Business Commons^™

A Flexible Payment Scheme In Hotel Business, Ciwei Dong

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This paper introduces a flexible payment scheme in the hotel business. When a customer makes a reservation for a hotel room, the hotel offers an optional payment scheme (Scheme O). If the customer chooses the Scheme O, he/she makes a non-refundable down payment immediately. Meanwhile, the hotel offers a discount if the customer actually checks in to the hotel. Thus, the payment at check-out time is much lower than the original rental rate. Alternatively, if the customer rejects the Scheme O, the reservation is made under a traditional Scheme (Scheme T), where no down payment is required. However, the customer …

News Which Moves The Market: Assessing The Impact Of Published Financial News On The Stock Market, Yu Chiang Soon

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Recent years have seen a large increase in the volume of financial news available to investors daily. What has traditionally been restricted to print media has now evolved to include the internet and satellite television as important media sources for financial news. With this overwhelming flow of information available to investors, the impact of financial news on market prices is at best uncertain. In this paper, a computational text-scoring methodology will be employed to uncover behavioral responses by investors to negative news. The empirical methodology employed in this paper will consist of three parts. Firstly, through the General Inquirer (GI) …

Service Innovation In The Non-Profit Sector, Gabriel Boon Siong Lim

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Non-profit organisations are valued because they provide services that address unmet needs. Nonprofits who engage in social entrepreneurship augment their contributions through new services, programmes, enterprises and revenue generated. It is not surprising, therefore, for policy makers to encourage social entrepreneurship, service innovations and social enterprises. However, not all nonprofits seek to innovate by creating revenue-generating social enterprises. They may continue to devote themselves to specific fields and existing practices through other forms of service innovations instead. The intent of nonprofits in starting new services is investigated through a two-pronged quantitative and qualitative research approach.

In the quantitative section, a …

Do Analyst Earnings Beta Explain Growth Anomaly?, Sophie Phuong Thanh Doan

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Using a measure of cashflow risk derived from analyst forecasts, I find that cashflow risk offers a partial explanation for the value – growth anomaly. In particular, the lowest asset growth portfolio has a higher earnings beta than the highest asset growth portfolio. Approximately cashflow risk measured by earnings beta carries a significant positive risk premium of 1.24% with a t-value of 3.51.

Why "Democracy" And "Drifter" Firms Can Have Abnormal Returns: The Joint Importance Of Corporate Governance And Abnormal Accruals In Separating Winners From Losers, Koon Boon Kee

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Do managers exercise accounting discretion in an opportunistic or efficient manner? Good governance structures, which mitigate agency costs, are necessary to ensure that the accounting information supplied by management is not opportunistically manipulated. The output of quality accounting information, in turn, serves as an input to better governance structures. Thus, governance and earnings quality (EQ) are inexorably linked through a complementarity relationship. This suggests two previously unexamined relationships. Firstly, the governance effects on performance in the influential paper by Gompers, Ishii and Metrick (2003) is overrated without good EQ, measured by the magnitude of abnormal accruals (AA), as an input. …

Does Corporate Governance Matter, Evidence From Earnings Management Practices In Singapore, Lingxu Hu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This paper addresses two questions. First, do good corporate governance practices add values to company or does it lead to higher stock returns in Singapore? Second, does poorly governed listed company in SGX tend to manage their earnings by using discretionary accruals? Following the approach of Gompers et al. (2003), we formed two portfolios consisting of well-governed and poorly governed companies. Well governed companies are able to maintain a higher return relative to poorly governed companies. I also look at the firm valuation from the adoption of corporate governance practices. Our result shows a positive relationship between firm valuation and …

Corporate Governance And Earnings Management Before Share Repurchase Announcements In Singapore, Jian Ming Chua

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Share repurchase in Singapore was legalized in 1998. It is well known that investors view share repurchase as good news. This study is based on share repurchase announcements from 2006 to 2009. The mean Cumulative Market-Adjusted Returns (CAR) for the period [0, +1] and [-1, +1] are significant at 1.25% and 1.33% respectively. In Singapore, there are positive abnormal returns following share repurchase announcements in support of the ―free cash flow‖ hypothesis. By using the Singapore Corporate Governance Index as a proxy, the weakly governed companies exhibit the strongest, positive and significant CAR of 2.62% for the period [0, +1]. …

