Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

Harnessing Diversity To Accommodate The Global Business Environment, Terrica Coleman

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Ineffective diversification strategies significantly affect a business owners’ competitive advantage. When business owners struggle to recruit and retain a diverse workforce, these owners fail to meet the diverse needs required to operate in varied business environments, impacting profitability and continued business sustainability. Grounded in the transformational leadership and human capital theory frameworks, the purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore the strategies that business leaders use to recruit and retain a diverse workforce to increase performance in the global setting. The participants comprised three business leaders in the southeast region of the United States, who successfullly used …

Strategies For Improving Small Restaurant Success Rates Beyond Three Years, Joseph Wilder

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Only 65% of new restaurants remain in business after the first three years of operations. Leaders of small restaurants who lack strategies to ensure sustainability witness significant financial losses in their organizations. Grounded in the general systems theory, the purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore the strategies small restaurant owners use to sustain their business beyond three years. A purposeful sampling of three small restaurant owners in Washington County, TN, who successfully used strategies to ensure sustainability beyond three years participated in this study. Data were collected from semistructured interviews, financial documents, and public websites and …

Bank Employees’ Lived Experiences With The Implementation Of Innovative Financial Technologies, Gloria L. Cortes

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

In recent academic research, the process of financial innovation has been explored with a focus on customer adoption, the process of implementing change, and performance. An underresearched topic within existing financial innovation research is how individuals experience the process of innovation. The research question guiding this study was to explore the lived experiences of bank employees regarding the implementation of innovative financial technology solutions in a highly regulated environment. An interpretive phenomenological approach was utilized within this study to explore the experiences of 18 individuals who participated in the implementation of innovative financial technology solutions while employed at a bank. …

Strategies For Reducing Conflicting Organizational Issues Of Cross-Border Mergers And Acquisitions In West Africa, Ernest Mfobujong Ngwa

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

West African companies witnessed a reduction in cross-border merger and acquisition (CBMA) activities in 2017 resulting in an $11 billion decrease in foreign direct investment. In addition, West African CBMA executives who do not reduce postmerger organizational issues are less likely to attract foreign direct investment, resulting in lower economic productivity. Grounded in Tannenbaum and Schmidt’s situational leadership theory, the purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore strategies some CBMA executives use to reduce conflicting organizational issues in CBMAs to increase economic productivity. The participants comprised five CBMA executives of organizations active in CBMA in West Africa …

The Impact Of Financial Education On The Lives Of Cherokee Nation Citizens, Ron Pense

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Financial literacy is something that is important for financial well-being for individuals, but it is lacking, leading to problems such as inadequate saving and poor financial decision making. This research was conducted to examine the impact of financial education for citizens of Cherokee Nation on saving and financial decision making and was grounded in prospect theory and quasi-rational economics. Accordingly, the research questions focused on the extent of differences between individuals with and without financial education for decision making and saving as well as the extent demographic factors play a role. The research design was non-experimental causal comparative with financial …

Diversifying Funding Streams For A Nonprofit Behavioral Health Organization, Danielle Hurt

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Business sustainability is essential for any nonprofit organization. Revenue diversification can play a key role in business sustainability. In this case study, the revenue diversification practices and challenges of an international, behavioral health, nonprofit organization based out of the western United States were examined. The organization provides training, support, and resources in an experiential modality of behavioral health treatment for clients worldwide. Data collection processes consisted of a review of current revenue diversification literature, semistructured interviews with three senior-level leaders in the organization, and a review of select organizational documents. The Baldrige Excellence Framework for Healthcare provided a proven framework …

A New Explanation For Samuelson’S Dictum And The Stock Market: Novel Events And Knightian Uncertainty, Nicholas Mangee

Finance: Faculty Publications

Samuelson’s Dictum argues that aggregate stock markets do not convincingly reflect information on fundamentals, such as dividends or earnings, and are, thus, inefficient in setting prices. By contrast, firm-level stock prices share a much closer connection with fundamentals and are, therefore, deemed relatively efficient. This paper presents an alternative explanation: Knightian uncertainty stemming from historically unique events produces differential impacts on investor forecasting bounds at the aggregate versus firm level. Several uncertainty proxies are employed from millions of unscheduled events identified in the universe of Dow Jones & Co. financial news reports over the last twenty years. Uncertainty based on …

