Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Regional Economic Impacts Of China's High-Speed Rail Development And Its Institutional Challenges, Hankun Zhao

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This article studies the impact of connecting to high-speed rail (HSR) network on regional development and the replication and sustainability of China’s GIUR system, aiming to summarize the experience of China’s HSR, which can provide several policy references for developing countries. This article conducts two research: (1) explore the impact of connecting to HSR network on the urban industrial structure, urban creativity and urban-rural income gap of cities in different regions and cities with heterogeneous locations along the HSR lines in the long and short term; (2) explore the advantages and disadvantages of the Government-Industry-University-Research (GIUR) system in the process …

On The Influence Of Incentive Mechanisms For China’S Current Mixed Ownership Reform On Corporate Performance, Hui Yong Ren

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Since the Central Economic Work Conference set the mixed ownership reform as where China’s state-owned enterprises (SOE) can make breakthroughs on reforms in early 2017, enterprises at all levels, from central to local state-owned, have continuously introduced new measures and new deployments involving the reform. The mixed ownership reform (hereinafter referred to as the “mixed reform”) introduces flexible market response mechanisms and innovative management systems from private enterprises into state-owned enterprises to enhance the market awareness of state-owned enterprises, to increase their own competitiveness, vitality and creativity. It aims to build a system that conforms to modern corporate governance and …

The Role Of Employee Proactive Behaviors In Influencing Supervisors’ Trust In Employees, Ngai Meng Ho

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In organizations, proactive employees make things happen. They anticipate, initiate, and drive meaningful changes for a better future. Such proactive behaviors can be manifested in different forms. Initiating work improvements and voicing for changes are examples of the different proactive behaviors commonly demonstrated by employees.

Empirical studies have associated proactive behaviors at work with a range of positive workplace outcomes. However, only limited research has examined how proactive behaviors might be related to one particularly important outcome, trust, i.e., whether an employee’s proactive behaviors will influence the supervisor’s trust toward the employee. Accordingly, in this present research, I conducted two …

The Effects Of University Governance Structure On New Programme Development And Approval Process In Vietnamese Universities, Thi Anh Tram Le

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Universities and other higher education institutions are viewed as social organizations which play a crucial role in developing the economy, politic, culture, talent, and society of the country. Society expects the universities to well-fulfill their mission in education, academic research, public engagement for the economic development and sustainability of the country and the government is also accountable for supporting the universities to accomplish their missions.

In the context of the increasingly dynamic education industry, between a) internationalization with foreign schools establishing new ventures abroad or local schools recruiting students worldwide, b) the rapid development of information technology as digitization is …

Employees’ Ritual Sense In Organization: A Scale Development Study And Effects Of Ritual Sense On Employee Outcomes, Jun Liang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The present research is focused on the topic of organizational rituals. On the basis of reviewing existing studies of organizational rituals, the present investigation (1) developed the scale of employees’ ritual sense and (2) empirically tested the effects of ritual sense in impacting employees’ workplace consequences. Two independent studies were conducted to develop the scale of employees’ ritual sense and to investigate how and when ritual sense is associated with employees’ workplace outcomes. Specifically, using data collected from 418 employees in China, Study 1 develops and validates an individual level measure of employee’s ritual sense. Collecting another sample of 453 …

The Importance Of Innovation And Entrepreneurship In China’S Social Transformation, Guo Jun Shen

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

As world’s second largest economy, China has seen tremendous changes since its 1978 “open door and reform” policy. Different reformations in form of policies were planned and rolled out to release the potential of productivity. At the same time, social development also seen a huge progress. How the reformation been transformed to social development and in what degree? This is the question was answered in this dissertation. I studied four major reformations covering: State owned Enterprises (SoE), land, financial liberalization, and science and technology, and their impacts on the social development. At macro level, I identified mediation effects of entrepreneurship …

Risk Control System Construction Of China’S Equity Crowdfunding Platforms: A Comparative Study On The Differences Between Equity Crowdfunding And Traditional Venture Capital Investment, Wentao Bai

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Equity crowdfunding is a new type of public financing activity realized by Internet technology with small single investments funds, which is different from traditional venture capital. It greatly solves the equity investment problem of middle-class people and the difficulties of small and medium-sized enterprises and start-ups in financing. It is also conducive to the construction of multi-level capital market, and the healthy development of national financial system. Due to the advantages of equity crowdfunding, the global equity crowdfunding market has developed rapidly in recent years. Unfortunately, China's formal legislation on equity crowdfunding has not been introduced yet. Each platform can …

