Economics Commons^™

Empowering Voices: Exploring The Career Trajectories Of Women Of Color Hr Professionals Amid Disruptive Change, Brandi R. Muñoz

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study investigated strategies to enhance diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging initiatives in organizational leadership, focusing on supporting women of color in the workplace. The specific problem addressed was the underrepresentation and barriers faced by women of color in leadership positions despite their potential contributions to organizational success. The study employed a qualitative approach, combining qualitative interviews with socioeconomic data analysis. Data collection methods included semistructured interviews with women of color and a survey to gather demographic and employment information. The sample consisted of 16 women of color human resource professionals working in various industries and organizational settings across the …

Perceptions Of Student Loan Debt: A Phenomenological Study Exploring Black Undergraduate Students' Experiences., Pilar Prather

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The rising cost of higher education concerns many families in the United States, especially those from historically underrepresented backgrounds. The purpose of this study is to explore the phenomenon of Black students' perception of their student loan debt and how their financial knowledge influences their decisions at a public institution. This qualitative research provides space to empower individuals to share their stories through semi-structured interviews to get an account of their experiences. Grounded in Yosso's (2005) Community Cultural Wealth Theory, the study seeks to capture the unique ways Black students make financial decisions. The dissertation is divided into five chapters: …

Adaptive Learning Gain In Asset Pricing, Sedealy Juste Lokossou

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This paper delves into the complexities of asset pricing, emphasizing the need to go beyond prevailing paradigms and constant learning gain assumptions. We examine the influence of personal experiences, adaptive learning processes, and subjective return expectations on asset pricing. By incorporating the concept of time-varying learning gain, we provide a more realistic portrayal of asset pricing. Empirical analysis reveals a consistent negative correlation between experienced real payout growth and subsequent returns, indicating counter-cyclical behavior. Our findings also support the mean-reversion hypothesis in stock returns, although caution is needed due to some scenarios lacking statistical significance. Theoretical exploration uncovers that higher …

How An Abusive Supervision Climate Impacts Business-To-Business (B2b) Sales Performance, And The Roles Of Leader–Members Interdependence And Team Psychological Safety, Matthew J. Daniel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Sales supervisors can tremendously influence the sales teams they manage, and their behaviors can influence a team’s engagement and sales performance. Because of the supervisor’s influential role, their behavior, positive or negative, can ripple throughout the organization. As a result, a supervisor who role models abusive behavior within their organization also promotes a climate of abuse and incivility that can contribute to a toxic workplace. Abusive supervision (AS) is a significant problem in many business-to-business (B2B) sales organizations that negatively impacts the financial welfare and subjective well-being of organizations and their employees. This quantitative correlational study aimed to examine how …

Ceo Types And Firm Efficiency, Lok Chi Lam

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This paper investigates the connection between CEO types and firm efficiency. I utilize the general ability index (GAI) as a proxy to examine and separate CEO types: generalist CEOs and specialist CEOs. Initially, I applied the pooled ordinary least square (OLS) and fixed effect regression on 26,830 firm-year observations to explore the GAI effect on firm efficiency. The finding shows that GAI has a negative impact on firm efficiency. It indicates that CEOs with lower GAI are better at improving firm efficiency; for instance, specialist CEOs are preferable to generalist CEOs. Further analysis of CEO types using the quadrant method …

Decision-Making Framework For Circular Economy In Remanufacturing, Saleh Maffoudh Bagalagel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Product recovery and remanufacturing have received increasing attention in the past two decades due to environmental, legal and economic drivers. The concept of reverse logistics has evolved from an initiative to recycle raw materials such as paper and glass to a broad sustainable product recovery and remanufacturing approach to enable a transition to circular economy. Advanced manufacturing companies need to develop smart manufacturing-remanufacturing systems to maximize product value recovery utilizing Industry 4.0 principles. Research articles have accumulated over the years to suggest solutions to many product recovery and remanufacturing implementation problems. However, the common case of a family of products …

