Business Commons^™

Mispricing, Speculation And Real Activities Manipulation, Cristhian R. Mellado-Cid

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

Real activities manipulation involves changes made by firm’s managers to the normal business operations of the firm and consequently should affect the firm cash flows. Real activities manipulation can reduce firm value because actions taken in the current period to increase earnings can have a negative effect on cash flows in future periods. As such, real activities manipulation should deserve more attention from researchers. First, I attempt to explore the causality relationship between real activities manipulation and firm equity mispricing. Results show that firms with high real activities manipulation have lower level of equity mispricing while firms with high levels …

An Examination Of G10 Carry Trade During Non-Crisis And Crisis Period (2007-2009), Charles Kwame Armah Danso

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

Carry trading is a form of currency trading in which an investor buys assets in a higher interest yielding currency by borrowing in a low interest yielding currency without hedging for exchange risk. I seek to compare and contrast the performance of carry trade strategy before and after the financial crisis (2007-2009). I also compare and contrast how the carry trade strategy and covered interest rate arbitrage fare in different periods. Carry traders do not hedge their position using forward rates whereas covered interest rate arbitrageurs do hedge their position using forward rates. A comparison of the two trading strategies …

The Relationship Between Institutional Ownership And Firm Performance, Javeria Farooqi

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

In the past three decades, the presence of institutional investors has increased 33% in the equity market. The main goal of this dissertation is to study the relationship between institutional ownership and firm performance. I examine how the level institutional investors' involvement in composing their own portfolio, as oppose to replicating their portfolio, impacts their level of monitoring and disciplining their portfolio firms. Specifically, I investigate the relationship between institutional ownership and firms' operating efficiency, earnings management and cost of debt.

In Chapter II, I explore the relationship between institutional ownership and firms' operating efficiency. I use the data envelopment …

Underpricing And Buy And Hold Abnormal Returns In Venture Capitals' Portfolio Firm Ipos, Abdelhamid Riani

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

I seek to explore in detail the relationship between Venture Capitals (VC) characteristics and the underpricing and long-run performance of their portfolio firms overtime using a sample of 2,052 IPO firm-year observations, corresponding to 669 unique U.S.VCs from 1985-2013. Gompers (1996) and Lee and Wahal (2004) focus on individual portfolio firms and relate the performance of these firms in IPOs to the VCs that back these firms, I focus on the VCs themselves as individual entities and examine how their whole portfolio of IPOs fares. I find that the more experienced the VC is, the larger the underpricing and the …

Can I Smile With Spirit? Towards A Process Model Associating Workplace Spirituality And Emotional Labor, Ashwini Gangadharan

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

Workplace spirituality (WS) is a framework of organizational values embedded in the culture of the organization that promotes employees to experience a sense of meaningfulness at work, sense of connection with coworkers, congruence of organizational values with theirs' and experience transcendence through their work. This dissertation presents workplace spirituality as an organizational intervention to manage the problem of emotional labor and its dysfunctional consequences among the service employees.

The main thesis of the dissertation is that workplace spirituality will enable service employees to appraise emotional labor as a positive stressor (challenge stressor) rather than a negative stressor (hindrance stressor). The …

Does Optimism Pass On To The Employees? The Impact Of Supervisor Optimism On Employees In Small And Medium Sized Businesses, Roger S. Brown

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

The focus of this dissertation primarily examines the optimism contagion from the supervisor to his/her employees. Though the literature has discussed different types of optimism such as dispositional optimism (Scheier & Carver, 2006; Chang, 1998; Segerstrom, 2006) and unrealistic optimism (Weinstein, 1980; McKenna, 1993; Radcliffe & Klein, 2002), this paper will focus on trait and state optimism. State optimism (which relates to particular situation) is theorized as being easily transferrable when compared to trait optimism. The level of the transfer will depend on the emotional expressivity of the supervisor. The facets of emotional expressivity are impulse strength, positive expressivity and …

Consumer Evaluation Of Corporate Social Responsibility: New Insights From The Expectancy Confirmation/Disconfirmation Paradigm, Roberto Saldivar

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

Consumer-centric corporate social responsibility studies have focused on consumer evaluation of CSR perceptions (Stanaland, Lwin, and Murphy 2011) without addressing the consumer’s CSR expectations (e.g. Russell and Russell 2010, Schuhwerk and Lefkoff-Hagius 1995, Sen and Bhattacharya 2001). This discovery motivates this study that utilizes the expectancy confirmation/disconfirmation paradigm (Erevelles and Leavitt 1992; Oliver 1985; Tse and Wilton 1988) to offer novel insights of consumers’ evaluations of CSR information and subsequent consequences in terms of customer satisfaction, referral, purchase intention and willingness to pay premium. Two studies, each with a unique design and sample, were developed to test 13 hypotheses. In …