Digital Commons Network^™

Reshaping The Event Horizon‑ Marketing Utopia At Music Festivals, Justin D. Joffe

Capstones

Imagine a world where every leisure activity is tracked, recorded, and then analyzed as market research according to your age and gender demographic. Imagine the next phase after smartphone payments, when a chip linking your finances isn’t in your phone, but on your wrist. Imagine a vast field of fellow fun-­‐seekers, eating, drinking and dancing in hedonistic, chemically enhanced utopia. Such a scene certainly requires some open-­‐ mindedness and improvisation, sure, a willingness to submit oneself to a vulnerable environment of whimsy. Now imagine being subtly exposed to advertisements in such a mindset. It’s no Orwellian controlled dystopia, really. You’ve …

The Sixty-Six Percent, Natalie Abruzzo

Capstones

The Sixty-Six Percent represent the percentage of women in the U.S. who are overweight. They are regarded as full-figured or “plus” size in the world of women’s apparel. Even though more than half of American women wear a “plus” size - size 14 and up - designs for these women account for a fraction of women’s apparel - Only 37% of women's wear is plus-size.

The Sixty-Six Percent is coming at an important time in a broader conversation about de-stigmatizing what it means to be a plus-size woman in America. Fat shaming has become taboo and mainstream media as well …

Startup Elsewhere, Michaela Ross

Capstones

Immigrants have made outsized contributions to American innovation and entrepreneurship, but the headwinds they face in the U.S. are now driving them to return to their native countries to startup their tech companies.

U.S. immigrants make up only 13% of the country’s overall population, but they have filed over a quarter of the country’s global patent applications, won a third of America’s Nobel prizes in the sciences in the last hundred years and make up over half of all computer science Ph.D. students in U.S. universities. Immigrants also build businesses at twice the rate of native-born Americans, and over the …

The Fate Of $15, John S. Spina

Capstones

The Fight for $15 is reinvigorating the labor moment in ways people never thought possible. In just over three years it spanned the nation and won increased minimum wages in major cites across the country. Governor Cuomo now prepares to pass the nation's first state wide $15 minimum wage in New York, but not without strong opposition.

Daily Fantasy Sites Engage In A Legal War For Survival, Danni R. Santana

Capstones

Over the past two years, the world has changed its perception of daily fantasy sports. FanDuel and DraftKings have taken the world by storm, making huge profits off even the casual fans desire to win money everyday, instead of just once at the end of a season. Lawmakers have noticed and are eager to regulate the business or ban it altogether, as seen in New York. What was once a weekend hobby is now a multi-billion dollar business. A business lawmakers say is just another form of gambling and doesn't require skill.

In The Race To Reach New Wine Drinkers Old World Taste Is Losing Out, Lillian Knoepp

Capstones

But this old world is losing its grip on the wine industry. French wine production and consumption are falling while the New World of wine is gaining ground in both areas. Experts say that new wine making techniques and higher consumption in New World markets like the United States have changed the French wine industry.

For the French, more than just their wine industry is at stake. For many, the loss of French wine is a loss of French identity.

“They can't choose between the two. Because French people - we are wine and cheese - we are everything,” said …

Technical Analysis Under Knightian Uncertainty, Andre Mouton

Student Theses and Dissertations

Technical analysis, or the forecasting of asset price movements using past prices, is commonly practiced in financial markets but poorly explained by mainstream economic theory. I show that a technical rule can have predictive power when an asset’s payoffs are subject to Knightian uncertainty, defined as variation that cannot be described probabilistically (Knight, 1921). I present an asset-pricing model in which asset payoffs undergo periodic shifts in trend, and agents form expectations about these payoffs using a constant gain least squares (CGLS) rule. I investigate whether a second CGLS rule, operating on price, can provide a more accurate forecast of …

Exploring Antecedents, Performance Outcomes And Psychological Processes Of Multi-Device Use, Chi-Wen Chen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Given the widespread use of multiple devices (such as desktop computers, smartphones, and tablets) in performing a task, systematic, theoretic, and empirical studies pertaining to motivations regarding, performance outcomes, and attitudes toward multi-device use have become essential. Despite the increasing importance of multi-device use, research remains scarce regarding this topic.

To comprehensively understand the issues of multi-device use, this dissertation comprises three complementary studies, each of which focuses on a different aspect of multi-device use: Given the availability of multiple devices, what are the motivations behind multi-device use as opposed to the use of only one device to complete a …

Essays On Disclosure And Individual Investors, Yakun Wang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Essay 1: Using data from StockTwits.com, the most popular investment-dedicated social media network in the US, I develop new and direct measures of investors' aggregate attention to the stock market, and to individual stocks. I then examine the behavior of investors' aggregate attention and firm-specific attention. First, I show that investors' aggregate attention to the stock market is higher during earnings season than non-earnings season, but is not lower on Fridays compared to other weekdays. Second, I show that investors' firm-specific attention is positively related to Earnings Response Coefficients (ERCs) and negatively related to Post Earnings Announcement Drift (PEAD), indicating …

The Role Of Financial Reporting Quality In The Selection Of New Audit Committee Member, Dongliang Lei

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Prior studies investigating the selection of audit committee members (ACMs) often focus on board-level and director demographic characteristics. In this paper, I investigate whether boards select new ACMs from corporate environments with similar financial reporting quality. Using the appointee firm's financial report quality as a proxy for new ACMs' financial reporting attributes, I find that firms are more likely to appoint new ACMs with financial reporting attributes similar to firms' financial reporting culture for a sample of 275 new ACM appointments from 2007 to 2011. I find that firms appointing ACMs with relatively weak (strong) financial reporting attributes are more …

Earnings Forecast And Stock Recommendation By Security Analysts, Cunyu Xing

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of 3 chapters.