Aircraft Leasing With Contracts, Qiong Zuo

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

We study a problem of rental rate pricing and rental contract designing in aircraft leasing industry. In a framework of Stackelberg game, the system is composed of an airline company (carrier) and an aircraft leasing company (lessor). Acting as the leader, the lessor announces daily rental rates and/or provides long-term contracts on a finite horizon with multiple periods. For each period, the carrier determines the aircraft leasing number to adjust the flight capacity, and applies a dynamic pricing policy for air-tickets based on a seasonally stochastic demand and some economic factor, such as oil price. We find the optimal policies …

Dynamic Quay Crane Allocation, Yan Zhang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

We introduce simple rules for quay cranes to handle containers along a berth where vessels arrive continuously in time. We first analyze a model where workload is continuous. Our analysis shows that if the system is configured properly, it will always converge to a state with the maximum possible throughput regardless of external disruptions or changes in workload. Numerical simulations based on a discrete workload model suggest that, by following the same rules, the system can still converge to state with throughput that is very close to its upper bound.

Procure Financing For Shipping By Auctions, Kekun Wu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

We study a risk management problem in the scenario of ship procurement. A shipping firm faces a certain financing pressure for the procurement of a new ship. On the other hand, the capacity of the ship excesses the demand requirement of the firm. The firm wants to reduce the payment and control the risk by selling a percentage of capacity to another shipping company. We introduce an auction mechanism for the firm to select the partner and determine the sharing percentage. Acting as the auctioneer, the firm announces a certain percentage of capacity to a set of buyers. The payment …

Short-Selling Prior To Analyst Recommendations, Can Qu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This paper investigates short-selling five days prior to analyst recommendations by using a complete data set from Reg SHO database during January, 2005 to July, 2007. Empirical tests uncover the evidence that short-sellers significantly increase their short positions prior to negative analyst recommendations, which is consistent with the informed trading hypothesis. This finding is robust to model specification. Further, this paper also examines which of the two competing hypotheses-prediction and tipping-could better explain short-sellers’ informative front-running. The tests indicate that short-sellers use book-to-market ratio as a filter to narrow down their pool of candidates, while market capitalization doesn’t play a …

Discounts And Termination Of Close-End Funds, Chen Chen

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Based on an extensive sample of U.S. closed end funds undergoing termination, this study offers a comprehensive analysis of closed end fund exiting behaviors. There are four ways for a fund to exit: merger into other closed-end fund, liquidation, conversion to open-end mutual fund and merger into open-end mutual fund. Closed-end funds that exit must choose the most efficient and optimal mechanisms corresponding to funds‟ characteristics and organizational forms. In this study, I find that closed-end funds exit optimally. First, funds with persistently larger discount and smaller size are more likely to exit and consistent with rational expectation, market incorporates …

Why Does Corporate Governance Matter? Evidence From Seasoned Bond Offerings, Fang Wang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

To examine the importance of corporate governance, I look at how management and investors behave in the event of seasoned bond offerings, controlling for the corporate governance structure of issuing firms. I find that companies with the weakest governance structure aggressively manipulate their earnings upwards during the two years prior to the debt issuances. And when the bond offerings are announced to the market, these same firms experienced positive abnormal returns over a three day event period, indicating that investors of poorly governed firms value a debt financing for the alleged decrease in agency cost.

How Predictable Is The Chinese Stock Market?, Fuwei Jiang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

We analyze return predictability for the Chinese stock market, including the aggregate market portfolio and the components of the aggregate market, such as portfolios sorted on industry, size, book-to-market and ownership concentration. Considering a variety of economic variables as predictors, both in-sample and out-of-sample tests highlight significant predictability in the aggregate market portfolio of the Chinese stock market and substantial differences in return predictability across components. Among industry portfolios, Finance and insurance, Real estate, and Service exhibit the most predictability, while portfolios of small-cap and low ownership concentration firms also display considerable predictability. Two key findings provide economic explanations for …

Idiosyncratic Risk And Risk Taking Behavior Of Mutual Fund Managers, Gao Wang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

I propose that various measures of mutual funds’ performance are more consistent with their investment capability when mutual funds present low idiosyncratic risks. This paper finds conditional predictor for funds’ returns: alpha predicts returns positively for low idiosyncratic risk funds. It suggests that mutual funds which showed high alpha and low idiosyncratic risk in the past may be capable in investment. Their performance is consistently higher than funds with low idiosyncratic risk and low alpha. On the other hand, the performance of high idiosyncratic risk funds is more likely to reverse in the future: expected returns are low for high …

Pricing And Inventory Control In Dual-Channel Network With One Manufacturer And Retailer, Zhicong Pan

