Business Commons^™

Sarbanes-Oxley Act Section 404 And Filing Status, Yanwen Wang

Honors Theses and Capstones

This thesis focuses on Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which is a United States federal law that sets new or expanded requirements for all U.S. public companies. Section 404 aims to ensure that all public companies have effective internal controls. Section 404 is not applied uniformly across different filers. This thesis focuses on the analyses of small companies as these companies, i.e. non-accelerated filers, got exemption from Section 404 (b), which requires a publicly-held company’s auditor to attest to, and report on, management’s assessment of its internal controls. Because this exemption allows non-accelerated filers to avoid significant compliance cost, the purpose of the …

State Funding And Its Impact On University Funding, Andrew Wolfgang Doppstadt

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

Ipo Ready? Illuminating The Dark Box Of Private Equity, Tyler Gregory Cornellier

Honors Theses and Capstones

The use of public equity data can help combat the challenges private equity funds currently face regarding data availability. The goal is to create a model to provide guidance to both investors and entrepreneurs in the decision-making process. The data gathered would provide insight on how close a private company is to a successful Initial Public Offering (IPO). The idea is that a model, showing the average financial metrics of companies within certain industries during an IPO, can provide new perceptiveness as to how the private company is performing.

Assessing Financial Reporting Quality Of Early Stage Private Companies, Devereux D. Evans

Honors Theses and Capstones

There are a variety of widely accepted methods that are used in order to evaluate the financial positioning of companies that are traded on stock exchanges. However, these methods that are common in the public markets do not suffice for assessing companies that are privately held. Attempting to devise an intrinsic value using anticipated cash flows is ineffective given that most companies are pre-revenue. Deriving a value based off of assets held is also inaccurate given that a young company will be in the process of capitalizing itself and more of its assets cannot be represented on a balance sheet, …

Indian Microfinance Sector: A Case Study, Sean P. Gillon

Honors Theses and Capstones

In developing areas of the world with very little economic structure, many activities are not monetized. In other words, money is not used to carry out these tasks because the people in these areas do not have the expendable funds required. In order to combat this problem, micro financing has become increasingly more apparent in these areas of distress. Microfinance is an economic development strategy that allows for those in need to borrow actual money in order to start a business, go to school, or even gain access to everyday living requirements. Microfinance has made tremendous strides over the years, …

Predicting Yelp Food Establishment Ratings Based On Business Attributes, Peter Mark Shellenberger Jr.

Honors Theses and Capstones

Social networking and business review sites play an integral role in the buying behavior of the modern consumer. An individual with access to the internet may observe millions of reviews on almost every type of product and service on the market. Websites such as Angie’s List, Facebook, Yellow Pages, and Yelp all facilitate this process, acting as crowd-sourced hubs for review data. This has major implications for the modern business, as past research shows that reviews and ratings play a direct role on the demand a business receives. With the vast dissemination of review data to the potential buyer market, …

An Organizational Attachment Model: Lmx-Social Comparison, Job Embeddedness And Psychological Ownership, Saul R. Valdiviezo

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This study investigates the relationship between employees' comparisons of relationship quality with their leader (LMXSC) and attitudinal workplace outcomes. Building on the theoretical principle of LMXSC, I postulate that job embeddedness mediates the relationship between perceived relationship quality and psychological ownership. Additionally, I examine the effects of overall organizational justice to understand how environmental variables impact our attachment model. Our results indicate that LMXSC is an important determinant of psychological ownership and job satisfaction and that job embeddedness mediates these relationships. I examine the proposed model with 471 employees from 37 organizations. The results show partial support for the proposed …

Three Essays On Dynamic Capabilities In The Context Of Innovation, Networks And Entrepreneurship, Ken (Yongjian) Chen

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

A recent study by McKinsey & Company (Benson-Armer, Otto and Webster 2015) found that half the executives they survey rate capability building as one of their firms’ top three priorities. This research also concludes that building capabilities in the domains of strategic marketing and entrepreneurship represents an urgent task in capability management. The importance of capability development and management is also recognized by leading strategic marketing and entrepreneurship scholars (e.g. Moorman and Day 2016; Day and Schoemaker 2016; Teece 2012). These authors suggest that managers demand new ways to help firms compete in today’s fast-changing environment. Dynamic capabilities are considered …

Three Essays In Green Product Development: Co-Opetition, Sustainability, And Regulations, Maryam Hafezi

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Pollution, global warming, ozone depletion and the greenhouse effect have brought environmental issues to the fore. As a result, consumers, governments and NGOs have pressured firms to develop green products. Green products are those “that strive to protect or enhance the natural environment by conserving energy and/or resources and reducing or eliminating use of toxic agents, pollution, and waste’’. Pressures from those stakeholders are not the only reasons for firms to become involved in green product development. Other reasons include the opportunities for accessing new markets, enhancing competitive advantages, gaining cost efficiency, and building a better reputation.

