Business Commons^™

The Great Resignation, Unemployment, And Underemployment In The Us: A Study Of Labor Market Segmentation, Thomas E. Lambert

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

During 2021 and 2022 many news media outlets have been reporting that millions of workers in the US have been quitting their jobs in record numbers. In a global economy rebounding from the economic downturn caused by the Covid-19 outbreak and demanding more workers, a high rate of resignations has exacerbated labor shortages and may be aggravating underemployment rates if many workers are choosing not to be part of the labor force or only to work part time. Many reasons have been offered to explain this “Great Resignation” including high day care costs for working parents which may in turn …

Skbi Big 5 Survey 2022 August, Singapore Management University

Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics

The latest survey results on the largest five economies (Big5) were revised markedly relative to the prior release (pre-Russia-Ukraine conflict), generally indicating weaker growth and higher inflation coupled with incremental ambiguity on the policy front.

Nebraska Monthly Economic Indicators: August 1, 2022, Eric Thompson

Leading Economic Indicator Reports

The LEI-N rose by 0.68% during June 2022. The increase in the leading indicator, which is designed to predict economic activity six months in the future, signals that the Nebraska economy will grow slowly through the end of 2022. The indicator improved for two primary reasons. First, there was an increase in manufacturing hours-worked during June. Second, respondents to the June Survey of Nebraska Business reported plans to increase sales and employment.

Obstacles To Domestic Retail Investing : Evidence From Mexico, Kenneth Bulko

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Despite efforts to improve investment behavior, equity participation worldwide remains low. Researchers have attempted to explain the reluctance to purchase risky assets by seeking to identify the barriers investors face during the investment process. However, past empirical results relied on data often collected as part of a larger investigation and not explicitly centered on barriers to investing. We seek to deepen the understanding of investor behavior with qualitative and qualitative research designed to specifically identify the obstacles typically faced by potential investors, with a particular focus on Mexico.

The 1-2-3 Of Market Research For Business Startups: A Case Study In Library Instruction, Daniel Le, Marie-Louise Watson

Georgia Library Quarterly

This article describes a practical way to teach student entrepreneurs to search and use market data for business startup plans. The conventional way of teaching students to find articles and business intelligence based on a class assignment can be challenging for many students without an academic business background. This library instruction approach sequentially uses three databases enriched with business data and infographics to support the development of critical thinking for student entrepreneurs. It teaches entrepreneurial personality support, analysis, visualization, and market mapping.

Full Disclosure: Model Uncertainty In Adjusting For Confounders, Dieudonne Dusenge

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the role of knowledge about underlying causal relationships in classifying controls in order to mitigate omitted- and included-variable biases. Using simulations and accounting examples, the study shows that the researcher may not distinguish good and bad controls because the underlying causal relationships are unobservable, and remedying strategies (such as the relative timing of measurement) may not remove the uncertainty in the classification. Because of the uncertainty about which controls to use, two or more models will be credible as will the distinct estimates derived from them. Next, the study shows that the current standard practice of singling …

International Asset Pricing With Strategic Business Groups, Massimo Massa, Hong Zhang, Hong Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Firms in global markets often belong to business groups. We argue that this feature can have a profound influence on international asset pricing. In bad times, business groups may strategically reallocate risk across affiliated firms to protect core “central firms.” This strategic behavior induces co-movement among central firms, creating a new intertemporal risk factor. Based on a novel data set of worldwide ownership for 2002–2012, we find that central firms are better protected in bad times and that they earn relatively lower expected returns. Moreover, a centrality factor augments traditional models in explaining the cross section of international stock returns.

Customer Concentration And Corporate Carbon Emissions, Saiying Deng, Tinghua Duan, Frank Weikai Li, Xiaoling Pu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper examines whether economic links with major corporate customers curb corporate carbon emissions. We show that supplier firms with a concentrated customer base have significantly lower carbon emissions. The baseline results are robust to alternative measures of carbon emissions and customer concentration, and various approaches that mitigate endogeneity concerns due to omitted variables and reverse causality. Moreover, the curbing effect of customer concentration on supplier carbon emissions is more pronounced in firms facing lower customer switching costs, with less (more) supplier (customer) bargaining power, fewer redeployable assets, operating in more carbon-intensive industries, and after the Paris Agreement of 2015. …

Two’S A Crowd? Implications Of Economic Geography For Corporate Governance, Matthew Farrell

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

Although literature on corporate governance and economic geography often explores similar constructs, theories, and other matters, little work has been done examining their joint effects. This two-essay dissertation integrates these literatures in order to partially fill this gap by asking the following research questions:

1.) Do geographic proximity and multiple directorships function as substitutes or complements?

