Business Commons^™

Global Energy Consumption: An Analysis Of Variables That Shape Per Capita Usage, Or How Pump Price, Urbanization, And Fossil Fuels Imports Impact Fossil Fuels Consumption Per Capita Across Oecd Countries, Mila Demchyk Savage

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

Among reasons explaining the importance of studying fossil fuel consumption are: crude oil is a subject of the international commodities market, thus, any fluctuation related to its' availability or price would impact the rest of the World; natural resources like oil, gas, and coal are limited; the extensive use of fossil fuels harms our surroundings, creating many environmental concerns; every human (on average) has been using more energy since 1971 and the trend is expected to continue. The upward trend is not consistent among individual countries. Therefore, the core question of my research is, `Why do some countries consume less …

Firm Capabilities, Great Power Competition, And The Structural Reshaping Of Globalization, Samuel Wilson

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

The changing nature of modern globalization has given rise to strategic competition between great power states, who utilize global firms and policy interventions in commercial markets to pursue state-level objectives. Multinational executives operating in global markets must contend with the consequences of great power competition between countries like the US and China, developing novel strategies and capabilities to defend firm performance in the face of trade wars and geopolitical confrontation. Through the analysis of risk factor disclosures of foreign multinational firms operating in China, as well as cases of Chinese economic and industrial espionage against US firms, this study utilizes …

Essays On The El Niño Anomaly And Stock Return Predictability, Zhijun Yang

Finance Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation is to examine the impact of the El Niño phenomenon on the international stock market, both at the aggregate level and the portfolio level.

In first essay, I study the predictive relation between the El Niño phenomenon and international stock market aggregate returns. I find that the El Niño anomaly can predict all 14 countries’ stock returns. Specifically, the El Niño unconditional effect can predict stock return negatively in Japan, Malaysia, and South Africa, while the El Niño conditional on winter season can predict positively stock returns in 13 countries’ stock markets except for Japan. This conditional effect …

Founder Ceos And Initial Public Offerings: The Role Of Narratives, Institutions And Cultural Context, Christina Helen Tupper

Management Theses & Dissertations

This is a two essay dissertation which explores how founder and non-founder CEOs influence the IPO process and seeks to better understand their impact on IPO performance in a cross-national set of firms. Essay 1 addresses the question ‘how founder and non-founder CEOs’ narratives are portrayed differently in business media.’ Using insights from the narrative paradigm and utilizing qualitative content analysis for 1,057 units of data, I find that founders and non-founders’ media narratives differ in three important ways based on the amount of personal information about founders, how founders talk about their business operations, and positive and negative name …

Two Essays On The Internationalization Speed Of New Ventures, Orhun Guldiken

Management Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation comprises two essays on the internationalization speed of new ventures and contributes to the international entrepreneurship literature at several levels. The first essay reviews and critiques the internationalization speed literature and proposes a multi-dimensional conceptualization of speed of internationalization. In particular, previous studies that examined internationalization speed implicitly assumed that INVs need to enter new countries to grow fast in foreign markets. The key tenet of the first essay is that INVs can also grow fast in foreign markets by expanding rapidly in previously entered host countries. Consequently, the first essay uses three theoretical perspectives — organizational learning, …

What Constitutes The Success Or Failure Of Multinational Corporations (Mncs) In Foreign Markets? A Case Study Of Chinese And American Mncs, Shiwei Jiang

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

Scholars have identified multinational corporations (MNCs) as increasingly important and influential actors in international politics. However, mainstream international studies scholarship has failed to explain why MNCs succeed or fail in entering foreign markets. Market entry is a particularly vexing question for U.S. and Chinese firms seeking to compete for each other's consumers. As this study shows, surprising differences in success among U.S. firms in China, as well as Chinese firms in the U.S., suggest that statist and market factors interact with corporate strategies in confounding ways. Through case studies in the internet, automobile and fast food industries, this dissertation builds …

The Effect Of The Governance Environment On International Business: Three Essays, Jun Wu

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

We examine how governance environment affects business activities across countries. Using an updated framework of governance environments, we classify countries into three groups based on their dominant modes of governance: (1) rule-based (strong rule of law), (2) relation-based (weak rule of law and strong informal network based on private relations), and (3) neither-based (absence of both public rules and private network). We then examine how different governance types affect trade patterns and foreign investment flows. Chapter 2 theoretically proposes that the governance environment of a society plays a significant role in influencing international trade and foreign investment across countries. Chapter …

The Impact Of Collective Animosity And Collective Guilt On The Judgments Of And Preferences For Japanese Products, Amro Maher

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

Collective animosity and its effects on consumers' perceptions of and preferences for foreign products from the perpetrators' country of origin has received considerable attention in the marketing literature (Ettenson and Klein 2005; Klein, Ettenson and Morris 1998; Klein 2002; Nijseen and Douglas 2005). Collective animosity however is only one possible emotion that might be experienced towards other groups (Smith 1993; Smith 1999; Mackie, Devos and Smith 2000). Collective guilt is one of these possible emotions that have received considerable attention in the social psychology literature. Collective guilt refers to the distress that one might feel due to moral transgressions performed …

Investigating The Effect Of The International Stock Indexes On The United States Stock Index Futures, Zehlha Illhan Ertuna

