Business Commons^™

How Should We Motivate Effort, Shamima Khan

Theses and Dissertations

This research uses an experimental design to study if the pattern and positioning of rewards influence the amount of effort participants put in. The three key hypotheses tested here are: 1) are people more likely to complete a task if the incentives are given in more regular intervals, 2) do uncertainty of reward timing hurt or help in maintaining motivation, 3) is intrinsic motivation more influential than the patterns in which incentives are structured? The treatments in this experiment are created by varying the reward structure of candies and pens in exchange of a simple math test completion. Among the …

A Cost Of Doing Business: Defense Contracting Fraud, Shane M. English

Capstones

The federal government relies heavily on outside contractors to provide essential research and services. Following World War II, the Department of Defense and the military began to rely on approved government contractors to develop, test and improve weapons and tools used to keep soldiers and the nation safe.

Defense contracting is a massive business that commands billions of dollars a year. Despite the magnitude of the United States' contracting system, detecting fraud and preventing bad actors from continuing to profit off of the government has proven difficult. The systems at hand: civil and criminal charges, suspension and debarment have consistently …

Not On The Menu, Kathryn Casteel, Zameena Mejia

Capstones

The element of “unwelcomeness” and the burden of proof on the plaintiff to prove sexual conduct in the workplace is one of the flaws of Title VII that make it difficult to protect victims of sexual harassment. This is particularly true in restaurants where a sexual environment is often thought of as “part of the job.” Formal complaint systems, if available, in restaurants are often flawed, even though they can pose as an affirmative defense for the defendant if they are available and a victim does not file a complaint. In the cases examined, all involved an accused supervisor or …

Long Odds: Inside The Process Of Applying For Affordable Housing Through Nyc’S Lottery System, Scott Klocksin

Capstones

This story is a look at the process of applying for affordable housing through lotteries set up by the New York City Department of Housing Preservation & Development. The story follows Chris Kelly, a 36 year-old freelance writer and personal assistant, through the process of applying through the lotteries and eventually through the final stages of securing an affordable apartment.

Spend Your Student Loans On A Vacation. No One Is Watching., Raul A. Hernandez, Morten Buttler

Capstones

Student loan debtors who spend their loans on non-educational expenses   increase the likelihood of financial hardship once they begin repayment. Contributing to the financial struggles of student loan debtors is an overly-complicated student loan system which can entangle borrowers with unclear financial statements and a glut of federal loan repayment programs.

Link to capstone project: https://medium.com/@raul.hernandez/spend-your-student-loans-on-a-vacation-no-one-is-watching-a71834ed6f45#.vj61hhxig

The Pop Behind Pop-Ups, Lauren Klose

Capstones

Small businesses on Long Island have been suffering due to a variety of reasons including taxes and regulations on small businesses. Despite this, one entrepreneur, Howie Frank, has decided to fight back and start a small business that is only open for six months out of the year: Everything Christmas. He cashes in on the most profitable time of the retail season, and has since grown his company in the past eight years to four locations and four franchise locations. His intent is to continue this expand this business which he dedicates all of his time to, year round.

http://www.laurenklose.com/

Fraud Detections For Online Businesses: A Perspective From Blockchain Technology, Yuanfeng Cai, Dan Zhu

Publications and Research

Background: The reputation system has been designed as an effective mechanism to reduce risks associated with online shopping for customers. However, it is vulnerable to rating fraud. Some raters may inject unfairly high or low ratings to the system so as to promote their own products or demote their competitors.

Method: This study explores the rating fraud by differentiating the subjective fraud from objective fraud. Then it discusses the effectiveness of blockchain technology in objective fraud and its limitation in subjective fraud, especially the rating fraud. Lastly, it systematically analyzes the robustness of blockchain-based reputation systems in each type of …

The Promise Of Cooperatives Falls Short For Immigrant Women, Lisa Thomson

Capstones

A worker cooperative is a special type of business where the workers are also the owners, which allows them to share in running the day to day of the business as well as the profits. They are becoming popular way for immigrant women to gain economic independence and become entrepreneurs. As the city invests an increasing amount of money to support this initiative, the services available are scattered and disjointed, are often run by people who are new to cooperative development, while the promise of stable employment and higher wages go unmet.