2.) How is the governance of highly innovative firms affected by the presence of Marshallian externalities?

While some scholars suggest that multiple directorships lead to board members neglecting their advisory and monitoring obligations, others have embraced the idea that holding multiple board seats can …

Markets With Within-Type Adverse Selection, Anh Nguyen, Teck Yong Tan

Department of Economics: Faculty Publications

We study bilateral trade with a seller owning multiple units of a good, where each unit is of binary quality. The seller privately knows her “type”—defined by the number of lemons that she owns — and which units in her endowments are the lemons (“withintype adverse selection”). We characterize the set of informationally constrained Pareto optimal allocations and show that every such allocation must involve a trade characterized by a threshold λ^∗, with types having less (more) than λ^∗ units of lemons selling only their lemons (selling their entire endowment). We provide conditions for a …

Three Chapters On Investments And Financial Institutions, Cao Fang

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Only the stock selection (“alpha”) decisions of fund managers who trade on firm-specific information should have predictive return content. Faced with the same information, skilled fund managers make similar stock selection decisions. In Chapter one, we introduce a new measure - stock investment quality - which uses fund quality to weight asymmetries in private information reflected in deviations of fund from peer group ownership on stocks in a style segment. We show stocks ranked high on investment quality generate significantly higher excess returns that persist through the ensuing year. The positive investment quality–future return relationship is robust to alternative fund …

How Gen. Musharraf Restructured The Economy, Ishrat Husain Dr.

Faculty Research - Newspaper and Magazine Articles

President Musharraf assumed power in October 1999 under difficult circumstances when Pakistan was already facing sanctions for nuclear testing, further compounded by sanctions against the military takeover. External liquidity had dried up due to the freezing of foreign currency deposits in May 1998. The new government assigned priority to debt restructuring and reforms in taxation, trade, the financial sector, privatization of state-owned enterprises, and deregulation of private businesses. This article provides a first-hand, data-driven account of Pakistan's economic record during 2000-2008, demonstrating that sustained economic growth was possible because a strong government mobilized domestic resources and ensured they were utilized …

The Cryptocurrency Participation Puzzle, Ran Duchin, David H. Solomon, Jun Tu, Xi Wang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We show that ongoing zero portfolio weights in cryptocurrency are surprisingly difficult to generate in a standard Bayesian portfolio theory framework. With ten years of prior data, equity market investors would need very pessimistic priors on mean returns to justify never having bought cryptocurrency: -10.6% per month for Bitcoin, and -19.6% per month for a diversified portfolio of cryptocurrencies. Moreover, most priors that involve never purchasing cryptocurrency imply that investors should short cryptocurrency. Optimal absolute weights are generally small but non-trivial (1-5%), frequently positive, and fairly smooth despite returns being volatile. Under a wide range of priors, the certainty equivalent …

Inflation Expectations Can Be A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, Aurobindo Ghosh, Khyati Chauhan, Muskan Bagrodia

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In a commentary, SMU Assistant Professor of Finance (Education) Aurobindo Ghosh, SMU postgraduate student and Research Assistant for the SInDEx Project Muskan Bagrodia and International Monetary Fund Economic Research Assistant Khyati Chauhan weighed in on why inflation expectations matter as much as economic data. They discussed how inflation expectations can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, and shared the key takeaways of the quarterly DBS-Sim Kee Boon Institute’s Singapore Index of Inflation Expectations (DBS-SKBI SInDEx) survey. They concluded that effective communication on inflation control measures, in addition to credible policy decisions, will help consumers feel assured and refrain from basing purchasing decisions …

The Effects Of Consumer Loan Application Formats And Advertised Terms On Consumer Borrowing Decisions, Alicia M. Johnson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Consumers continue to demonstrate a willingness to accrue more debt. They are also more accepting of increased repayment risk via the acceptance of longer loan terms. Extant research on consumer borrowing consists primarily of experiments designed to assess consumer choices and understand how consumers evaluate loan attributes in relation to one another within consumer borrowing contexts (Kamleitner, Hoelzl, and Kirchler 2012; Ranyard et al., 2006). Thus, prior research examines consumer responses to loan information rather than the generation of loan parameters at the time of financing. With important implications for consumers, marketers of financial products, academic researchers, and federal regulators, …