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

The futures market is used extensively for price discovery, arbitrage, and hedging. Since their introduction in the 1980's, the stock index futures have also become an active market and a very important research area. Any additional knowledge to understand the underlying effects on the index will help both investors and researchers. In this study, I examine the role of informational flow from the world's major stock markets (British, French, German, Japanese) to the U.S. futures market in terms of forming expectations, and offer new insights regarding the informational efficiency of the futures markets in an intenational perspective. State space modeling …

An Assessment Of The Links Between International Diversification, Product Diversification, Performance And Risk Within Service Corporations, Sally Ann Sledge

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

Services currently account for the dominant share of the workforce in all developed nations and are the fastest growing sector of employment in most developing nations. Services comprise approximately two-thirds of the GDP (gross domestic product) or total domestic output of final goods and services in highly industrialized nations from the OECD (Organization for Cooperation and Development). They make up almost half of the GDP in developing nations. All economic forecasts predict that services will continue to grow and account for the vast majority of future economic expansion throughout the world. Despite these facts, services have been studied infrequently among …

The Market And Ethics: The Case Of The 1994 Decision By The Clinton Administration To Delink China's Human Rights Record From Most-Favored-Nation Status, Susan C. Morris

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

Amid the globalization of markets and the interdependence of states, human rights violations throughout the world still persist. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between the economic interdependence of nations and the moral responsibilities of nations by examining the case of the 1994 decision by the Clinton administration to delink China's human rights practices from most-favored-nation status.

The annual 1997 Freedom House world survey of human rights rated China at its lowest point and quoted that “the regime continues to have one of the worst human rights records in the world.”1 Yet despite China's ongoing human …

An Empirical Analysis Of The Critical Determinants Affecting Commitment And Performance Of The U. S. Firm In The South African Market: Apartheid Versus Post-Apartheid, Sonja Pollard Mitchell

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

Recognized by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as one of the world's Big Emerging Markets (BEMs), South Africa has received vast attention from potential foreign investors (IRRC 1994) and has been recognized by scholars as an excellent base for research (Hofmeyr, Templer and Beaty 1994). Unfortunately, little is known about the export behavior of the foreign firm in South Africa (Calof and Viviers 1995) given the country's history of political, social and economic instability.

This dissertation is an effort to increase the understanding of the factors that contribute to the commitment and overall market performance of U.S. firms in South …

First Mover Advantage: An Industrial Buyer Behavioral Perspective, Howard G. Ling

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

Contemporary order-of-entry research has shifted from econometric investigations to research grounded in quasi-experimental and empirical consumer behavior studies. In the marketing literature, Carpenter and Nakamoto (1988), Kardes and Kalyanaram (1992), and particularly Alpert and Kamins (1992, 1994, 1995) have examined the role of consumer behavior as a potential explanation of first mover advantage. However, little or no research has been devoted to an understanding of pioneer advantage as it relates to industrial markets.

This dissertation investigated the effect of order of entry on the attitudes of industrial purchasing managers. Six major hypotheses were proposed to examine the cognitive beliefs, attitudes, …

Relative Gains Problem And Case Studies Of Economic Cooperation In East Asia, Ping Deng

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

Relative gains problem basically means unequal cooperative payoffs disproportionately favoring partners. With the relative gains problem widely accepted as a serious impediment to international cooperation, some scholars have theoretically argued or modeled several conditions that are most likely to foster a state's sensitivity to relative gains and thus substantially affect the prospects for cooperation. But little empirical work has been done to date. The central objective of this dissertation is to test whether those theoretical propositions can be supported by empirical evidence. For this purpose, we have deducted three hypotheses: (1) If a state faces military threat and zero-sum political …

Three Essays On European Union Advances Toward A Single Currency And Its Implications For Business And Investors, Charlotte Anne Bond

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

The first chapter examines the changes in various European currencies' exchange rates through the time period 1980 through 1997. Specifically, we are interested to determine if there is any affect to the volatility of these exchange rates and specific events related to the advancement of European Unification. In order to move to a single currency it is imperative that the separate currencies become less volatile to facilitate the move to a single currency. In this study, we examine whether this is the case and discuss which currencies appear to display this behavior. It is observed that of the 14 currencies …

Cross-Cultural Issues In The Management Of German-Owned Business Subsidiaries In Hampton Roads, Teja Ulrich

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

'Culture' can be described as patterns of thinking, feeling and acting that distinguish one cultural group from another. Cultural diversity is therefore likely to introduce variety to organizations in which individuals from different national backgrounds are working together. Although this variety bears the potential for an improvement of the cognitive development in the organizations, managers of multicultural business organizations tend to perceive cultural diversity as a disadvantage. This thesis attempts to identify the impact of cultural differences between Germans and Americans on organizations in which German managers work with American employees. German managers of eight business subsidiaries in the Hampton …

An Empirical Test Of Linder's Trade Hypothesis, James Norman Carnes

Economics Theses & Dissertations

Attempts have been made recently to empirically test several theories of the basis of international trade. These efforts have been concentrated mainly on the empirical testing of the Heckscher-Ohlin and the classical international trade theorems. The results so obtained are both complementary and conflicting. Although a greater degree of empirical relevance has been observed in the Ricardian model than in the Heckscher-Ohlin theorem, so far no sophisticated effort appears to have been made at the empirical testing of Linder's trade hypothesis.

Linder's thesis is that a country cannot achieve comparative cost advantage in that line of production for which there …

An Analysis In Terms Of Trade, Nobuhiro Hayashi

Economics Theses & Dissertations

No abstract.