Employee Ownership And Moral Hazard: How Broad-Based Equity Sharing Can Lower Agency Costs And Reduce Inequality, Colin Clinton Hudson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Providing incentives to top managers by offering equity has become the norm; this practice, however, does not hold for all levels of employees. After tax incentives for employee ownership were introduced through the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, there has been little legislative support to encourage companies to implement broad-based equity sharing programs. Moreover, decades of neoliberal policies have incentivized the pursuit of short-term profits and speculation, which contribute to economic instability and explain the growing gap between productivity and real wages observed since the late 1970s. Developments in the literature contend that employee ownership aligns the goals …

Competition In Economic Theory And The Skew In U.S. Corporate Wealth Creation, Marc H. Pentacoff

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Historical studies of U.S. capital markets show a dramatic skew in the distribution of corporate wealth. This thesis investigates the evolution of economic thought related to realistic models of competition, seeking to find the most suitable theory of competition to explain this skew in U.S. corporate wealth creation. The incorporation of realistic elements into the static theories of competition leads to theoretical difficulties in the early 20th century. Another line of thought developed non-equilibrium dynamic models of competition, culminating in Schumpeter. In Schumpeter, firms seek to manage the uncertainty f rom rapid change induced by innovation and increasing returns by …

The Hotelling Valuation Principle: Does User Cost And Reserve Differentials Improve Validity?, Brian K. Hicks

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Hotelling Valuation Principal (HVP) implies that the value per unit of an in-ground exhaustible natural resource is equal to the current price less the cost of production. The assumptions required for this principle include a certain and homogenous reserve stock, unconstrained extraction, and constant costs. Extensive research has empirically investigated the HVP. This paper expands the HVP framework and relaxes the theory’s assumptions to account for reserve differentials. The results show that the original net price model is more closely aligned with developed reserve value, than total reserve value. In addition, this paper develops two- and three-factor net price …

Airbnb Release Of Latent Economic Value And Return To Equilibrium, Daniel Joseph Trujillo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

We empirically consider Airbnb’s effect on a new variable in Short Term Rental (STR) research, second homes, employing a model pre-Airbnb diffusion (2009), and post-Airbnb diffusion (2019). In doing so we test our hypothesis that second home use will be converted to short-term rentals with the advent of Airbnb. We do so through a natural experiment examining housing stock. We create a schema to segregate tourist and non-tourist counties based on economic variables and deploy these in our research framework observing a shock to housing supply. Notably, we observe a structural change in the use of second homes resulting in …

An Economic Analysis Of Using Retired Vessels To Create Artificial Reefs In Costa Rica, Josué González

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

The Republic of Costa Rica is a Central American country with only 0.03% of the world’s landmass, but 5% of the world’s biodiversity, making it a leading ecotourism destination. Ecotourism is one of the main sources of revenue for the country, but the degradation of coastal reefs has resulted in a significant loss of financial income for developing areas. As a result, many of these areas are searching for methods to revert the degradation of coral reefs.

Artificial reefs play an important ecological role in marine ecosystems due to their complexity and size. They help in the development of …

Health Insurance Plan Design And Chronic Disease Management, Daniel E. Feldman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Each year, Americans spend more money on health care than any other industrialized nation, despite comparable mortality rates for people with risk factors for heart disease. The reasons for this lack of health care value in the US are numerous and complex – including market distortions like supplier-inflated pricing and regulatory structures that enable consumers to utilize ubiquitous, high-cost medical technologies that yield uncertain benefits. Health insurance, once thought to be an insignificant contributor to rising health spending, has changed considerably in the past few decades in ways that make it more accessible and more generous in coverage. Health insurance …

Using Behavior Economic Nudges To Facilitate Client Follow-Through In Financial Coaching, Charlene Hurst

