Business Commons^™

Virtue-Driven Leadership: Powering Excellence In Organizations, Joseph Scherrer

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I seek to answer the question “What makes a good leader?” I approach this question systematically, starting in Chapter 1 by asking “What is Leadership?” In attempting to formulate a response, I find that the concept is slipperier than it first appears and difficult to pin down. All the same, I construct a thematic, contextually pertinent definition that provides reasonable precision for the purposes of this study. In Chapter 2, I present a representative survey of the social-scientific academic literature in order to establish the prospect that a philosophy of virtuous leadership can be empirically validated in …

Edgar 10x Filings’ Sentiment And Predicting A Firm’S Stock Return, James Horn

Olin Business School Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research paper investigates the role of managerial sentiment in predicting future stockreturns by constructing firm characteristics based on sentiment words. Through the analysis of all Securities and Exchange filings submitted by publicly traded companies from 2001 to 2022, this study demonstrates that certain sentiment words provide a robust and significant cross-sectional predictor of future monthly stock returns. The paper utilizes a unique ap- proach by leveraging a long time frame and analyzing all available filings. This allows for a comprehensive analysis of the impact of managerial sentiment on stock returns, highlighting the importance of sentiment analysis in financial markets.

On The Value Of Operational Flexibility In Anheuser Busch Inbev’S Trailer Loading And Shipment Problem: Data-Driven Approaches And Reinforcement Learning, Yunsi Yang

Olin Business School Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This paper introduces the Anheuser Busch Inbev (ABI)'s trailer shipment problem and suggests data-analytics methodologies to deal with it. The problem is to determine the proper weight of products loaded on a trailer (a transporting container) owned by ABI, which is delivered by a tractor (a motor vehicle) owned by third-party logistics (3PL) providers. ABI must meet a regulation that restricts the gross weight of the truck on the road. However, the challenge comes from the fact that the tractor weight is uncertain and unknown to ABI when it determines the load size on the trailer. We suggest machine learning-based …

Examination Of The Role Of Peer Effect On Board Diversity Among Us-Listed Companies, Liyang Wang

Olin Business School Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Traditionally, government mandates and investor activism influence board diversity in the United States. This study proposes peer effects as a third important determinant of board diversity. The results suggest that companies consider the progress made by their peers when deciding their own diversity. Interestingly, companies only match the performance of their peers and will spend comparable efforts in improving their diversity according to their peer's progress. Meanwhile, the peer effect has grown stronger in recent years, and companies are more likely to track the performance of mid-level peers. The results provide evidence on a new channel that can affect board …

The Application Of Dynamic Models In Operations Management, Yunzhe Qiu

Olin Business School Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The dynamic program is a principal method for analyzing stochastic optimization problems. This dissertation studies three operations management problems that arise in the dynamic environment. The principal motivation behind these comes from the applicability in three areas: the agricultural supply chain, the container shipping industry, and supply chain financing. In the first chapter, we consider the hog production industry, where the hog raising farm should decide the selling strategy among several selling options. The farm also faces the uncertain yield of different weights of hogs and spot price volatility from other interactive markets. In the second chapter, we formulate a …

Topics In International Finance, Jonathan Lennon Hsu

Olin Business School Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on two main unanswered questions that lie at the intersection between international financing, international trade, and supply chains. Firstly, to what extent can international trade networks offer borrowing opportunities for firms that face significant barriers in traditional financing markets? Second, what are the potential impacts of financial globalization on firms’ borrowing and extension of trade credit?

The first chapter seeks to answer the first research question listed above: to what extentcan international trade networks offer borrowing opportunities for firms that face significant barriers in traditional financing markets? I show that firms use their trade flows to borrow …

Manage Your Money Wisely: How Consumers And Marketers Can Effectively Communicate Money Issues, Alexander Park

Olin Business School Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Consumers and marketers find it challenging to communicate money matters. For example, consumers experience discomfort and uneasiness when discussing financial issues with their social relationships. Firms often receive backlash when sharing their good financial deeds (e.g., charitable efforts) with consumers. Because financial matters can be a sensitive topic, in my research, I explore the difficulties consumers and marketers experience when communicating money issues and how they can better navigate these problems.In Chapter One, I investigate a particularly uneasy interaction that consumers often face with their friends and acquaintances: the need to ask for money back. Seven fully preregistered studies (N …

Essays On Customer Relationship Management, Nan Zhao

Olin Business School Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The general topic of my dissertation is customer relationship management. Specifically, I use quasi-experimental causal inference methods, randomized field experiments, and machine learning methods to study and measure consumer response to co-branded credit cards and email communications promoting subscriptions.

In Chapter 1, “The Impact of Co-branded Credit Card Adoption on Customer Loyalty”, we estimate the treatment effects of adopting a co-branded credit card on spending and loyalty behaviors using a comprehensive longitudinal dataset from a North American airline. Our data set contained detailed records of both airline credit card adopters and non-adopters, including their travel and loyalty program activities over …

The Effect Of Off-Site Examination: A Natural Experiment After Covid-19, Whan Kyu Shin

Olin Business School Electronic Theses and Dissertations

I examine the effectiveness of off-site bank examinations by using the natural experiment during COVID-19. Exploiting the difference in the amount of soft information and in the effect of the change to off-site examination between the banks far from the supervisory field office and those near the field office, I find that distant banks increase asset risk regarding RWA to asset ratio and become less conservative in anticipating or preparing for future losses from loan portfolios. I also show that distant banks that adjust the loan portfolio to be riskier are less profitable, and the effect is prominent among the …

