Business Commons^™

We Don’T Have To Lose Stem Students To Business, Naomi L. B. Wernick, Fred D. Ledley

Natural & Applied Sciences Faculty Publications

Most undergraduate students who leave STEM majors before graduation choose careers in business. This article argues that better integrating business opportunities and context into the STEM curriculum could advance STEM learning, motivate students to remain in STEM as majors, and cultivate a constructive relationship between business, science, and society.

Profitability Of Large Pharmaceutical Companies Compared With Other Large Public Companies, Fred D. Ledley, Sarah Shonka Mccoy, Gregory Vaughan, Ekaterina Galkina Cleary

Natural & Applied Sciences Faculty Publications

Understanding the profitability of pharmaceutical companies is essential to formulating evidence-based policies to reduce drug costs while maintaining the industry’s ability to innovate and provide essential medicines.

What's In A Wage? A New Approach To The Justification Of Pay, Jeffrey Moriarty

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In this address, I distinguish and explore three conceptions of wages. A wage is a reward, given in recognition of the performance of a valued task. It is also an incentive: a way to entice workers to take and keep jobs, and to motivate them to work hard. Finally, a wage is a price of labor, and like all prices, conveys valuable information about relative scarcity. I show that each conception of wages has its own normative logic, or appropriate justification, and these logics can come apart. This explains some of the debate about wages and makes the project of …

On The Origin, Content, And Relevance Of The Market Failures Approach, Jeffrey Moriarty

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The view of business ethics that Christopher McMahon calls the “implicit morality of the market” and Joseph Heath calls the “market failures approach” has received a significant amount of recent attention. The idea of this view is that we can derive an ethics for market participants by thinking about the “point” of market activity, and asking what the world would have to be like for this point to be realized. While this view has been much-discussed, it is still not well-understood. This paper seeks to remedy this problem. I begin by showing, against some recent commentators, that McMahon’s view and …

Increasing Gender Diversity On Corporate Boards: Voices Of Male And Female Directors In The United States, Vasilia Vasiliou

2020

An emerging literature highlights the lack of gender diversity on corporate boards, its implications, and the need for more scholarship and theoretical development on board diversity. According to this literature, to better understand the reasons behind the persistent underrepresentation of women on boards (WOB), of particular importance is the need to access boards directly for data, as opposed to focusing solely on human capital, firm, and board characteristics. This dissertation research directly accesses both male and female board directors using a qualitative interview approach and employs grounded theory techniques to investigate (a) how and why corporate boards appoint members, and …

Portfolio Insurance Strategies. Parameter Optimization And Comparison Study, Olga Biedova

2020

Portfolio insurance strategies are very popular investment solutions that provide an investor with capital protection as well as allow for an equity market participation.

This dissertation focuses on two portfolio insurance strategies: Constant Proportion Portfolio Insurance (CPPI), one of the most popular strategies, and Volatility Target Portfolio Insurance (VTPI), a modified version of an Option Based Portfolio Insurance (OBPI). This dissertation follows a three-paper model.

In paper one, we propose a two-step approach to the numerical optimization of the CPPI main parameter, multiplier. First, we identify an admissible range of the multiplier values by controlling the shortfall probability (chosen as …

The Influence Of Internal Audit Competency On Financial Reporting Quality And Enterprise Risk Management, Melissa E. Renschler

2020

The internal audit function (IAF) is critically important to financial reporting quality and enterprise risk management (ERM). Following both the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 and the financial crisis of 2008, there have been improvements to other monitoring functions, such as the audit committee, management, and the external auditor, but regulation over the IAF is nearly absent. Further, our understanding of how IAF competency is developed and how IAF competency impacts both financial reporting quality and ERM outcomes is limited. My dissertation consists of three archival studies that investigate IAF competency using LinkedIn data. Taken together, these three studies contribute to …

Technology Based Audit Tools: Implications For Audit Quality, Annie L. Witte

2020

Technology as an exogenous shock has proven to have pervasive effects on auditing firms, practitioners, regulators, and global markets. However, the dynamic nature of technology makes it uniquely challenging to articulate technology’s largescale implications on the auditing profession in recent times. Understanding how current technology has helped shape the contemporary auditing profession is vital to identify points of inflection within the industry (i.e., areas of risk and change), and key to elucidating the future of where the field is going.

The first paper (sole-authored) is a literature review that synthesizes auditing studies across methodologies, including archival, experimental, and qualitative methods. …