This dissertation includes …

Two Essays On Marketing Capabilities, Hamed Mehrabi

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

A critical decision for any firm involves allocating investment to different types of marketing activities. One argument is that firms should invest resources in both explorative and exploitative activities to develop ambidexterity. Considering the extensive theoretical and practical implications of ambidexterity, several research gaps exist in this area provide opportunities for both theoretical and practical contributions. In this dissertation, I identify and explore three important research opportunities.

First, based on one argument regarding ambidexterity, firms should pursue exploration and exploitation in a balanced manner. This is even though there is little evidence confirming that being ‘out of balance’ actually hurts …

Three Essays On Liquidity In Modern Markets, Konstantin Sokolov

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Recent technological advancements have challenged financial markets. Academic researchers, regulators and market participants voice concerns that modern markets bear the negative externalities of such advancements. Specifically, they are concerned that today’s markets are becoming more fragile and unfair to less sophisticated traders. This work employs empirical methodology to test whether these concerns are justified. This thesis contains three essays:

The first essay studies whether modern markets become less liquid during intraday extreme price movements (EPMs). When a price moves in a certain direction, liquidity providers face two opposing incentives. The first incentive is to stay in the market to accumulate …

Three Essays On Banking, Capital Market Frictions And Corporate Payout Policy, Hosein Nooriaan

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

The prevalence of financial market frictions is far from uncommon. Between 1970 and 2011, Laeven & Valencia (2012) identify 147 banking crises, along with 218 episodes of currency crises, and 66 episodes of sovereign debt default. Thus, understanding a firm’s behavior in the presence of financial crisis is an important issue for future financial research. My dissertation explores corporate payout and liquidity policy either during a financial market crisis, or in anticipation of a financial market crisis.

In the first essay, “Capital Market Friction and Corporate Payout Policy”, I focus on the role of supply of capital on corporate payout …

Three Essays On Corporate Governance And Politically Connected Firms, Justin Mindzak

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

In this dissertation three essays on corporate governance and politically connected firms are presented. The first essay “Interlocked Boards of Directors, Corporate Governance and Earnings Quality” studies the effects of interlocked boards of directors on voluntary governance disclosures, governance practices and earnings quality. The Canadian environment, where director interlocks are prevalent, is examined. A checklist of twenty voluntary disclosure measures from proxy statements is developed and a direct measure of interlocking directorships is employed. It is found that interlocked boards of directors are negatively associated with voluntary governance disclosures and positively associated with earnings quality. From an accounting perspective, greater …

Ambivalent But Not Indifferent: Consumer Motivations To Seek Versus Avoid Professional Advice, David Lewis

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

An under-explored dimension of consumer decision-making is the motivation for seeking professional advice. While extant research in marketing describes some antecedents to seeking advice (e.g. complexity, risk), it is not known how these factors combine to influence consumer intentions to seek advice. Given the general consumer reluctance to obtain professional advice, the current research examines the factors that influence the motivations to seek advice. Professional financial advice is selected as the empirical context to investigate this issue.

The first of two studies involved exploratory qualitative research and revealed the factors affecting the motivation to seek advice. It was observed that …

An Information Theoretic Investigation Of Complex Adaptive Supply Networks With Organizational Topologies, Joshua V. Rodewald

Theses and Dissertations

Supply networks exist throughout society in manufacturing and knowledge-intensive industries as well as many service industries. Organizations have been noted to behave as complex adaptive systems or information supply networks with both formal and informal structures. Thoroughly understanding supply network structure and behavior are critical to managing such organizations effectively, but their properties of complex adaptive systems make them more difficult to analyze and assess, forcing researchers to rely on unrealistic data or assumptions of behavior. This research proposes an information theoretic methodology to discover such complex network structures and dynamics while overcoming the difficulties historically associated with their study. …

A Phenomenological Inquiry Into The Perceptions Of E-Leaders On Virtual Team Leadership, Deann Chriestenson

All Theses And Dissertations

Corporations are facing a more complex and challenging global business environment, and many have implemented a virtual workforce to maintain their competitive advantage through maximizing productivity, reducing product time to market, and cost reduction. The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to gain a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of virtual leadership, as seen through the eyes of study participants (Merriam, 2009). Participants included fifteen Fortune 500 virtual team leaders who had prior experience leading traditional co-located teams. Data collected through telephone interviews were transcribed verbatim and NVivo 11 assisted in the coding, analyses, and presentation. The data analysis …

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 …

The Impact Of Authentic Leadership Behavior On Employee Engagement And Organizational Ethical Culture In Nigeria, Adayehi B. Peter

Human Resource Development Theses and Dissertations

Authenticity in leadership is an old phenomenon that has recently sparked a new research interest in management and the human resource development (HRD) literature (Peus, Wesche, Streicher, Braun, & Frey, 2012). An upswing in highly publicized corporate scandals, management malfeasance, and broader societal challenges facing public and private organizations has contributed to the recent attention placed on authenticity and authentic leadership (Walumbwa, Avolio, Gardner, Wernsing, & Peterson, 2008). Authentic leadership behavior allows leaders and organizations meet the raised expectations of fairness, morality, and social responsibility held by employees and organizational stakeholders (Kiersch, 2012).