Creating An Optimal Portfolio With Covariance Adjustments For Moving Average Trends, Jayden Moore

Honors Program Theses

In this analysis, I investigate whether combining these two traditional methods of portfolio construction, mean-variance optimization and trend following, enhance the performance of a portfolio. Specifically, I consider whether stock trends within a pool of stock mechanically influences the covariance matrix for this pool of assets–a crucial input for mean-variance optimization. I then use these trend modified covariances to form a new mean-variance optimized portfolio and then evaluate performance. Instead of using the trends to determine whether or not to invest in a stock, as trend analysis postulates, I will be using trends to create new covariances between assets that …

Active Choice, Implicit Defaults, And The Incentive To Choose, John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson, Brigitte C. Madrian

Faculty Publications

Home-delivered prescriptions have no delivery charge and lower copayments than prescriptions picked up at a pharmacy. Nevertheless, when home delivery is offered on an opt-in basis, the take-up rate is only 6%. We study a program that makes active choice of either home delivery or pharmacy pick-up a requirement for insurance eligibility. The program introduces an implicit default for those who don’t make an active choice: pharmacy pickup without insurance subsidies. Under this program, 42% of eligible employees actively choose home delivery, 39% actively choose pharmacy pick-up, and 19% make no active choice and are assigned the implicit default. Individuals …

Were There Fire Sales In The Rmbs Market?, Craig B. Merrill, Taylor Nadauld, René M. Stulz, Shane M. Sherlun

Faculty Publications

Many observers have argued that the fall in RMBS prices during the crisis was partly caused by fire sales. Using a unique dataset of RMBS transactions for insurance compa- nies, we show evidence supportive of a role, at the transaction level, of forced sales that occurred at discounted prices relative to fundamentals, and find that the RMBS market behaved as a whole as would be expected in the presence of fire sales. We show that risk- sensitive capital requirements and mark-to-market accounting can jointly create incentives for financial institutions subject to adverse capital shocks to sell stressed securities.

An Empirical Analysis Of Video Games And Social Media On Learning In An Information Systems University Class, Heber C. Brau, James C. Brau, James Gaskin

Faculty Publications

Prior research by Brau, et al. (2016, 2017) identifies factors that correlate with university student course grades. We employ the same research structure as the Brau, et al. papers with the innovation of adding dozens of questions that deal with video game and social media usage. Extant research argues that time spent on video gaming and using social media can: 1) hurt student grades, 2) help student grades, or 3) have no impact on student grades. We test the video game and social media impact hypotheses using a survey of over 500 college students in an Introduction to Information Systems …

Methodological Variation In Empirical Corporate Finance, Todd Mitton

Faculty Publications

I document large variation in empirical methodology in corporate finance regressions in top finance journals. Although methodological variation allows for customization of empirical tests to fit specific theories, it can also enable excessive reporting of statistically significant results. For example, given discretion over ten routine methodological decisions, a researcher could report that over 70% of randomly generated variables are statistically significant determinants of leverage at the 5% level. The methodological decisions that impact statistical significance the most are dependent variable selection, variable transformation, and outlier treatment. I discuss remedies that can mitigate the negative effects of methodological variation.

Cleaning Corporate Governance, Jens Frankenreiter, Cathy Hwang, Yaron Nili, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

Although empirical scholarship dominates the field of law and finance, much of it shares a common vulnerability: an abiding faith in the accuracy and integrity of a small, specialized collection of corporate governance data. In this paper, we unveil a novel collection of three decades’ worth of corporate charters for thousands of public companies, which shows that this faith is misplaced.

We make three principal contributions to the literature. First, we label our corpus for a variety of firm- and state-level governance features. Doing so reveals significant infirmities within the most well-known corporate governance datasets, including an error rate exceeding …

Uncovering Real Earnings Management: Pay Attention To Risk-Taking Behavior, Samar Alharbi, Md Al Mamun, Nader Atawnah

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

We examine the impact of corporate risk-taking on firm-level real earnings management. We find that firms with higher risk-taking engage in higher real earnings management. Our results are robust to a series of robustness tests, including simultaneous least squares approach, firm fixed effect, change analysis, and pseudo difference-in-difference analysis. Additional analyses reveal that the impact of risk-taking on real earnings management is more pronounced among firms that experience prior-year loss and are run by top-echelons who are risk lovers. Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) regulation does not attenuate the positive effect of risk-taking on real earnings management. However, external monitoring by institutional …

