Business Commons^™

Topics In International Finance, Jonathan Lennon Hsu

Olin Business School Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on two main unanswered questions that lie at the intersection between international financing, international trade, and supply chains. Firstly, to what extent can international trade networks offer borrowing opportunities for firms that face significant barriers in traditional financing markets? Second, what are the potential impacts of financial globalization on firms’ borrowing and extension of trade credit?

The first chapter seeks to answer the first research question listed above: to what extentcan international trade networks offer borrowing opportunities for firms that face significant barriers in traditional financing markets? I show that firms use their trade flows to borrow …

Essays In Behavioral Corporate Finance, Corporate Governance, And Higher Purpose, Kingsley Wabara

Olin Business School Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Does individual financial risk-taking behavior indeed vary by gender? If yes, how exactly? Moreover, what happens when individuals with differential tendencies (e.g., risk-taking, sense of higher purpose, et cetera) come together in small groups such as the corporate board to decide on financial risk-taking or conduct intense board oversight? What role does group or board structure play in all of these? In effect, how does the within-group power and influence asymmetry affect the manifestation of the individual tendencies in boards’ decisions, corporate behavior, and financial outcomes? The lack of conclusive answers to these questions is at the core of several …

Topics In International Finance, Jonathan Lennon Hsu

Olin Business School Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on two main unanswered questions that lie at the intersection between international financing, international trade, and supply chains. Firstly, to what extent can international trade networks offer borrowing opportunities for firms that face significant barriers in traditional financing markets? Second, what are the potential impacts of financial globalization on firms’ borrowing and extension of trade credit?

The first chapter seeks to answer the first research question listed above: to what extentcan international trade networks offer borrowing opportunities for firms that face significant barriers in traditional financing markets? I show that firms use their trade flows to borrow …

Essays In Behavioral Corporate Finance, Corporate Governance, And Higher Purpose, Kingsley Wabara

Olin Business School Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Does individual financial risk-taking behavior indeed vary by gender? If yes, how exactly? Moreover, what happens when individuals with differential tendencies (e.g., risk-taking, sense of higher purpose, et cetera) come together in small groups such as the corporate board to decide on financial risk-taking or conduct intense board oversight? What role does group or board structure play in all of these? In effect, how does the within-group power and influence asymmetry affect the manifestation of the individual tendencies in boards’ decisions, corporate behavior, and financial outcomes? The lack of conclusive answers to these questions is at the core of several …

Essays On Information And Liquidity, Swaminathan Balasubramaniam

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The 2008 financial crisis has highlighted the challenges faced by financial systems in aggregating information, ensuring coordination among various market participants and providing adequate liquidity. In this backdrop, the three chapters of the dissertation explore (i) the role of disagreement in enabling communication and trade among strategic investors (ii) how uncertainty about what others know could be exploited in preventing coordination failures (ii) pricing liquid and illiquid assets in response to unforeseen liquidity demand.

When do competing traders, endowed with different pieces of information pertaining to a security payoff, exchange information before trading? The first essay shows that competing traders …

Peer Interactions In Decision Making, Yijun Chen

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The broad research topic of my dissertation is individual’s decision making in the presence of peer interactions. I focus on empirical settings where individuals are connected with others in the peer network, and through peer interactions, their decisions are interdependent. Peer network structures in terms of who is connected with whom and the mechanisms of peer interactions convey valuable information on the decision making process. I employ quantitative empirical methods to uncover the information embedded in peer networks, provide insights on the mechanisms of peer interactions, and generate peer-network based managerial implications.

Chapter 1 studies how participants collaborate to compete …

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 …

Essays On Asset Pricing: A Model Comparison Perspective, Lingxiao Zhao

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In my dissertation, I focus on theoretical and empirical asset pricing from a Bayesian model comparison perspective. In the first Chapter, revisiting the framework of Barillas and Shanken (2018), BS henceforth, we show that the Bayesian marginal likelihood-based model comparison method in that paper is unsound: the priors on the nuisance parameters across models must satisfy a change of variable property for densities that is violated by the Jeffreys priors used in the BS method. Extensive simulation exercises confirm that the BS method performs unsatisfactorily. We derive a new class of improper priors on the nuisance parameters, starting from a …

Essays On Consumer Online Search And Digital Content Consumption, Shuo Zhang

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In my dissertation, I apply empirical quantitative methods to marketing research and investigate consumer online search and purchase patterns, as well as digital consumption behaviors and the potential implication for marketing managers. This dissertation consists of two chapters. Chapter 1 studies the consumer shopping channel choice when they search and shop for products online. Mobile phones have emerged as a major channel for online shopping as an alternative to PCs. Despite more consumers using mobile phones, the conversion rate on the mobile channel is lower than that on the PC channel. In this study, we propose a structural consumer search-and-purchase …

Essays On Marketing Strategy, Chang Liu

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I apply game-theoretical methods in the context of marketing research and investigate the effects of stylized facts in behavioral economics. Chapter 1 studies the effects of managerial optimism on firms’ performance. Research has shown that many managers and entrepreneurs tend to be optimistic and are inclined to believe that negative shocks happen to them less frequently than to others. However, there is also evidence suggesting that such optimism is often inaccurate in reality and managerial optimism can lead to the failure of a company. We develop a game-theoretic model to investigate the impact of managerial optimism on …

Essays On Financial And Monetary Economics, Xi Wang

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The first part of this dissertation explores an empirical relevance to understand the equity premium puzzle. Since only the wealthiest people invest significant amounts in the stock market (limited participation), it is reasonable to combine the consumption data of the wealthy, instead of aggregate data, with observed asset returns to estimate the risk aversion coefficient (RRA). I approximate the consumption by the rich from two angles: one explores the income and wealth data to back out synthetic consumption directly, and the other explores the sales data to approximate the expenditure by the rich. By using the created indices, the lowest …

Essays On Financial Intermediation, Yong Kyu Gam

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

Chapter 1 investigates a regulatory spillover effect of the Basel III liquidity standard on the real economy through a series of difference-in-difference estimations. Since the Basel Committee’s official endorsement for the new liquidity regulation in December 2010, a bank exposed to high liquidity risk reduced its loan proportion significantly, making a negative real effect on its surrounding economy via a bank-lending-channel. The new regulation also induced a bank with a weak liquid balance sheet to raise its deposit rate aggressively, generating a liquidity problem in a nearby local bank through a deposit-competition-channel and ultimately curbing an expansion of the local …

Essays In Financial Economics, Jinji Hao

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the first chapter of my dissertation, I provide a novel framework – the cumulant generating function (cgf) of the market risk on the positive half real line – for studying the market risk which can be replicated by cross sections of index option prices in a model-free manner. Within this unifying framework, independent of the underlying price process, the VIX index measures the height of the cgf at one while the SVIX index proposed by Martin (2016) measures the convexity of the cgf over the interval [0, 2]. A tail index of the market risk, TIX, is proposed based …

Essays In Entrepreneurship, Innovation And Labor, Andres Gonzalo Hincapie Norena

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

I explore the role of experimentation on the career choices of individuals deciding whether to be paid employees or entrepreneurs, and on the decisions of consumers deciding what medical treatment to buy. In the labor market, experimentation entails the accumulation of information that allows individuals to improve their occupational choices. In the product market, experimentation entails discovering the quality of new products and it may have an effect on the evolution of technology: less experimentation by individuals may slow down the process of innovation. I start in Chapter 2 with the observation that most individuals do not start a business …