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While benevolence-based programs have been a large part of meeting immediate financial needs of the poor, they lack the relational aspect needed to facilitate long-term behavior change. Recently many social service organizations have adopted financial coaching as a promising replacement for benevolence programming. The field of coaching has dealt with its own challenges. Most coaching practitioners surveyed in 2016 and 2019 acknowledged lack of client follow-through as their number one challenge. Behavior economics offered nudges as a solution. Nudges are cues placed within the physical environment to prod clients toward behavior change. A quantitative field study was conducted to evaluate …

Local Food Policy & Consumer Food Cooperatives: Evolutionary Case Studies, Afton Hupper

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Darwin’s theory of natural selection has played a central role in the development of the biological sciences, but evolution can also explain change in human culture. Institutions, mechanisms that govern behavior and social order, are important subjects of cultural evolution. Institutions can help stabilize cooperation, defined as behavior that benefits others, often at a personal cost. Cooperation is important for solving social dilemmas, scenarios in which the interests of the individual conflict with those of the group. A number of mechanisms by which institutions evolve to support cooperation have been identified, yet theoretical models of institutional change have rarely been …

The House That Credit Built: How Advertising Shaped A Culture Of Borrowing In The Decade Of Prosperity., Morgan Folden

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an examination of the visual rhetoric of the advertisements in 1920s America that encouraged consumers to implement payment plans to purchase commodities. It begins with an analysis of a standard advertisement found in a popular subscription journal and describes the ad’s reliance on an editorial-style layout to appeal to the rationality of the viewer, a theme common among marketing schemes of the surrounding decades. It uses an art historical approach to provide a new lens in studying capitalist economics and the provocative issue of empowerment versus confinement in the general visual representation of American housewives. The latter …

Political Connectedness, Firm Performance And Corporate Risk Taking: Are Emerging Markets Different?, Augustine Tarkom

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Existing literature exploring the effect of politically connected firms on their performance and risk-taking seems to offer decisive results for the emerging and the developed market. However, from professionals and anecdotal evidence, both markets do not exhibit similar characteristics. Considering these characteristics, instability of the government, lack thereof of adequate governance structure, I revisit the topic. This study comprises 27 advanced and 20 emerging economies for the years 1992 through 2016. I find that sound political environment drives risk-taking in advanced markets, while political connections drive corporate risk-taking in emerging markets. I also find that political institutions and political connections …

Two Applications Of Financial Economics To Real Estate, Jeffrey Dibartolomeo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My first essay examines the effects of dividend policy on the liquidity risk of REITs. I argue that the mandatory high cash payouts of REITs reduce investor reliance on the stock market to satisfy their liquidity needs. Using a sample of equity REITs from 1980 through 2015, I find strong empirical evidence consistent with this paradigm. Unlike non-REIT property companies, I find REITs exhibit negative sensitivity to marketwide liquidity shocks; a result that is evident across most property type sectors. Moreover, while my findings are robust across a wide range of portfolios based on size, dividend frequency, leverage, market-to-book, operations …

A Cross-Sectional Exploration Of Household Financial Reactions And Homebuyer Awareness Of Registered Sex Offenders In A Rural, Suburban, And Urban County., John Charles Navarro

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As stigmatized persons, registered sex offenders betoken instability in communities. Depressed home sale values are associated with the presence of registered sex offenders even though the public is largely unaware of the presence of registered sex offenders. Using a spatial multilevel approach, the current study examines the role registered sex offenders influence sale values of homes sold in 2015 for three U.S. counties (rural, suburban, and urban) located in Illinois and Kentucky within the social disorganization framework. Homebuyers were surveyed to examine whether awareness of local registered sex offenders and the homebuyer’s community type operate as moderators between home selling …