Chapter 1: Last Minute Earning Forecast Revision

Chapter 2: Security Analysts' Double Down Behavior in Stock Recommendation

Chapter 3: Cost of Speaking in Two Different Tongues

Chapter 1: I study financial analysts who revise their earnings forecasts just a few days before firms' earnings announcement. Analysts who apply this strategy are more accurate in their earnings forecasts, and they are more likely to move to a larger brokerage firm. All-star analysts are more likely to take this last minute revision strategy than non-all-star analysts. All-star analysts using the strategy are likely to maintain their …

Auditor Size And Audit Quality: A Partner-Level Perspective, Yu Zhou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines the effect of auditor size on audit quality at the level of audit partners. Auditor size is defined by three criteria: the wealth of the audit partners; the size of the partners' client portfolios; and the number of audit partners in the firm. Using data from China, where disclosure of the identity of the engagement audit partner is required, I hypothesize and find that the personal wealth of an audit partner has two effects on audit quality: the income effect and the substitution effect. The Chinese audit market is particularly suited to study these two effects. Prior …

The Innovation Makerspace: Geographies Of Digital Fabrication Innovation In Greater New York City, Kathryn Dickerson

Theses and Dissertations

Desktop digital fabrication technology has the potential to powerfully alter the economics, geography, and sociology of production. The desktop technology cannot reach its potential for widespread impact until it improves in quality and decreases in price. Makerspaces have emerged in the United States in the last eight years as informal social organizations where innovation in this technology may be occurring. This study examines whether innovation in digital fabrication technology has occurred, or has the potential to occur, at makerspaces in the New York City area.

Bank Monitoring: Impact On Equity Reit Risk And Return, Mariya Letdin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The first half of this paper studies the impact of bank screening on the risk of asset collateral pledged against secured loans for a sample of US equity REITs. Using a unique, hand-collected data sample, I show that bank screening results in lower risk assets being pledged as collateral, a finding confirmed by property type risk and location risk. Further, I find evidence consistent with the role of monitoring for secured, non-recourse mortgage loans. Finally, examining risk at the company level, I find that screening and monitoring of REITss assets via utilizing secured mortgage financing (as opposed to unsecured, recourse …

Essays On International Payout, Governance, And Information, Richard Clifton Herron

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of four chapters that span international payout policy, firm- and country-level governance, and information in capital markets.

Chapter 1: This chapter tests if information gathered by investment bankers during a firm's initial public offering (IPO) creates value in a subsequent acquisition of that same firm. In a sample of 1,519 all-public acquisitions, for 54 of these acquisitions the target's IPO underwriter later becomes the acquirer's adviser. These "same adviser" acquisitions outperform, with three-day acquirer cumulative abnormal returns (CARs) that are 4% higher, all else equal. This outperformance is through both better acquisitions and better prices, and combined …

Essays On The Impacts Of Quantitative Easing On Financial Markets, Joanne Guo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Due to the severity of the financial crisis of 2008, the Federal Reserve had attempted a variety of unconventional monetary policy to support the U.S. financial markets at the verge of collapse. The most well-known of the Fed's unconventional monetary policy is quantitative easing, in which it purchased a large amount of government securities from the markets in order to lower longer term interest rates and mortgage rates. The several rounds of quantitative easing had different impacts, intended as well as unintended, on U.S. financial markets and foreign markets. The purpose of this paper is to fully explore the effects, …

Explorations Of Perceived Product Efficacy, Veronika Ilyuk

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Prior research has largely treated perceived product efficacy as a one-dimensional construct. This research uniquely demonstrates that perceived product efficacy is comprised of several dimensions and focuses on one previously unexplored dimension that has significant implications for consumption frequency: perceived duration of product efficacy. The current research shows that consumers make biased duration judgments of product efficacy: consumers make shorter (vs. longer) duration judgments when they perceive a concurrent task to be relatively difficult (vs. easy). The effect of perceived task difficulty on duration judgments of product efficacy is (1) established with energy-enhancing products and medication, (2) shown to be …

Essays On Real Estate Investment Trusts, Jiajin Chen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is composed with two essays on real estate investment trusts. The first chapter examines REIT IPOs initial-day, short-run and long-run performance using a large sample of 370 REIT IPOs from four continents (14 different countries) during the 1996-2010 period. The result shows that (1) the newly-established REITs in other countries exhibit similar initial-day return pattern as in the U.S., (2) the low initial-day return might be caused by the fund-like structure of REITs together with the real estate assets they hold, (3) the slightly positive initial-day return is offset by the poor performance in the 190-day days subsequent …

The New York Philharmonic Strike Of 1973, Kuan Cheng Lu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The New York Philharmonic Strike of 1973 is a story waiting to be told. The sole volume to mention it, John Canarina's The New York Philharmonic, devotes less than two pages to it. Until now, the full story has lain buried in archival documents, newspaper articles, and the memories of those who experienced it firsthand. This document represents the first comprehensive examination of this event. The research upon which it is based consists of: interviews with the New York Philharmonic members; research in the New York Philharmonic Archives; newspaper articles and reviews. The results are presented here in three …

It-Enabled Coordination In Electronic Markets: An Experimental Investigation Of The Effects Of Social Communication On Group Buyers, Alexander Pelaez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Coordination, and the mechanisms by which coordination occurs, represents a significant area of study for economic research, and information technology. Technology enhances communication in both speed and quantity of information and when aligned with appropriate tasks can improve decision-making and task performance. Examining the effect of technology based coordination mechanisms on market platforms provides insight into outcomes as represented by buyer surplus and task completion as well as behaviors, such as network structure and emotional attitudes in economic experiments. Drawing on theory from economics and information systems, larger buyer groups should be able to obtain better prices and extract higher …