Business Commons^™

Towards Understanding Entrepreneurship’S Role In Our Common Future: Essays From The Sustainability-Entrepreneurship Nexus, Kiven Pierre

Dissertations - ALL

The purpose of this dissertation is to facilitate a better understanding of the relationship between entrepreneurship and attainment of sustainable development. Drawing on prior work, I present three related essays that together provide both an evaluation and extension of research at the intersection of the entrepreneurship and sustainable development concepts – herein referred to as the Sustainability-Entrepreneurship Nexus. In addition, the findings from these essays provide some interesting research opportunities for management and entrepreneurship scholars alike.

Essay 1 provides a literature review of extant research within the S-E Nexus. Focusing on the composition of conceptual and empirical articles, and the …

Voluntary Adoption Of Internal Audit By Nasdaq Firms And Its Impact On Financial Reporting, Omar Watts

Dissertations - ALL

While regulators recognize internal audit as an important governance function, the recent rejection by managers of NASDAQ firms of a proposal that would require NASDAQ listed firms to have an internal audit function indicates that management may not have the same regard for internal audit and may be unclear regarding internal audit’s value. Using hand-collected data for a sample of firms that have and have not voluntarily adopted an internal audit function, I run regressions to identify the impact of internal audit adoption on financial reporting and audit fees. I also identify the factors that drive the adoption decision. I …

Business Failure And Entrepreneurship: Three Essays On The Effects Of The Cost Of Failure, Chong Kyoon Lee

Dissertations - ALL

When entrepreneurs encounter business failure, they have to bear the financial, emotional, and social cost of failure. Prior research on the effects of these costs has focused mainly on entrepreneurial exit context or on the quantity of new firms. Moreover, these studies suggest to policy makers to establish institutions to lower the costs of failure with the aim of increasing entrepreneurial activities. However, this dissertation seeks to improve our understanding by providing more extensive and fine-grained assessments of the effects of the cost of business failure in entrepreneurship contexts. The first essay in this dissertation conducts a systematic review regarding …

Essays In Corporate Finance, Lea H. Stern

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation consists of three chapters in corporate finance and private equity. Chapter 1, “Incentives of Private Equity General Partners from Future Fundraising”, co-authored with Ji-Woong Chung, Berk Sensoy and Michael Weisbach, studies the incentives of private equity general partners (GPs). Lifetime incomes of GPs are affected by their current funds’ performance not only directly, through carried interest profit-sharing provisions, but also indirectly by the effect of the current fund’s performance on GP’s abilities to raise capital for future funds. In the context of a rational learning model, which we show better matches the empirical relations between future fundraising and …

Heterogeneity In Institutional Context And Its Impact On Initial Public Offerings And Corporate Social Responsibility, Gokce Serdar

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation investigates the impact of institutional heterogeneity, which arises due to variations in institutional context, on a market and a non-market transaction. It draws from institutional theory and organizational institutionalism, and contributes to organization theory, corporate social responsibility, gender, and initial public offering literatures. In the two chapters that make up this dissertation, I theorize and empirically show that the institutional context varies not only between countries or groups of countries, but also domestically; and this variation has a statistically significant and economically meaningful impact on organizations. In the first chapter of this dissertation I focus on a market …

Trading Dynamics In A Fragmented Market, Krzysztof Herman

Dissertations - ALL

In this dissertation, we study the effect of recent regulatory and technological changes on trading

dynamics. Advances in communication and computing technologies have made millisecond

latencies as the new trading standard and have resulted in a new era of automated trading. The

introduction of Reg-NMS (Regulation National Market System, implemented in 2007) has set

strict rules for the access and removal of liquidity from the fragmented US equity market, de

facto linking the trading activities across trading venues. These transformations have not only

changed how equity markets function but also how market participants interact with the market

and among themselves. …

Total Immersion: Virtual Reality's Path To Mass Adoption, Joshua Daghir

Honors Capstone Projects - All

With the release of devices such as the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Google Daydream in 2016, virtual reality seems poised to take over the tech and media landscape. Professional estimates of the projected popularity of these devices span extremely wide ranges, and many of these predictions fall victim to a self-serving bias. The purpose of this research is to identify the variables that affect the spread of the use of virtual reality, and to analyze how the characteristics of modern virtual reality relate to these variables. The framework used to identify and assess these variables comes from Everett Rogers’s …

Preserving The Past: The Future Of Museums, Stephanie Cox

Honors Capstone Projects - All

This project explores the future of the museum industry and seeks to examine the ways in which the industry has changed to adapt to the current competitive environment. It explores the increasing competitiveness inside the industry and the growing concentration of funding that has resulted in an extremely high percentage of unfunded museums.

The strategies that can be effectively employed to ‘modernize’ a museum are examined and several living history museums that have employed these strategies are used as examples of their relative effectiveness/ineffectiveness. An analysis of how the museum industry has morphed over time to create these mega-museums which …

When The Ultimate Goal Is Running Yourself Out Of Business: The Extent To Which For-Profit Strategic Management Tools Apply To The Nonprofit Sector, Haley Mcdonnell

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Competitive advantage is important to any entity committed to success in its respective space. However, competitive advantage – and competition in general – becomes a complex concept when applied to a context like the nonprofit sector so often marked by cooperation and collaboration. This research explores the gap in availability of applicable strategic management tools, like competitive advantage frameworks, between the for-profit and nonprofit realms. This research draws on 20 interviews conducted with nonprofit executives around the United States and compares the findings with literature currently available about the nonprofit context and competitive advantage. A framework of nonprofit competitive advantage …

Intrusive Or Beneficial: Do Corporate Cell Phones Affect Workplace Obligation?, Jamie Gelberg

Honors Capstone Projects - All

As mobile devices have crept into our personal lives, they have become a staple in professional’s lives as well. While these devices have made individuals better at instant communication, does this affect work-life balance? This paper aims to address this question through literature review, two primary data sources and an overall analysis. The target audience of this paper are employees with corporate cell phones and executives making decisions on mobile phone policies for their company or organization although, anyone can read it if they are interested in how technology influences daily routines.