Essays On Multivariate Stochastic Volatility Models, Han Chen

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In this dissertation, I have made several contributions to the literature on the multivariate stochastic volatility model. First, I have considered a new multivariate stochastic volatility (MSV) model based on a recently proposed novel parameterization of the correlation matrix. This modeling design is a generalization of Fisher's z-transformation to the high-dimensional case. It is fully flexible as the validity of the resulting correlation matrix is guaranteed automatically. It allows me to completely separate the driving factors of volatilities and correlations. To conduct an econometric analysis of the proposed model, I develop a new Bayesian method that relies on the Markov …

Spatial Panel Data Models With Temporal Heterogeneity, Yuhong Xu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation studies the fixed effects (FE) spatial panel data (SPD) models with temporal heterogeneity (TH), where the regression coefficients and spatial coefficients are allowed to change with time. The FE-SPD model with time-varying coefficients renders the usual transformation method in dealing with the fixed effects inapplicable, and an adjusted quasi score (AQS) method is proposed, which adjusts the concentrated quasi score function with the fixed effects being concentrated out. AQS tests for the lack of temporal heterogeneity (TH) in slope and spatial parameters are first proposed. Then, a set of AQS estimation and inference methods for the FE-SPD model …

Three Essays On International Economics: Global Value Chains Of Singapore And The Cptpp; The Effects Of Oil Price Shocks On Trade, Tran Bao Phuong Nguyen

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation discusses two questions in international economics. The first two chapters focus on the matter of global value chains. We first explore the participation of Singapore in the global value chains by characterizing the position of Singapore in the global network and identifying Singapore’s key upstream and downstream trade partners. This is done at both the country aggregate and at the sector level. We trace how the country’s position in global value chains has changed in the past two decades: whether it has moved upstream or downstream, how involved it is in global value chains, how its trend compares …

Three Essays On Econometrics, Xin Zheng

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The dissertation includes three chapters on econometrics. The first chapter is about treatment effects and its application in randomized control trial. The second chapter is about specification test. The third chapter is about panel data model with fixed effects.

In the first chapter, we study the estimation and inference of the quantile treatment effect under covariate-adaptive randomization. We propose two estimation methods: (1) the simple quantile regression and (2) the inverse propensity score weighted quantile regression. For the two estimators, we derive their asymptotic distributions uniformly over a compact set of quantile indexes, and show that, when the treatment assignment …

With A Little Help From My (Undesirable) Friends: The Influence Of Sex Ratio On Preferences For The Relative Mate Value Of Friends, Bryan Kwok Cheng Choy

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The present research examined whether who men and women choose to befriend reflects evolved desires for managing intrasexual competition for mates. It is reasoned that individuals should display a stronger preference for others of relatively lower mate value to oneself when the local ecology exhibits signs of intense intrasexual competition (when the operational sex ratio [OSR] is most unfavorable). Conversely, an unfavorable OSR was expected to reduce the desirability of others of similar or higher mate value. The possibility that this effect would be sex differentiated was also examined. In particular, it was reasoned that these predictions should hold for …

The Effect Of Endogenously-Determined Bullying On Test Scores, Hisham Bin Yacob Patel

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The problem of bullying is one of the main sources of adverse school environment. In this dissertation, I explore the effect of bullying on test scores, under the assumption that bullying is endogenously determined. Comparing my estimates with that from traditional OLS, I find that estimates from OLS grossly underestimates the effect of bullying on short-term student outcomes. I also find significant evidence of heterogeneity across various sub-groups; for example, male students are found to be less affected by bullying as compared to their female peers. Furthermore, male students are also found to be less affected by physical bullying while …

Followers’ Reactions To Leader Differentiation, Yuchuan Liu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Leaders generally differentiate their relationships with followers, for example, by providing some with more respect, trust, support, or information than others (Liden & Graen, 1980). However, the effects of such leader differentiation on followers remain inconclusive such that research suggests that leader differentiation may have negative, positive, or null effects on favorable employee work-related outcomes (for a recent review, see Martin et al., 2018). To better understand the effects of leader differentiation, utilizing leader-member exchange (LMX) theory, I considered three inherently connected properties in the leader differentiation process – LMX differentiation, LMX quality and LMX social comparison (Martin et al., …

Land Policy And Welfare In China, Xin Zou

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation quantitatively studies the impact of land policy on welfare in China. There are two specific nationwide land policies of importance on which I focus: 1) The red-line policy that imposes a minimum 1.2 million square kilometers for agricultural use only 2) The zoning policy for urban land that strictly regulates the amount of industrial and residential land usages respectively; In the first chapter, I give an introduction about the land policy and institutional background in China and the related literature to my dissertation. Second chapter builds a two-sector(two-region) model to examine how the red-line policy interacts with land …