Illegitimate Tasks As An Impediment To Job Satisfaction And Intrinsic Motivation: Moderated Mediation Effects Of Gender And Effort-Reward Imbalance, Rachel Omansky, Erin M. Eatough, Marcus J. Fila

Publications and Research

The current work examines a contemporary workplace stressor that has only recently been introduced into the literature: illegitimate tasks. Illegitimate tasks are work tasks that violate identity role norms about what can reasonably be expected from an employee in a given position. Although illegitimate tasks have been linked to employee well-being in past work, we know little about the potential explanatory mechanisms linking illegitimate tasks to work-relevant negative psychological states. Using a sample of 213 US-based employees of mixed occupations and a cross-sectional design, the present study examines job satisfaction and intrinsic motivation as outcomes of illegitimate tasks. Additionally, we …

Relational Pluralism In Boards Of Directors: A Multidimensional View, Zhu Zhu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A large body of literature has been devoted to explaining the influence of corporate boards on their firms’ financial performance, yet the findings paint a puzzling picture. My dissertation seeks to shed light on current research by paying nuanced attention to latent board characteristics and obtaining a more comprehensive understanding of the board-performance relationship. I adapt a relational pluralistic perspective of the board to empirically examine multiple facets of director ties, identities, power relations, and networks and their effect on firm performance. This relational view of the board extends the current understanding of director behavior by aggregating director relationships on …

Do Executives Have Fixed Effects On Firm-Level Stock Price Crash Risk?, Jiaxin Liu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper investigates whether individual CEOs and CFOs have “styles” (i.e. manager’s fixed effects) in withholding corporate bad news, which is captured using firm-level future stock price crash risks. Tracking managers that move across firms and employing a manager fixed-effect model, I find that both CFOs and CEOs have fixed effects on firm-level stock price crash risks in the future using multiple crash risk measures adopted from previous studies (e.g. Kim et al.(2011a,b)). In addition, I find that CFOs’ managerial ability is positively associated with one crash risk measure. Lastly, I find systematic differences in CEO vis-à-vis CFO’s preferences in …

Investigating Personal Intelligent Agents In Everyday Life Through A Behavioral Lens, Sara Moussawi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Personal intelligent agents (PIA), such as Apple’s Siri, Google Now, Facebook’s M, and Microsoft’s Cortana, are pervading our lives. These systems are taking the shape of a companion, and acting on our behalf to help us manage our everyday activities. The proliferation of these PIAs is largely due to their wide availability on mobile devices which themselves have become commonly available for billions of people. Our continuous interaction with these PIAs is impacting our sense of self, sense of being human, perception of technology, and relationships with others. The Information Systems (IS) literature on PIAs has been scarce. In this …

An Analysis Of The Relationship Between Ceo Compensation And Corporate Social Responsibility Disclosure Type And Quality, Nicole M. Heron

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The construct of corporate social responsibility (CSR) itself is comprised of three underlying components: environmental, social, and corporate governance. However, it is unclear from the extant literature whether and how these underlying components of CSR are related to CEO compensation. In the absence of a theoretical model of CSR that specifically considers its underlying components, I present in this paper an exploratory analysis of the relationships between CEO compensation and CSR disclosure type and quality. My CSR proxies are based on a firm’s environmental, social and corporate governance-related disclosure, as reported by Bloomberg. I calculate total CEO compensation as the …

Zero Textbook Cost Syllabus For Res 3400 (Real Estate Capital Markets), Meagan Mccollum

Open Educational Resources

This course examines the creation and evolution of mortgage pass-through securities, real estate investment trusts (REITs), commingled real estate funds (CREFs), and commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBSs). These developments have had profound effects on the real estate markets, including how they have led to greater flexibility and transparency in those markets, and how they have affected the valuations and pricing efficiency of markets for real estate assets. This course will help students develop a clear understanding of the workings of and opportunities in the real estate capital markets.