Does The Financial Experience Of Sec Regional Directors Impact Sec Investigations Into Reporting Entities?, James Justin Blann

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The SEC’s Division of Enforcement is frequently criticized for its lack of oversight effectiveness, and certain vocal critics attribute this to a lack of financial experience within the SEC. Using hand-collected data on SEC regional directors, I find that the majority of these SEC officials lack financial experience. I then examine whether the financial experience of SEC regional directors impacts SEC investigations into reporting entities. Consistent with financial experience equipping directors to better process complex financial transactions and reports, I find that directors with financial experience open public company investigations 29 percent more often and conduct these investigations 34 percent …

The True Cost Of Auto Insurance In The Mountain West, 2022, Annie Vong, Saha Salahi, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Transportation & Infrastructure

This fact sheet examines data on average annual premiums, percent of income spent on auto insurance, and life events associated with the rising cost of auto insurance in the Mountain West (Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah). The original report includes data on national averages for auto insurance premiums for all fifty states.

Shortage Of Affordable Rental Homes In The Mountain West, Joshua Padilla, Kelliann Beavers, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Housing & Real Estate

This fact sheet examines data from the 2022 report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), “The Gap: A Shortage of Affordable Homes” for the Mountain West region. The original report includes data from 2016- 2020 American Community Survey (ACS) Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) to help “determine the availability of rental homes affordable to extremely low-income households.”

Online Teaching Conference - A Blog Post, Manzoor Chowdhury

Title III Professional Development Reports

Attended the Online Teaching Conference in Long Beach, California (June 29 – July 1) and got the opportunity to learn about recent trends, new technology, and new challenges in online teaching. Presentations at the conference ranged from narrowly focused topics such as how to create great audio clips to more broad topics on online course design and student engagement. The conference also had sessions for open discussion where anyone could bring up any topic, ask questions, and participate in the discussion. A great conference that certainly helped me as a faculty member in my professional development.

Open Innovation Trends, Issues And Policy Suggestions In Manufacturing Industry, Rongping Mu, Jingjing Guo, Jin Kang, Shuang Ma, Kangwei Chi

Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Chinese Version)

At present, the new technology revolution and industrial transformation are accelerately reshaping the international industrial division of labor. It is urgent to adhere to the basic principles of "open cooperation, green and low carbon, value co-creation, and codevelopment", promote open innovation and cooperation in key areas of the manufacturing industry, and improve the open innovation and development capability in the manufacturing industry. This study first summarizes the open innovation trends of global manufacturing industries. Second, it analyzes major countries' policies in promoting open innovation in the manufacturing industry. Third, the current situation and problems of China's manufacturing open innovation is …

Lessons Learned: Zeti Akhtar Aziz, Maryann Haggerty

Journal of Financial Crises

Zeti Akhtar Aziz, a Malaysian economist, was governor of Bank Negara Malaysia, her nation’s central bank, from 2000 to 2016; prior to that, she was acting governor and deputy governor. Dr. Zeti was a key leader in Malaysia’s response to the Asian financial crisis of 1997¬-98, as well as the financial sector restructuring that followed. This “Lessons Learned” summary is based on a 2022 interview with Dr. Zeti. At the time of the interview, she was co-chair of the board of governors of the Asia School of Business in Kuala Lumpur, which is a partnership between Bank Negara and the …

Lessons Learned: David Wilcox, Mercedes Cardona

Journal of Financial Crises

David Wilcox was the deputy director of the Division of Research and Statistics of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors during the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-¬09. He assisted in developing the Federal Reserve policy response that ultimately stabilized the economy by providing insight into the economic and financial outlook to the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) prior to each of its policy-setting meetings. Wilcox became director of the division in 2011 and served in that role through 2018, acting as the division’s chief economist, manager, and the senior adviser to three Fed chairs. After leaving the Fed, he joined …