Stock Market Information And Security Prices, Haoyuan Li

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Chapter 1: Analyst report content and stock market anomalies A series of recent papers document that security analyst recommendations tend to contradict stock-mispricing signals. This seems at odds with the large prior literature on the investment value of analyst recommendations. What justifications do analysts make when they write reports on mispriced stocks? I use the latest techniques in machine learning and textual analysis to categorize the qualitative information in a large sample of analyst reports. I find that report content can be intuitively classified into five categories or topics: 1) Growth, 2) Earnings, 3) New developments, 4) Management transactions, and …

Attention, Entrainment, And Rules In High Reliability Organizations, Tingting Lang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Chapter 1: How institutions enhance mindfulness: interactions between external regulators and front-line operators around safety rules (with Ravi S. Kudesia and Jochen Reb) How is it that some organizations can maintain nearly error-free performance, despite trying conditions? Within research on such high-reliability organizations, mindful organizing has been offered as a key explanation. It entails interaction patterns among front-line operators that keep them attentive to potential failures—and relies on them having the expertise and autonomy to address any such failures. In this study, we extend the mindful organizing literature, which emphasizes local interactions among operators, by considering the broader institutional context …

Three Essays On International Trade Policies, Xin Yi

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation studies the empirical and quantitative implications of trade policies. The first chapter examines the effects of trade policies on quality specialization across cities within a country. Specifically, we complement the quality specialization literature in international trade and study how larger cities within a country produce goods with higher quality. We first establish three stylized facts on how product quality is related to agglomeration, firm productivity, and worker skills. We then rationalize these facts in a spatial equilibrium model where all the elements mentioned above are present and firms are free to choose their locations. Using firm-level data from …

Stochastic Capacity Management In The Presence Of Production Resource Disruption, Boya Yang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation studies the capacity investment decision of a manufacturing firm facing demand uncertainty in the presence of shortage possibility in production resources, as often ignored in the literature. These production resources can be physical resources (component / raw material) or financial resources (working capital / budget). The shortage in these resources can be caused by a variety of supply chain disruptions; examples include global disruptions like COVID-19 and financial crisis in 2008 and local disruptions like shortage of components/workforce. The dissertation analyses two important issues related to capacity management: (i) the effect of production resource disruption on the capacity …

Essays On Time Series And Financial Econometrics, Yijie Fei

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation contains four essays in financial econometrics. In the first essay, some asymptotic results are derived for first-order autoregression with a root moderately deviating from unity and a nonzero drift. It is shown that the drift changes drastically the large sample properties of the least-squares (LS) estimator. The second essay is concerned with the joint test of predictability and stability in the context of predictive regression. The null hypothesis under investigation is that the potential predictors exhibit no predictability and incur no structural break during the sample period. We first show that the IVX estimator provides better finite sample …

Examining The Impact Of It Investment On Insurer Productivity: A Bootstrapped Malmquist Frontier Analysis Approach, Jee Yuen Yew

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This paper attempts to examine productivity changes of insurance companies in Singapore as represented by bootstrapped Malmquist indices, generated from a data envelopment analysis (DEA)-based frontier analysis, and attribute these changes to an increasing investment in information technology infrastructure and equipment, and increasing investment in staff enhancement. Through this analysis, the author finds that there has been a general increase in productivity and efficiency from 2011 – 2017, as seen from changes in the kernel density functions of productivity change between the two periods. The author also finds, through running a panel tobit regression model, that there is a positive …

Essays On Corporate Social Responsibility And Strategic Leadership, Li Tong

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation two issues related to business ethics: how corporate social responsibility (CSR) affects the value creation in an acquisition and how corporate decoupling behaviors are driven by the CEO narcissism, consisting of two essays. The first essay examines how target corporate social responsibility affects the economic gains for acquirers, as reflected in market reaction to acquisition announcement, from two distinct perspectives: stakeholder preservation versus stakeholder appropriation. The stakeholder preservation perspective suggests that positive market reaction to an acquisition stems from potential new value creation by honoring implicit contracts and maintaining good relationships with target stakeholders. By contrast, the stakeholder …

Is It Only The Thought That Counts; Or Do Gift Cost, Social Approval, And Relationship Satisfaction Matter Too?, Farah Binte Abdul Malik

