dynastic business families employ people, produce and innovate products and processes, and give to community. Linked to values and enacted by strategic leaders, strategy organizes and mobilizes capital toward goals attainment. The firm-centric perspectives of the strategic management and family business strategy literatures overlook the systematic investigation of family strategy as a means of perpetuation. This grounded theory influenced study explores the components of a family …

What’S In It For Me? Consumer Perceived Value Of Marketing Activities As A Driver Of Consumer Brand Engagement On Social Network Sites., Mary Jane Gardner

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

Social network sites are transforming the way companies, both big and small, communicate and market to consumers. Many businesses recognize the need for incorporating a social networking strategy as part of their overall marketing efforts. This strategy involves the use of social network sites as a means of promoting and communicating about a focal brand to consumers, attracting and building relationships with consumers, and increasing sales. However, an effective social network strategy is much more complex than simply having a Facebook page to which companies occasionally post. The effectiveness of marketing on social network sites depends at least in part …

Have We Overlooked The Benefits Of Nas, James C. Rich

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

Are nonaudit services (NAS) good or bad? Regulators, investors, and the professional accounting community have intensely debated this question for the last five decades. While seemingly a simple question, the abundance of conflicting literature surrounding this topic has indicated that the answer is anything but simple. The professional accounting community maintains that joint provision of the audit engagement and NAS results in a more in-depth knowledge base that positively impacts the auditor/client relationship. Regulators and investors have taken an opposing view by arguing that NAS lead auditors to compromise their independence. While an extensive body of literature has sought to …

Redefining The Sales Call, Judi Billups

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

The sales process is undergoing a revolution as a result of social media and related technological advancements. Although each step of the sales process is being affected, the most drastically altered step is likely the sales call. The purpose of this research is to examine the impact the type of sales call used by sellers has on both the buyer’s evaluation of the salesperson and the seller’s attribution of sale call success or failure. The study consists of two essays. The first focuses on the buyer’s evaluation of the salesperson based on the frequency and alignment of their use of …