Business Commons^™

How Random Incidents Affect Travel-Time Distributions, Melike Baykal-Gürsoy, Andrew Reed Benton, Pedro Cesar Lopes Gerum, Marcelo Figueroa Candia

Supply Chain Management

We present a novel analytical model to approximate the travel-time distribution of vehicles traversing a freeway corridor that experiences random quality of service degradations due to non-recurrent incidents. The proposed model derives the generating function of travel times in closed-form using clearance time, incident frequency and severity, and other ordinary traffic characteristics. We validate the model using data from a freeway corridor where weather events and traffic accidents serve as the principal causes of service degradation. The resulting model is equivalent in performance to widely used methodologies while uniquely providing a clear connection on how incidents affect travel time distribution. …

Collaborative Test Bank Development: Multi-Institutional & Pandemic Style, Anita Walz, Eli Jamison, Candice Vander Weerdt, Mandi Goodsett

Michael Schwartz Library Publications

During 2020-21 two business faculty from different institutions together with OER librarians, undergraduate students, and graduate assistants conspired to create a faculty-access-only test bank aligned to senior undergraduate-level open textbook, Strategic Management (2020) and AACSB Standards. Test bank development followed instructional and ethical practices for non-disposable assignments including faculty development of assignments, student ownership of student work, student “opt in” to go public, choice of no or some student attribution, financial incentives for various project participants, project MOUs, professional copyediting, and public release to vetted requestors. This presentation describes our respective motivations, process, how we found one another, why the …

Payout Policy, Managerial Perquisites, And Sticky Sg&A Costs, Deborah Smith

Business Faculty Publications

Background

Sticky SG&A costs provide a novel opportunity to investigate whether payout policy serves as a remedy for management overspending on perquisites that are embedded in SG&A expenses. Payout policy, especially under strong governance, may reduce overspending. Another possibility is that management may use sales declines opportunistically to repurchase shares when sales are expected to rebound.

Methods

Regression analysis is used to examine the effect of payout mechanisms (dividends, share repurchases, and combinations thereof) and shareholder rights (EIndex) to determine whether managerial overspending on perquisites is reduced through payout policy.

Results

The results indicate that dividends and share repurchases are …

Does Industry Timing Ability Of Hedge Funds Predict Their Future Performance, Survival, And Fund Flows?, Turan G. Bali, Stephen J. Brown, Mustafa O. Caglayan, Umut Celiker

Business Faculty Publications

This paper investigates hedge funds’ ability to time industry-specific returns and shows that funds’ timing ability in the manufacturing industry improves their future performance, probability of survival, and ability to attract more capital. The results indicate that the best industry-timing hedge funds in the manufacturing sector have the highest return exposure to earnings surprises. This, together with persistently sticky earnings surprises, transparent information environment in regards to earnings releases, and large post-earnings-announcement drift in the manufacturing industry, explain to a great extent why best-timing hedge funds can generate significantly larger future returns compared to worst-timing hedge funds.