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The study on multi-channel problems has been one of the most active research fields in recent years. In this paper, we consider a dual-channel network problem with one manufacture and one retailer. The manufacturer, acting as the Stackelberg leader, sells a single type of product through a traditional channel to the retailer and/or through a direct channel to customers. The retailer, acting as the follower, operates a Newsvendor model, ordering from the manufacturer and selling to the customers. We study the problem with the deterministic demand. We develop an efficient algorithm to find the joint optimal policy for three prices: …

Risk Response Strategies In The Supply Chain: Examining Attributes Of Stakeholders And Risk Attitude, Shu Jian Lim

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Supply chain management is about managing flows of material, information and funds in a complex network of entities of suppliers, manufacturers, distributors and customers. Companies are now connected in this network as an extended enterprise and any company may be involved in more than one such extended enterprises. But, such a network of relationships is very much vulnerable to disruptions of all sorts ranging from internal to inter-firm and to external turbulences. Companies now need to be prepared for risks associated with their participation in the supply chain network. Not many works in the literature have used theories to study …

A Remanufacturing News-Vendor With Pricing And Take-Back Pricing, Keyu Lu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This paper analyzes the problem of a remanufacturing news-vendor with selling and take-back price decision. In our model, the remanufacturer decides selling price, take-back price, and order quantity for new materials. She then uses the stochastic take-back quantity and the new material to meet the stochastic demand comparably to a news vendor setting. We allow demand and take-back supply to be correlated. In this thesis, we study a production problem with dual input sources: raw materials and recycled or remanufactured take-back items. To answer when mixed-sourcing is best, we analyze the model under deterministic setting first, provide criteria for different …

Pricing And Lead Time Decisions In A Duopoly Common Retailer Channel, Xiuming Niu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This thesis studies a dual-level decentralized supply chain consisting of two suppliers and two retailers facing a price- and lead-time-sensitive demand. We model the suppliers’ operations as M/M/1 queues and demand as a linear function of the retail prices and promised delivery lead-times offered to the customers. Three different kinds of games are constructed to analyze the pricing and lead-time decisions of the suppliers and retailers. We show the existence of a unique equilibrium in all games and provide the exact formulas to compute the optimal decisions for both the suppliers and retailers. We further present numerical examples to illustrate …

Ownership Structure, Financial Structure And R&D Investment: Evidence From Korean Firms, Yanghua Chen

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Understanding factors that can enhance a firm‟s innovativeness is of critical concern in management research. Prior studies in strategy and financial economics have advanced our understanding of how resource allocation into innovation is shaped in a firm, mainly from the perspectives of ownership and financial structures. However, the extant literature is incomplete, because it treats ownership and financial structures as separate determinants, even though theoretical arguments and empirical evidences suggest that they are interdependent. This study investigates the determinants of firm‟s R&D investments by bridging ownership and financial structures. Ownerships held by inside and external owners are considered for ownership …

Organizational Slack, International Expansion And Firm Profitability, Anran Liu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

International expansion is a viable growth strategy for firms operating in an increasingly competitive business environment. Understanding the relationship between international expansion and firm performance has been a significant concern for theory development in the strategy and international business literature. The extant literature, however, has paid insufficient attention to the tradeoff between firm growth and profitability that may imply the existence of an optimal rate of growth. Drawing from the Penrosian perspective that emphasizes the role of resources in firm growth, this study investigates whether and how firm slack resources affect the tradeoff between international expansion and profitability. Specifically, this …

The Relationship Between Product And International Diversification: The Effect Of Asset Dispersion And Asset Diversity On Firm Performance, Yulia Muzyrya

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

There is little consensus on the diversification-performance relationship in the diversification literature. We aim to contribute to this literature by looking simultaneously at product and international diversification and the relationship between both. Furthermore, we distinguish theoretically and empirically between two different components of any diversification strategy, i.e. the degree of diversification and the type of diversification. We test our hypotheses on panel data covering 115 firms. We find that the dispersion of a firm’s activities, both internationally and in different product markets, results in higher levels of performance. Contrary, we find that higher levels in the diversity of the firm’s …

The Impact Of Employees' Perception Of Corporate Social Responsibility On Job Attitudes And Behaviors: A Study In China, Dan Zheng

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is regarded as voluntary bahaviors that contribute to the soceity welfare. Based on the concept of sustainable development, corporations should not only stress on their economic and business outcomes, but also pay attention to their effect on the society and environment. Corporations are expected to engage in the improvement of their employees' quality of life, as well as the well-being of employees' families, local communities, and the overall society. With the acceleration of global integration, CSR has become a main concern by the public, and is considered as an essential part of the business strategy. It …