Business Commons^™

Essays On Networks And Corporate Finance, Tatiana Salikhova

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In my dissertation I explore how personal networks affect firms’ financial decisions. In the first essay, I study how social connections among divisional managers affect the capital allocation to divisions in diversified conglomerates. In contrast to the previous studies, I focus on the horizontal connections or connections formed among managers of the same level of corporate hierarchy. I show that connections among divisional managers lead to higher sensitivity of segment capital spending to segment’s growth opportunities, higher firm-level allocation efficiency and higher firm value. Additionally, firms tend to strategically assign better-connected managers to these segments, and connections help to reduce …

Credit Risk And Corporate Governance, Olivier Mugisho Mudekereza

Theses and Dissertations

Is the executive’s compensation structure influenced by the credit rating assigned to his company? I analyze a panel of U.S. public firms using the random-effects and fixed-effects estimations. Compared to firms with lower credit risk, I find that firms facing higher probability of default provide more incentives for their CEOs.

Essays In Corporate Responsibility And Finance, Mert Demir

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of three chapters:

Chapter 1: The Effects of Corporate Social Performance and Social Norms on Market Valuation of Nonfinancial Disclosures Using a novel measure of the quality of corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosures by global companies, this paper analyzes how CSR report quality affects firm value when mediating roles of social pressure and CSR performance are considered. I find that firms operating in socially controversial industries enjoy higher valuations when they issue high-quality CSR reports. I also find that for firms with poor CSR performance, higher-quality CSR disclosure is associated with a decline in firm value, while …

Gender Matters: Perceptions Of Corporate Leadership, Kylie A. Braegelmann

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Women remain conspicuously underrepresented at the highest levels of corporate management; thus, it seems, gender matters. Gender bias in financial markets would imply an inefficient market, which necessarily constrains economic performance and social welfare more generally. To measure gender bias, I examine the cumulative abnormal returns around CEO announcements from 1992 through 2016 using a modified event study methodology. Existing event studies in this field are inconclusive as to whether or not such a bias exists. Therefore, this research contributes to the literature by extending the data, using a larger event window, and studying bias over time and firm size. …

Behavioral Finance: Its History And Its Future, Robert Christopher Hammond

Selected Honors Theses

The field of behavioral finance has attempted to explain a litany of biases, heuristics, and

inefficiencies present in financial markets since its creation in the 1980’s. This paper is structured as a comprehensive literature review of behavioral finance, and includes both the seminal works as well as more recent papers. The various subtopics of behavioral finance will also be analyzed, which include loss aversion, corporate finance, and momentum/contrarian investing. Finally, this paper will draw unique conclusions across behavioral finance and hypothesize about what topics within behavioral finance are likely to yield the most interesting research in the near future.

Three Essays On Dividend Policy, Mehmet Deren Caliskan

Finance Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation considers paying earnings out as dividends a conservative policy as opposed to investing earnings in to value-increasing projects. Based on this view, this dissertation explores the effect of chief executive officers’ (CEO) risk preferences on dividend policy, market’s reaction to dividend policy changes, and the effect of dividend policy on firm financial distress. The first chapter hypothesizes that risk seeking CEOs will be less likely to pay dividends compared to conservative CEOs. The second chapter hypothesizes that when the market sentiment is high (i.e., when investors are willing to take risk) firms that omit dividends should outperform the …

Three Essays On Banking And Corporate Finance, Fang Zhao

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is composed of three essays on banking and corporate finance. The first essay studies the relationship between interest-rate derivative usage and bank lending. Using recent data that cover a full business cycle, this paper documents a direct relationship between interest-rate derivative usage by U.S. banks and growth in their commercial and industrial (C&I) loan portfolios. This positive association holds for interest-rate options contracts, forward contracts, and futures contracts. This result is consistent with the implication of Diamond's model (1984) that predicts that a bank's use of derivatives permits better management of systematic risk exposure, thereby lowering the cost …