Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

Internal Governance And Litigation Risk, Mohammad Hashemi Joo

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is comprised of three chapters that focus on the topics related to internal governance and litigation risk.

The first essay investigates the effect of board independence on security litigation risk. Based on the premise of the agency theory, our findings indicate that board independence has a negative impact on securities litigation risk. The effectiveness of this impact is also analyzed in light of the firm’s complexity and monitoring cost. The results show that board independence effectiveness is negatively related to the firm’s monitoring cost but is positively influenced by the firm’s complexity. Our results challenge the notions of …

Three Essays On Risks Of Firms Led By Founder-Ceos, Yuka Nishikawa

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is comprised of three essays that focus on the topics related to risks of firms led by founder-CEOs. This research provides insights into how founder-led firms are different from nonfounder-led firms in terms of their operational and financial risk taking, litigation risk, and restructuring probabilities and outcomes. The empirical results are significant and robust.

The first essay examines the relationship between founder-CEO firms and firm risk. Using a sample of S&P 1500 firms, our empirical results show that founder-led firms are associated with higher overall risk and operational risk, and lower financial risk than nonfounder-led firms. We further …

Short Selling: Implications For Corporate Governance And Capital Structure, Mohammad Anisur Rahman

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The literature on short selling documents substantial evidence that short sellers are generally informed investors (e.g., Diamond and Verrecchia, 1987; Asquith and Muelbrook, 1996). This dissertation investigates three specific implications of informed short selling for a firm and its investors.

The first essay investigates if short selling discourages managers from pursuing over-optimistic projects by reducing equity market timing. By conditioning short selling on firm overvaluation, this essay shows that short selling reduces managerial equity market timing and increases leverage. This moderating impact of short selling is more pronounced in smaller firms and those with low institutional ownership or higher intangible …

Three Essays In International Finance, Iván Marcelo Rodríguez Jr

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I focus my research on some of the economically significant and current open problems in international finance, specifically the relationship between Credit Default Swaps (CDS) on sovereign debt, the importance of fundamental dyadic distances on the initiation and completion of cross-border mergers and acquisitions, and the impact of domestic and transnational terrorism on cross-border mergers and acquisitions.

In the first essay, we study the relationship between sovereign debt ratings and the information contained in CDS spreads regarding the credit risk of the reference entity. Using data for 54 countries over a twelve-year period, we find that the …

Essays On The Effect Of Board Gender Diversity On Firm Risk, Performance, And Institutions' Ownership Preferences, Jodonnis Rodriguez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the effect of gender diversity on firm risk and financial performance, and on the stock ownership preferences of institutional investors. For the firm risk and financial performance analysis, we use U.S. firms listed on the S&P 500 and NSE-listed Indian companies. The two samples provide our study with the ability to study gender diversity in a developed and emerging market with distinct economic frameworks, cultural traditions, and legal environments.

Our empirical tests show that firms with more gender diversity are less risky and have higher financial performance than firms with less gender influence. These results are consistent …

Cfo Turnover, Firm’S Debt-Equity Choice And Information Environment, Muhammad Bakhtear U. Talukdar

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The CEO and CFO are the two key executives of a firm. They work cohesively to ensure the growth of the firm. After the adoption of the Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX) in 2002, the importance of CFOs has increased due to their personal legal obligation in certifying the accuracy of financial statements. Only a few papers such as Mian (2001), Fee and Hadlock (2004), and Geiger and North (2006) focus on CFOs in the pre-SOX era. However, a vacuum exists in research focusing exclusively on CFOs in the post-SOX era. The purpose of this dissertation is to delve into a …

Liquidity, Governance And Adverse Selection In Asset Pricing, Sascha Strobl

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A plethora of recent literature on asset pricing provides plenty of empirical evidence on the importance of liquidity, governance and adverse selection of equity on pricing of assets together with more traditional factors such as market beta and the Fama-French factors. However, literature has usually stressed that these factors are priced individually. In this dissertation we argue that these factors may be related to each other, hence not only individual but also joint tests of their significance is called for.

In the three related essays, we examine the liquidity premium in the context of the finer three-digit SIC industry classification, …