The primary purpose of this study was …

Assessing The Impact Of Csr Policy And Practice On Education Of Orphans And Vulnerable Children In Indonesia, Sri Frazee

International Commerce & Policy Theses

Indonesia was one of the first countries to implement the mandatory Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) approach. This law requires corporations to allocate part of their budget toward funding for CSR programs. When implementing CSR programs, many Indonesian corporations focus on education. This research assesses how this policy has affected education, particularly for Orphans and Vulnerable Children (OVC) who are cared for at childcare institutions. These childcare institutions include orphanages (panti) and halfway houses (rumah singgah) that provides a temporary shelter for street children. This research examines the role of the Government of Indonesia (GOI) and corporations in implementing this mandatory …

Riding The Wave: How The Philanthropic Revolution Will Impact Museums In The United States And Canada, Sarah M. Mackey

Master's Projects and Capstones

This capstone project explores the history of philanthropy from 1970 to the present, and presents a strategy for museums to leverage contemporary trends in nonprofit giving. The methods proposed in this project are specifically targeted at engaging new community leaders and the family members of legacy donors. I have researched and created an updated job description and hiring plan for a Transformational Gift Officer. This person would be responsible for identifying, cultivating, and stewarding the donor portfolio outlined in this project. The individual who will be successful in this role will be able to move past institutional silos and collaboratively …

Multi-Period Stochastic Resource Planning: Models, Algorithms And Applications, Stanislaus Simon Solomon

Dissertations

This research addresses the problem of sequential decision making in the presence of uncertainty in the professional service industry. Specifically, it considers the problem of dynamically assigning resources to tasks in a stochastic environment with both the uncertainty of resource availability due to attrition, and the uncertainty of job availability due to unknown project bid outcome. This problem is motivated by the resource planning application at the Hewlett Packard (HP) Enterprises. The challenge is to provide resource planning support over a time horizon under the influence of internal resource attrition and demand uncertainty. To ensure demand is satisfied, the external …

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 …

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

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.

Improving Employee Engagement Through The Development Of An Enterprise Performance Management System, Carlton D. Abner

Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) Projects

There is ample evidence of our health care delivery system relying heavily on value-based outcomes. The increased focus on outcomes has required health care organizations to adjust how they approach data and how they successfully implement performance management systems. These performance management systems help the organization identify, measure, and report the organization’s performance at an enterprise level using key performance indicators clearly linked to the organization’s overall strategy. As one organization began implementing an enterprise performance management system, the goal of this project was to show how participating in projects with that level of strategic impact can lead to improved …

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/

Gender Inequity Within Public Accounting, Paige Petersen

Honors Thesis

Traditionally a male-dominated field, the public accounting industry has seen recent progress in the presence and advancement of women in the profession. Today, women comprise half of accounting students, Certified Public Accountant test-takers, and employees at public accounting firms. However, women in public accounting face an invisible barrier when it comes to reaching the level of partner, where they represent only nineteen percent of partners. Uneven distribution of female representation should be of concern to public accounting firms seeking to maximize the potential of their talent pool and gain the benefits of diverse leadership. Traditional viewpoints on this issue promote …

History In Collaboration: Equalizing The Arts And The Humanities In San Francisco, Nicole C. Meldahl

Master's Projects and Capstones

Historically, there has been a critical imbalance in the way history and preservation organizations are civically supported in comparison with the amount of funding that is available to arts organizations in the United States. To correct this imbalance in San Francisco, I propose the creation of a San Francisco Department of Culture that would place the San Francisco Arts Commission equally alongside a San Francisco History Commission within a department that absorbs responsibilities currently managed by other divisions with in city government, such as the Planning Department and the Office and Economic and Workforce Development. City government necessarily takes time …

An Analysis Of Mongolia’S Resource-Led Development: The Impact Of Foreign Direct Investment In The Extraction Industry, Belguun Bat-Erdene

Master's Theses

It has been 26 years since Mongolia transitioned to democracy. I decided to evaluate the progress of Mongolia’s development since the transition to evaluate whether the country of only 3 million people with vast land and natural resources successfully implemented policies to attain growth and societal wellbeing. In order to evaluate Mongolia’s development progress, this thesis uses FDI in Mongolian development since 1990 as a case study to examine the relationship between FDI, state development strategies, and development outcomes. My research questions encompass a series of interrelated inquiries including 1) whether human development can be achieved through extraction industries 2) …