Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

Two Essays In Real Estate Dynamics, Navid Safari

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

Real estate dynamics encompass a multifaceted interplay of various factors that shape the market. This dissertation presents two distinct essays that delve into critical aspects of real estate dynamics.

In the first essay, we investigate the influence of short-term rentals, specifically Airbnb activity, on neighboring house prices in Hampton Roads, Virginia. By employing robust measures such as active listings, reservations, and their cumulative impact over different periods, we uncover a positive association between prior Airbnb rental activity and housing sales prices. Moreover, we observe a spatial decay effect, where the localized impact diminishes with increasing geographic distance, particularly beyond 500 …

Three Essays On Ceo Traits, Corporate Investment Decisions, And Firm Value, Rongyao Zhang

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

More and more research has shown that the characteristics of top executives, especially CEOs, affect organizational decisions and behaviors. This dissertation primarily focuses on the role of executives’ managerial ability played in firm investment decisions, such as mergers and acquisitions (M&As) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) investment, and firm value.

Essay 1 examines whether high-ability managers’ earnings smoothing is motivated by the need to mitigate the adverse effects of heightened information asymmetry triggered by M&As on managers’ reputation capital and firm value. I document that acquirers with high-ability managers engage in more pre-acquisition earnings smoothing and experience more significant announcement …

Two Essays On The Effects Of Organization Capital On Firm Behavior, Andrew Root

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

A growing stream of finance literature involves measuring the effects of organization capital (“OC”) on investment decisions, financial policy, and firm value. Li, Qui & Shen (2018) use the exogenous event of a merger or acquisition to determine whether high OC acquirers perform better. We extend the OC literature by considering economic policy uncertainty (“PU”)(Baker, Bloom & Davis, 2016), which is also exogenous to the firm, to determine the effect of OC on firms in the face of PU. Univariate tests show that high OC firms take more investment risk, have lower leverage, higher cash, lower total shareholder payouts, and …

Three Essays On Ceo Characteristics And Corporate Decisions, Trung Nguyen

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

Recent studies have stressed the importance of managerial fixed effects on firm investment decisions. Following this stream of research, this dissertation empirically investigates the potential effects of two major Chief Executive Officer (CEO) characteristics, i.e. risk preferences and potential mobility, on corporate decisions such as merger and acquisition (M&A) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) investments.

Essay 1 examines whether the variation of M&A stock returns around the 2008 financial crisis is associated with shareholders’ increased loss aversion as a result of undergoing financial losses. The results show that acquisitions carried out by CEOs with risk-averse inducing compensation (inside debt) before …

A Study Of Risk-Taking Behavior In Investment Banking, Elzotbek Rustambekov

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

This dissertation examines corporate risk-taking behavior by investment banks in the United States. This study was sparked by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, one of the largest bankruptcy filings in U.S. history. This dissertation examines the specific factors that drove investment banks such as Lehman Brothers to take excessive risks, and how the deregulation of the US financial services industry towards the end of the 1990s contributed to risk-taking behavior.

I use four theoretical perspectives to examine corporate risk-taking behavior among investment banks. These perspectives include: institutional theory, behavioral theory of the firm, knowledge based view (KBV) of the firm, …