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This study investigated the effects of gift cost, social network (SN) approval, and relationship satisfaction on a gift receiver’s perception of the giver’s commitment to their romantic relationship. In addition to predictions of positive main effects (H1 to H3), it was predicted that relationship satisfaction would moderate the effects of gift cost (H4) and SN approval (H5). Participants were 227 undergraduates from Singapore who completed a survey online. A hierarchical moderated regression analysis was conducted, and the results supported all the hypotheses except H5. The novel findings were that receivers perceived their partners to be more committed when their SN …

Three Essays On Quality Of Tradable Products, Angdi Lu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation includes three essays on the quality of tradable products. The first chapter studies the supply-side determinants of quality specialization across Chinese cities. Specifically, we complement the quality specialization literature in international trade and study how larger cities within a country produce goods with higher quality. In our general equilibrium model, firms in larger cities specialize in higher-quality products because agglomeration benefits (arising from the treatment effect of agglomeration and firm sorting) accrue more to skilled workers, who are also more efficient in upgrading quality, although these effects are partially mitigated by higher skill premium in larger cities. Using …

Three Essays On Financial Economics, Jiangyuan Li

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Disagreement measures are known to predict cross-sectional stock returns but fail to predict market returns. This paper proposes a partial least squares disagreement index by aggregating information across individual disagreement measures and shows that this index significantly predicts market returns both in- and out-ofsample. Consistent with the theory in Atmaz and Basak (2018), the disagreement index asymmetrically predicts market returns with greater power in high sentiment periods, is positively associated with investor expectations of market returns, predicts market returns through a cash flow channel, and can explain the positive volume-volatility relationship.

Essays On Heterogeneous Large Panel Data Models, Ke Miao

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation consists of three papers which contribute to the estimation and inference theory of the heterogeneous large panel data models. The first chapter studies a panel threshold model with interactive fixed effects. The least-squares estimators in the shrinking-threshold-effect framework are explored. The inference theory on both slope coefficients and the threshold parameter is derived, and a test for the presence of the threshold effect is proposed. The second chapter considers the least-squares estimation of a panel structure threshold regression (PSTR) model, where parameters may exhibit latent group structures. Under some regularity conditions, the latent group structure can be correctly …

Essays On Agricultural Commodity Processing, Bin Li

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation investigates two important issues in agricultural commodity processing: (i) biomass commercialization; that is, converting organic waste into a saleable product, from economic and environmental perspectives, and (ii) optimal procurement portfolio design using multiple suppliers and spot market, and the impact of by-product introduction on this optimal portfolio.

The first chapter examines the economic implications of biomass commercialization from the perspective of an agri-processor that uses a commodity input to produce both a commodity output and biomass. We characterize the value of biomass commercialization and perform sensitivity analysis to investigate how spot price uncertainty (input and output spot price …

The Benefits Of Exhibiting Family-Supportive Supervisor Behaviors: An Investigation Of The Effects Of Reducing Supervisors’ Work-Family Conflict, Jacky Jiang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The benefits of family-supportive supervisor behavior (FSSB) for subordinates’ work and family outcomes have been the focus of previous studies, but little research has examined the positive impact of FSSB on supervisors’ family outcomes. To address this research gap and contribute to the leader and family literature, the negative relationship between FSSB and work-to-family conflict (WFC) is examined in this study, focusing on the mediating role of personal skill development. In addition, I propose that emotional exhaustion moderates the main effect of FSSB on personal skill development and the indirect effect of FSSB on WFC via personal skill development. A …

Essays On Nonstationary Econometrics, Yanbo Liu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

My dissertation consists of three essays that contribute new theoretical results to robust inference procedures and machine learning algorithms in nonstationary models.

Chapter 2 compares OLS and GLS in autoregressions with integrated noise terms. Grenander and Rosenblatt (2008) gave sufficient conditions for the asymptotic equivalence of GLS and OLS in deterministic trend extraction. However when extending to univariate autoregression model yt = ρnyt−1 + ut , ρn = 1 + c nα , ut = ut−1 + t , and t is one iid disturbance term with zero expectation and σ 2 variance, the asymptotic equivalence no longer holds. Under …

Essays On Empirical Asset Pricing, Liyao Wang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The dissertation consists of four chapters on empirical asset pricing. The first chapter reexamines the existence of time-series momentum. Time-series momentum (TSM) refers to the predictability of the past 12-month return on the next one month return. Using the same data set as Moskowitz, Ooi, and Pedersen (2012) (MOP, henceforth), we show that asset-by-asset time-series regressions reveal little evidence of TSM, both in- and out-of-sample. While the t -statistic in a pooled regression appears large, it is not statistically reliable as it is less than the critical values of parametric and nonparametric bootstraps. From an investment perspective, the performance of …