Performance Of Actively Managed Exchange Traded Funds, Xuan None Li

Olin Business School Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Investors who want access to active asset management can choose to invest in actively managed exchange traded funds (AMETFs), actively managed non-transparent ETFs (ANETFs) or mutual funds. Three major differences of AMETFs, ANETFs and mutual funds are the venues funds are traded on, tax liabilities, and disclosure requirements. This paper exploits the 2019 SEC rulings on ETFs to study empirically which fund structure for active asset management delivers the best return performance and explores what are the driving forces behind the superior performance. I find that for equity funds, AMETFs is associated with 0.158% lower monthly returns than mutual fund, …

The Efficacy Of A Regime-Switching Asset Pricing Model Conditioned On Market Volatility, David Baines

Olin Business School Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In an attempt to explain stock prices in a simple and articulate manner, researchers in asset pricing have long employed a “one model fits all prices over time” approach. In this thesis, a regime-switching linear asset pricing model, conditioned on trailing market volatility, is introduced in an attempt to map specific linear model specifications to specific macroeconomicconditions which are quantifiable and observable at t. Called the Time-Robust Iterative Adaptive LASSO (TRIAL) model, this model computes the expected return more efficiently out-of-sample than a benchmark model which does not use volatility-defined regimes, yielding a risk-adjusted mean monthly return of 1.36%, compared …

Optimization And Information Problems In Operations, Puping Jiang

Olin Business School Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The main purpose of this dissertation is to study the optimization problems and the value of information in various commercial settings, especially in the emerging platform economy.

Chapter 1, “Data-Driven Asset Selling”. Motivated by online asset selling marketplace business (e.g., used cars and real estate), we formulate a data-driven asset selling dynamic pricing framework which utilizes platforms’ access to customers’ online behavioral data. With mild assumptions on the demand model, careful characterization of the problem structure shows that the model admits some ideal properties that facilitate our regret analysis under our dynamic programming setting. Instead of studying the policy performance …

Essays In Financial Intermediation, John Michael Dooley

Olin Business School Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation focuses on two broad questions. First, how does access to income affect the credit decisions of households? Second, how do individuals affect the behavior of financial institutions and financial contract terms?

In Chapter 1 with Emily Gallagher, we provide the first study of how access to plasma donation as a source of discretionary income affects households financially. In the United States, households donate plasma for compensation at a higher rate than they use payday, auto-title, rent-to-own, or pawn loans. Plasma donors are young, poorly educated, and financially vulnerable with limited access to households. We use the dramatic growth …

Essays In Behavioral Corporate Finance, Corporate Governance, And Higher Purpose, Kingsley Wabara

Olin Business School Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Does individual financial risk-taking behavior indeed vary by gender? If yes, how exactly? Moreover, what happens when individuals with differential tendencies (e.g., risk-taking, sense of higher purpose, et cetera) come together in small groups such as the corporate board to decide on financial risk-taking or conduct intense board oversight? What role does group or board structure play in all of these? In effect, how does the within-group power and influence asymmetry affect the manifestation of the individual tendencies in boards’ decisions, corporate behavior, and financial outcomes? The lack of conclusive answers to these questions is at the core of several …

Origin Of Value Creation: The Role Of Delayed Intuition In Entrepreneurial Problem Framing, Chan Hyung Park

Olin Business School Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Highly successful entrepreneurial ventures often result from solving problems that have not been solved before (i.e., entrepreneurial problems). The problem-solving and entrepreneurship literatures indicate that individuals need to develop novel problem frames—uncommon interpretations of observable needs or pain points (i.e., symptoms) signaling the problems—to create solutions that other people would not typically think of and generate unique value that is key to entrepreneurial success. However, developing novel frames of entrepreneurial problems is difficult for two reasons. The symptoms of the problems are ambiguous and unstructured, and the structured information to find the right frame of problems is costly to acquire. …

Supply Chain Management Under Technology Innovation And Pandemic, Xiaoyu Wang

Olin Business School Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The main purpose of this dissertation is to study supply chain issues under the challenge of technology innovation and pandemic; and to identify the implications for individuals and businesses.

In Chapter 1, ``Consumer Privacy in Online Retail Supply Chains", we study the implications of newly adopted privacy policies such as the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) for online retail supply chains consisting of a retailer and a supplier. Exploitation of consumer data allows online retailers to enhance services provided to consumers, but at the risk of causing unintended privacy issues. There has been debate about whether to devise regulation policies …

Times Of Uncertainty: The Psychological And Behavioral Impact Of Employment Uncertainty On Furloughed Workers And The Moderating Effect Of Work Orientation, Jack Haoyue Zhang

Olin Business School Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Although furloughs have been used by organizations for some time, their use increased sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic. They differ from layoffs in the uncertainty they involve around the employment relationship. However, the phenomenon has received little attention from research on involuntary job loss, and the impact of the employment uncertainty it involves is largely unknown. Furthermore, the moderating factors that differentiate the impacts across employee populations are also unclear. In this dissertation I report a mixed-method field study examining the impact of employment uncertainty on furloughed workers and the moderating role by their work orientation. To guide the development …

Refund Psychology, Tianjiao Yu

Olin Business School Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Consumers frequently receive refunds from prior purchases. In this research, I examine if money refunded from previous purchases is more likely to be spent than money that does not go through a refund process. Across eight fully pre-registered studies, I test how consumers’ willingness to spend depends on the transaction history of their money. I find that money refunded from a previous purchase is more likely to be spent on items unrelated to that purchase than non-refunded money that is otherwise identical in its source. I suggest that this pattern arises because the refunded money is earmarked as “spending money” …