Lessons Learned: Mark Van Der Weide, Matthew A. Lieber

Journal of Financial Crises

With more than two decades of continuing service at the Federal Reserve Board, Mark Van Der Weide brings a unique insider perspective on central bank policymaking before, during, and after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), including the Fed’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. From 1998 to 2009, Van Der Weide served in the Fed’s legal division. De-tailed to the Treasury Department in 2009, he helped draft the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Re-form and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. Back at the Fed in 2010, Van Der Weide served for eight years in the Division of Supervision and Regulation, where …

Lessons Learned: Brooksley Born, Maryann Haggerty

Journal of Financial Crises

Brooksley Born, a lawyer with decades of experience in derivatives law, served as chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) from 1996 to 1999. At the CFTC, she advocated for federal regulation of the over-the-counter derivatives (OTC) market, but legislation failed to pass. The OTC derivatives market had a central role in the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-09. Born, who returned to private practice after her CFTC term, served as a commissioner on the US Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which investigated the causes of the crisis and issued its report in January 2011. This “Lessons Learned” is based on …

Lessons Learned: Michael Silva, Mercedes Cardona

Journal of Financial Crises

Michael Silva was chief of staff to then-President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY) Timothy Geithner from 2006 to 2009, including the early stages of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). As such, Silva was critical in the coordination of personnel and information during the GFC, specifically during the period when the FRBNY was addressing liquidity stresses in the bank sector, including the bailout of Bear Stearns, the failure of Lehman Brothers, and the rescue of American International Group. When Geithner became President Barack Obama’s Treasury Secretary in 2009, Silva became chief of staff to his successor at …

United States: Main Street Lending Program, Steven Kelly

Journal of Financial Crises

In March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic caused slowdowns and disruptions to economic activity, businesses faced disruptions to their revenues and experienced increased demand for credit. Yet, as the pandemic worsened the economic outlook, banks tightened credit. Starting on March 17, the Federal Reserve rolled out several emergency programs aimed at capital markets. Most of these programs tended to benefit relatively large companies. On March 23, the Fed said it would introduce a program targeting small and mid-sized companies. On April 9, 2020, the Federal Reserve announced its first design iteration of the novel Main Street Lending Program (MSLP). The …

Lessons Learned: Scott G. Alvarez, Esq., Part 2, Steven Kelly

Journal of Financial Crises

Scott G. Alvarez was general counsel of the Federal Reserve Board during the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). He met with the Yale Program on Financial Stability (YPFS) to discuss a litany of legal aspects related to the Fed’s interventions under its emergency liquidity provision authority under Section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act. We summarize some highlights from our interview with Mr. Alvarez. The transcript of this interview, conducted in April 2022, and one from an earlier Lessons Learned interview, in December 2018

United States: Paycheck Protection Program Liquidity Facility, Steven Kelly

Journal of Financial Crises

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the US Congress passed and funded the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) to help small businesses facing business disruptions keep workers on their payrolls and meet other expenses. The PPP, signed into law on March 27, 2020, provided a mechanism for authorized lenders to extend concessionary, forgivable loans guaranteed by the Small Business Administration (SBA). Lenders ultimately extended approximately $800 billion in PPP loans. The SBA distributed the funds when the loan either defaulted or met the law's terms for SBA forgiveness. To buttress lenders' ability to fund PPP loans, the Federal Reserve …

United States: Primary Dealer Credit Facility, Carey K. Mott

Journal of Financial Crises

In March 2020, the uncertain outlook for the United States in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic prompted extremely high demand for cash and near-cash assets. Amid intense selling pressure from investors, securities dealers were unable to fully absorb the high volume of trade orders into their inventory due to balance sheet capacity and funding constraints. As dealer capacity declined and demand for liquidity continued rising, volatility spread to the critical and normally highly liquid market for US Treasury securities, prompting the Federal Reserve to increase open market operations (March 12) and begin historically large purchases of US Treasuries (March …

United States: Municipal Liquidity Facility, Steven Kelly

Journal of Financial Crises

In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic caused severe financial stress for state and local municipalities. Municipalities' public health responses led to material increases in expenditures. At the same time, many municipalities faced revenue delays and declines due to extended tax deadlines and disruptions in taxable economic activity. Institutional investors also put heavy selling pressure on municipal bonds. In response to stresses in the municipal financing market, the Federal Reserve invoked its Section 13(3) emergency lending authority and created the Municipal Liquidity Facility (MLF). The Fed created the facility to backstop municipal entities' access to capital markets to help them manage …