The Timeliness Of State And Local Governments By Gasb: An Evaluation Of Efficacy Of Financial Reports, Achraf Seyam, Alexander Hinners, Lauren Freire, Victor Parbat

Publications and Research

In March 2011, the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) issued a research brief titled “The Timeliness of Financial Reporting by State and Local Governments Compared with the Needs of Users.” This study formally exposed an apparent gap between the time-of-issuance of governmental financial reports and their usefulness according to a large and diverse group of survey participants. According to the GASB in the aforementioned report, nearly a quarter of the government entities take longer than six months to issue their annual reports, with many evidencing release times of a year or more. Comparatively, the users surveyed indicated that report usefulness …

Corporate Inversions: The Migration Of Corporate Tax Revenue, Joel Barker

Publications and Research

Estimates of over 20 billion of tax revenue are lost to our economy because of corporate inversions. Therefore, lawmakers are actively exploring ways to stop the hemorrhaging of corporate tax-revenues, tighten restrictions on corporate inversions, and to find ways to collect on defer tax revenues. From a business prospective, corporate inversions are nothing less than prudent, innovative, business strategies to enhance corporate profits. However, it’s undoubtedly having a significant impact on U.S. tax revenues and ultimately reducing domestic investments. Ireland is now the most popular new home to many U.S. Corporations, especially within the pharmaceutical industry. The advantageous tax incentives …

Essays On Foreign Firms Following Deregistration From U.S. Exchanges, Kathleen Michelle Bakarich

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 2007 the SEC introduced Rule 12h-6, which significantly reduced the requirements for cross-listed firms to leave U.S. markets. While the benefits and costs of cross-listing in the U.S. have been widely analyzed in prior literature, questions as to the impact of deregistration on firms, investors, and other parties have been raised given the increase in foreign firms leaving the U.S. over the past decade. In addition, the growing global adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and worldwide regulatory developments over this time period have brought changes to the home markets to which deregistering firms return potentially influencing the …

Essays On Institutional Investor Trading, Karolina Krystyniak

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of three chapters that examine the role of institutional investors in stock market efficiency. Institutions are important and influential market participants. This study aims to analyze whether institutional investor trading is consistent with higher attention and better skill, what is the impact of institutional trading on future asset prices and how does institutional trading relate to the liquidity in the market.

The first chapter of the dissertation analyzes institutional investors’ response to stock level liquidity shocks. I find that institutions, especially the transient ones, buy stocks that experience positive liquidity shocks and sell those that experience negative …

Essays On Investor Attention, Hongqi Liu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of three chapters that examine investor attention and its impact on corporate events and asset prices using a Google search-based measure of investor attention.

Chapter 1 This chapter investigates investor attention patterns and its determinants. I document that investor attention displays strong seasonality. It is significantly lower on Fridays and in summer months. I find that investor attention increases significantly following earnings announcements and macro news releases, and the effect is stronger for large firms. When faced with both firm-specific and market-wide information shocks, investors’ attention response to firm-specific information attenuates and their trading behavior is also …

Better Work And Global Governance, Paul Alois

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a case study of Better Work, a program run by the International Labor Organization and the International Finance Corporation. It aims to improve working conditions and productivity in the apparel industry. The purpose of this case study is to examine the role that international organizations can play in global governance. The research presented here comes from interviews, document analysis, and an examination of quantitative data on factories’ working conditions. In-person interviews were conducted in the United States, Switzerland, Vietnam, and Indonesia; many phone interviews took place with individuals in other countries. Both publicly available documents and internal …

The Impact Of Modality Expectancy On Memory Accuracy For Brand Names, Daniel Rubin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

It is proposed that an individual’s expectations regarding the modality by which to-be-remembered brand names will be communicated in the future can impact memory accuracy for those brand names. Specifically, we hypothesize that the likelihood of malapropistic errors (i.e., false recognition of phonetically similar brand names) increases with greater attention to phonemic codes relative to orthographic codes. Attention to these memorial representations is driven by expectations as to whether retrieval will be written or spoken. When visually presented with brand names, those expecting text-based retrieval pay relatively greater attention to the visual forms or orthographies of brand names, as this …

Earnings Management And Bargain Purchase Gains, Yan Yan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of two chapters that investigate earnings management through the recognition of bargain purchase gains in the banking industry and in other industries.

