Business Commons^™

World Food Crisis: Imperfect Markets Starving Development, A Decomposition Of Recent Food Price Increases, Christine Costello

College of Business: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The recent decade has experienced two rather substantial food price spikes. This thesis sets out to provide an in-depth look at the recent food price increases by achieving two goals: assessing the forces driving food prices, and determining the magnitude of those forces. These goals are reached by reviewing selected rhetoric on the recent food price increases, analyzing case studies, and lastly determining our modeling capabilities in decomposing food price changes. Additionally, this thesis will serve as a tool for stakeholder's to better address critical policy issues surrounding food, agriculture, and energy policies.

Adviser: Hendrik Van Den Berg

Interorganizational Knowledge Transfer Through Corporate Venture Investment, Taewan Kim

College of Business: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

A single research question motivated this dissertation: How does corporate venture capital investment by a parent firm affect knowledge transfer from the start-up? In answering this question I employed two theoretical foundations. First, drawing on the concept of distant search, I argue that search for external knowledge through CVC investment provides a parent firm with an opportunity to source external knowledge from the start-up. Second, building upon literature on knowledge transfer, I suggest that types of CVC structure facilitate external knowledge transferred from the start-up to a parent firm. Finally, I posit that knowledge attribute of the parent firm improves …

A Longitudinal Examination Of The Relationship Between Corporate Financial Performance And The Corporate Persona Revealed In The Annual Report, Samuel A. Nelson

College of Business: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This research examines the relationship between organizational financial performance and the levels of charisma and optimism revealed in the annual report. Hypotheses were developed based on the meta-theory of the organization as a social actor and previous empirical results regarding the relationship between organizational financial performance and the constructs of charisma and optimism. Based on previous research it was hypothesized that organizational financial performance would be positively related to charisma and optimism at the within-firm and between-firm levels of analysis. A content analysis of annual reports was performed and financial performance was collected for each company in the study for …

Team Collaboration In Virtual Worlds: The Role Of Task Complexity, Parichart Sattayanuwat

College of Business: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Virtual worlds are three-dimensional, computer-generated worlds where team collaboration can be facilitated through the use of shared virtual space and mediated using avatars. In this study, we examined the effect of task complexity on team collaboration. We used a puzzle game in Second Life as the collaborative task and manipulated task component complexity by varying the number of pieces in the puzzle. We hypothesized that task complexity would influence team trust, team process satisfaction, and one‘s attraction to the team in virtual team collaboration. The experimental results indicate that task complexity has significant effects on team trust and team process …

The Effect Of Tax Increment Financing On Spillovers And School District Revenue, Jennifer A. Bossard

College of Business: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Over the years the urban development financing tool known as Tax Increment Finance (TIF) has been a controversial topic as it relates to fiscal impacts on school districts. This study addresses an important question related to this issue. Does TIF affect non-TIF district property value within the school district? The question is explored by developing a theoretical model that describes the relationship between TIF and school finance and estimating an empirical model that tests the hypotheses stemming from the theoretical model. Although the results are mixed, there is some evidence that TIF does affect non-TIF district property value in the …

Industrial Diversity And Economic Performance: A Spatial Analysis, Hoa Phu Duy Tran

College of Business: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This study examines the linkage between industrial diversity and economic growth in the 48 contiguous states of the United States. The period of analysis is 1992 through 2009. Five diversity indices are considered and economic growth is measured as the growth rate of nonfarm earnings. Other variables thought to influence economic growth are included in the analysis. They are the growth rate of nonfarm employment, capital, and farm earnings. Tests for the endogeneity of variables are conducted and the need for instrumental variable estimation methods is demonstrated.

First, I consider multivariate model that relates nonfarm earnings growth to the diversity …

Three Essays On Fdi In China, Mingming Pan

College of Business: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) has contributed a great deal to China’s extraordinary growth by injecting capital into the economy, creating jobs, transferring technology and knowledge, enhancing trade, bringing in competition for local enterprises, improving the quality of local labor and intermediate goods suppliers, and connecting China’s gradually opening economy to the global market. For over a decade, China has been the second largest recipient of inward FDI in the world behind the United States. In 2009, China received $95 billion, which is 8.5% of the world’s total. However, the large amount of inward FDI has been unevenly distributed across Chinese …

Becoming A Firm: An Investigation Of How One-Person Enterprises Construct The Problem Of Becoming An Employer, Ronda M. Smith Nelson

College of Business: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This study draws on Coase’s (1937) Theory of the Firm, that suggests a firm exists only after it has employees and Penrose’s (1959) Theory of the Growth of the Firm which suggests human resources are a critical asset to the firm as a means to better understand the issue of job creation in the United States especially among one-person enterprises (OPEs). From the perspective of entrepreneurial cognition, and in the context of ill-defined problems (Abelson & Levi.1985) a survey was conducted to better understand the Becoming an Employer Problem (BEP) as it is perceived by OPEs. A measure of the …

Essays On International Trade And Foreign Direct Investment, Wanasin Sattayanuwat

College of Business: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation comprises three separate essays on international trade and foreign direct investment. We present the gravity model with Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood (PPML) estimation to investigate the effect of transportation costs on trade, the effect of RTAs on intra- and extra-regional trade in developing RTAs and the role of institutions on FDI in ASEAN.

The second chapter is a review of the log of gravity model and econometric specification. PPML approach applied to the gravity model is initially suggested Silva and Tenreyro (2006). They have shown that the log-normal gravity equation suffers from three problems: the bias created by the …

The Impact Of Supply Chain Innovation On Organizational Performance: An Empirical Study In The Health Care Organization, Donhee Lee

College of Business: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Supply chain management (SCM) has drawn significant attention in the health care industry in recent years because of its significant impact on hospital performance and quality of care. Since SCM is a complex system that interfaces with many different dimensions within a hospital and with suppliers, organizations need to first innovate their business processes while also considering their suppliers’ processes to accomplish effective SCM. Supply chain (SC) innovation helps organizations achieve efficiency and quality management practices for new customer value creation, which is expected to result in improved organizational performance.

This study examines the effects of innovation leadership, SC innovation, …