Trading Macro-Cycles Of Foreign Exchange Markets Using Hybrid Models, Joseph Z. B. Ling, Albert K. Tsui, Zhaoyong Zhang Prof

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Most existing studies on forecasting exchange rates focus on predicting next-period returns. In contrast, this study takes the novel approach of forecasting and trading the longer-term trends (macro-cycles) of exchange rates. It proposes a unique hybrid forecast model consisting of linear regression, multilayer neural network, and combination models embedded with technical trading rules and economic fundamentals to predict the macro-cycles of the selected currencies and investigate the predicative power and market timing ability of the model. The results confirm that the combination model has a significant predictive power and market timing ability, and outperforms the benchmark models in terms of …

Impact Of Covid-19 On Cryptocurrencies: Evidence On Information Transmission Through Economic And Financial Market Sentiments, Irfan Haider Shakri, Jaime Yong, Erwei Xiang

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

This paper investigates the relationship between the COVID-19 crisis and the two leading cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum, from 31 December 2019 to 18 August 2020. We also use an economic news sentiment index and financial market sentiment index to explore the possible mechanisms through which COVID-19 impacts cryptocurrency. We employ a VAR Granger Causality framework and Wavelet Coherence Analysis and find the cryptocurrency market was impacted in the early phase of the sample period through economic news and financial market sentiments, but this effect diminished after June 2020.

Audits For The Minimization Of Eco-Anxiety In The World Economy, Karina Nazarova, Volodymyr Hordopolov, Mariia Nezhyva, Viktoriia Mysiuk, Tetiana Kopotiienko

Journal of Environmental Science and Sustainable Development

The global pandemic of 2019–2020 is changing not only the lives of citizens, but also approaches to business management. The activities of audit companies have not escaped. Problematic and debatable issues need to be addressed to formulate a comprehensive approach to audits in a transformative economic environment and minimize the global economy's eco-anxiety. The purpose of the article is to determine the role of the audit in minimizing the eco-anxiety of the world economy. The study's materials were indicators of the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in the world, public writings of scientists, official reports of international organizations, regulations, and …

Foreign Institutional Shareholders And Corporate Payout Policy, Rahmat Setiawan, Nova Christiana, Sanju Kumar Singh

Jurnal Akuntansi dan Keuangan Indonesia

This study examines the effect of foreign institutional shareholders (FIS) on corporate payout policy. The study employs 97 Indonesian manufacturing firms listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange period 2011-2015. Multivariate Tobit and Logit are employed to estimate the model. The result confirms the bird in the hand theory that FISs need assurance of their investments in the emerging market. FIS has a monitoring role over the firms since they have the ability to detect the firm’s quality and the agency problem within. The result confirms that the presence of the FIS in the firm has a positive and significant effect …

Feedback’S Effect On Budgetary Slack And Self-Efficacy As Moderation Variable, Aryani Intan Endah Rahmawati, Supriyadi ,

Jurnal Akuntansi dan Keuangan Indonesia

This study aimed to examine the effect of positive and negative feedback on budgetary slack and the interaction between feedback and self-efficacy on budgetary slack under a condition of information asymmetry. Preliminary researches have tested various ways of mitigating budgetary slack practices, which did not separate the effects of positive and negative feedback. This study hypothesized that positive feedback minimizes the potential for budgetary slack under conditions of information asymmetry—and vice versa. Additionally, high self-efficacy reinforces positive feedback in reducing budgetary slack under conditions of information asymmetry—and vice versa. By employing experimental data, this study documented the results that positive …

Relationship Between Foreign Direct Investment And Stock Market Development In A Small Southern Africa Economy, Duduzile Ngobe, Kalu O. Emenike

Jurnal Akuntansi dan Keuangan Indonesia

This paper investigates the relationship between foreign direct investment and stock market development in a small southern African economy. Specifically, the paper analyses long-run, short-run and causal relationships between foreign direct investment and stock market development in Eswatini for the 1990 to 2018 periods. Results of preliminary analyses of the variable show existence of positive skewness, fat-tailed, non-normal distribution, and I(1) order of integration for the foreign direct investment and stock market return series. Estimates from the ARDL model indicate evidence of a positive and statistically insignificant long-run relationship between foreign direct investment and stock market development in the kingdom …