Chapter 1 In business acquisitions where the fair value of net assets acquired exceeds the consideration paid, acquiring firms recognize bargain purchase gains under ASC 805. The determination of the fair value of net assets at date of acquisition gives acquiring management considerable flexibility in judgments. In this chapter, I focus on bargain purchase acquisitions in the banking industry, and find that acquirer utilizes bargain purchase gains to avoid negative earnings and earnings decline. The …

Fashioning Desire At B. Altman & Co.: Ethics And Consumer Culture In Early Department Stores, Tessa Maffucci

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

We live in an age of fast fashion. Clothing is produced in greater volumes than ever before and the lifecycle of each garment keeps getting shorter and shorter. Many items are manufactured to be worn only one time and then thrown away—as disposable as a cup of coffee. There is much to be learned about our current fashion ecosystem by looking into the past. Beyond the garments themselves we must understand the larger historical and sociological context in which these articles of clothing were produced. How does the shopping environment shape the buying habits and fashion trends of an era? …

Effects Of Serveware Materiality On Food Perceptions, Consumption, And Waste, Sara Williamson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Three lab studies and three field studies indicate that food waste and consumption is influenced by serveware disposability. Studies indicate that consumers waste more food when eating with disposable plates and consume more food when eating with permanent plates. The effect persists whether participants choose their own type and quantity of food or are given the same amount of food, whether they are responsible for plate disposal or not, and whether the serveware is touched/held or not. Process level support is provided via an IAT test to explain this effect as a perceptual readiness to dispose of food when on …

Hunting For Financial Literacy, Georgia Sozou

Theses and Dissertations

This paper summarizes and explores the results of a survey conducted at Hunter College of the City University of New York that surveys 211 students. It examines the relationships between the students’ individual characteristics, previous personal finance education and the levels of financial literacy of the Hunter College population.

Reversing The Realities Of Mass Incarceration: The Role Of American Business, Jeremy Travis

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Electric Car-Sharing: Is It Possible In New York City?, Tomas Lopez-Pumarejo

Publications and Research

This paper examines the possibility of establishing an electric car-sharing program in New York, of the type that the French firm Bolloré articulated in France (Autolib) and in Indianapolis (Blue-Indy). It examines the current role of electric vehicles (EVs) in the global automobile industry. It explores how New York State and City policies could work in favor or against the establishment of a car-sharing program. It presents the opinions of energy and sustainability experts on electricity supply. Finally, this paper considers how an electric car-sharing system could fit into the ongoing reconfiguration of New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority.

Symptomatic Leadership: The Impact Of Changing Demographics On Global Business, Linda L. Ridley

Publications and Research

The past several decades have displayed a focus on diversity in the workplace throughout the corporate environment. Questions remain: has the effort been at all impactful – or, due to its symbolic nature, has it only been a distraction? What behaviors would have been better emphasized to achieve full participation and opportunity by all actors in a firm?

Considerable research has revealed that attempts at diversity are clumsy at best; and spurious at worst. [i] The challenge for firms has been to develop a “business case” for why those contributing groups represented by women and people of color should be …

The New Requirements Relating To Going Concern Evaluation And Disclosure Provide A Critical Improvement To The Financial Statements Taken As A Whole, Achraf A. Seyam, Sharon Brickman

Publications and Research

The going concern principle assumes that an entity will continue to exist into the future. This assumption implies that the entity will not be compelled to end their operations, liquidate their assets, or go into bankruptcy. It is an integral assumption in financial statements since it allows for the deferral of recognition of certain expenses until a period of time into the future, when the company is still assumed to exist. Members of management, as well as financial statement auditors, are required to identify signs that could indicate that an entity will not be able to continue their operations into …

Labor Market Integration Of New Immigrants In Spain, Núria Rodríguez-Planas, Natalia Nollenberger

Publications and Research

Immigrants’ employment status has worsened during the Great Recession in Spain.How much of this worsening is due to the recession, and how much to a composition effect? Using Spanish Labor Force Survey data from 2000 through 2011,we compare the employment trajectories of different cohorts of immigrants and natives and find that those who arrived before the 2008 recession had little trouble finding work immediately. In contrast, those who arrived after 2008 struggled to find work as Spanish unemployment rates skyrocketed. In addition, although many immigrants who arrived in Spain between 2000 and 2007 were able to find work and eventually …