The Viability Of Profit-Loss Sharing Models To Finance Small And Medium Enterprises: The Case Of Saudi Arabia, Alhanoof Alghamdi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study aims to explore the role of profit-loss sharing (PLS) models to alleviate access to finance for small and medium enterprises in Saudi Arabia, in the light of the stringent requirements of traditional financial institutions, to ensure the growth and development of the SME sector. A central question of this study is the extent to which Islamic banks can adopt profit-loss sharing modes to finance SMEs. The main results present the barriers preventing Islamic banks from the application of profit-loss sharing that increase incidence of agency problems for such institutions. High asymmetry of information and the nature of Islamic …

Gender Matters: Perceptions Of Corporate Leadership, Kylie A. Braegelmann

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Women remain conspicuously underrepresented at the highest levels of corporate management; thus, it seems, gender matters. Gender bias in financial markets would imply an inefficient market, which necessarily constrains economic performance and social welfare more generally. To measure gender bias, I examine the cumulative abnormal returns around CEO announcements from 1992 through 2016 using a modified event study methodology. Existing event studies in this field are inconclusive as to whether or not such a bias exists. Therefore, this research contributes to the literature by extending the data, using a larger event window, and studying bias over time and firm size. …

The Reliability Of Chinese Economic Statistics, Lili Yu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

China's rapid economic growth over the past three decades has drawn attention from all over the world. The sources and reliability of the official statistics behind the tremendous growth have been the subject of heated debate among economists. This paper contributes to this data reliability debate by analyzing on the GDP statistics of China and seeks to establish whether or not the official data are valid.

This study begins with a review of the prominent research on the topic. The majority of these studies, reviewed in chapter two, point to a series of inherent contradictions in the official figures, which …

Quantifying The Impacts Of The 2007 Economic Crisis On A Local Tourism Industry And Regional Economy, Yun Ying Zhong

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of the study is to explore the accuracy of the Input-Output model and its derivative, the Occupation-Based model in investigating the impacts of the 2007 economic crisis on the tourism-related industries and the local economy in the Metro Orlando Area, Florida. The 2007-2008 total visitor expenditure change is taken as an initial shock from the economic crisis on the region's tourism-related industries, and the total impacts are measured in terms of industry output (sales), employment and annual occupational wage. The estimation results are compared with the actual data to verify the accuracy of the modeling results. Paired-sample T …

The Impact Of Continuing Education Modules On The Moral Obligations And Responsibilities Of Financial Advisors, Sandy Modell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Increased life expectancies and a significant reduction in the number of corporate pension plans nationwide have made the prospects of retirement a challenge for many of us. The burden of funding retirement will move from the corporation or government to the individual. Those individuals with limited financial experience will most likely need the guidance of a financial advisor. Can we trust and rely upon them? Following the 2004 late trading scandal and the 2008 financial meltdown, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority ("FINRA") implemented Continuing Education requirements at the advisor level. The intent was to improve the quality and integrity of …

How Business Climate And Political Climate Influence Economic Growth And Economic Development In The American States, James H. Black

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Economist Joseph Schumpeter’s examination into the relationships between business cycles and periods of economic expansion defines the government’s role in markets as limited. However, he viewed government intervention as a precursor to improving the levels of economic growth and expanding an individual’s quality of life. This study examines how measures of business and political climate might explain variations in the level of economic growth and development across the states. Economic growth is gauged from the microeconomic perspective of the individual (per capita income) and from the macroeconomic viewpoint of the state’s economy (gross state product). Economic development is defined by …

Protecting Investment, Profit, And Personnel: Corporations As Social Change Agents, Carole C. Fotino

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This paper describes a three-level toolkit - The Investment Sustainability Toolkit. The Toolkit assists firms in improving the efficacy of one segment of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiative by creating at the first level, a strategy of conflict prevention. This strategy is followed by Common Elements of Conflict that Resolves/Becomes Violent, and Key Areas for Stabilization as Level II. The third and final level of the toolkit describes specific initiatives for increasing success, through The Screening Checklist.

The paper assesses through case study, the efforts of Firestone, Inc. in Liberia regarding regional development, stabilization, and economic development. This is done …