Business Commons^™

Essays On Mergers And Acquisitions, Marcin Krolikowski

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation includes two essays that examine mergers and acquisitions. In the first essay we examine how pay-for-performance influences the quality of merger decisions before and after Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX). Pay-for performance has a significant positive effect on acquirer returns of 0.9% pre-SOX and 1.1% post-SOX around the three day event window. Bidders with high pay-for-performance pay a 23.3% lower merger premium in listed target acquisitions. The positive effect of pay-for-performance is more important for public target acquisitions overall, for small acquirers pre-SOX, and for large acquirers post-SOX. In the long-run, bidders with high pre-merger pay-for-performance experience 27.6% higher returns after …

Do Social Biases Impede Auditor Reliance On Specialists? Toward A Theory Of Social Similarity, Rina Maxine Limor

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Does social similarity between the auditor and a specialist induce social biases that impair the auditor's reliance on the specialist? It is important to examine potential impairments to reliance since auditors do not possess expertise in many of the areas examined during the audit. One type of specialist that is increasingly relied upon by the auditor is the IT specialist.

Since firms have two approaches to the organization of IT personnel (decentralized vs. centralized) and often use professional designations as a hiring criteria for specialists, I examine two dimensions of social similarity: domain knowledge distinctiveness and spatial distance. Using a …

Multi-Task Setting Involving Simple And Complex Tasks: An Exploratory Study Of Employee Motivation, Maia Jivkova Farkas

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this study, employees are given autonomy in effort allocation across two tasks - complex and simple tasks, where the return to the organization is significantly higher for the complex task requiring high skill than for the simple task requiring low skill. An unavoidable feature of multi-task settings is that effort expended on one task detracts from effort that can be expended on another task. This effort trade-off among tasks becomes problematic when the returns from different tasks are unequal, with important consequences for a firm's overall performance. The design of management accounting control systems in such multi-task setting is …