Business Commons^™

Information Role Of Analysts' Target Prices: Event And Intra-Day Analysis, Fan Chen

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

I have documented that target prices subsumed in downgrade recommendations are the most informative while target prices in coverage reiteration are the least informative. The First Call database enables me to extend the analysis to an intraday frequency. Conducting event studies using high frequency data, is even more critical given the advent of information technology systems has dramatically changed the landscape of stock trading. The modified approach to event study is relevant to the fast-changing trading environment in today's capital market. For upgrades, there are significant positive market-adjusted returns lasting 20 minutes; for downgrades, there are significant negative market-adjusted returns …

Institutional Distance And Location Choice Of Multinational Enterprises, Yumeng Du

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Even though scholars have realized the importance of the impact of the institutional environment on the strategy of MNEs, most of them have overlooked the first and essential step of the FDI decision location choice. In this paper, we link institutional theory and location choice literature and propose that the difference in the host country and home country`s institutional environments - institutional distance - has a negative effect on the FDI`s location choice. We also formulate hypotheses about firm specific attributes that may moderate this impact of institutional distance on location choice. Using data on Japanese companies` FDI information and …

On Stock Return Patterns Following Large Weekly Price Movements: The Case Of Hong Kong, Yue Lu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In this paper, I examine the short-run and long-run performance of the largest 49 stocks in Hong Kong market which experience weekly price movements of more than ±10% between 1999 and 2007. For both decline and increase events, one-week significant reversal is documented. But such reversal in returns diminishes very quickly within two or three weeks. From a long-run perspective, I find that large price increases are followed by negative performance, which is consistent with the overreaction hypothesis. However, large price declines are also followed by negative cumulative abnormal returns, which supports the underreaction hypothesis. Such findings indicate that the …

The Announcement Effects And The Long-Run Performances Of Convertible Bond Issuances, Wei Xie

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

We discuss several measurements of equity components in CBs and then examine the short-run announcement effects and the long-run performances surrounding CB issuances by dividing the whole sample of CBs into a debt-like portfolio, a mixed portfolio and an equity-like portfolio. At the time of the CB issuance announcements, the market reactions to different portfolios strictly follow a hierarchy predicted by the pecking order hypothesis. In the long-run subsequent to the CB issuances, the buy and hold stock returns of the equity-like portfolio significantly underperform the industry and market benchmarks and the debt-like portfolio; the operating performances of the issuers …

The Effect Of Concentrated Institutional Portfolio On Stock Returns, Hao Li Zhang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This paper examines whether stock return is related to the extent of portfolio concentration on the part of institutional fund managers. There is evidence that large firms are preferred for both concentrated and well-diversified funds. Also, a trading strategy based on concentrated ownership generates positive abnormal return. This implies that informational effect (implied in an increase in concentrated capital) has significant impacts and predictability on returns. Meanwhile, we do not find diversified ownership has predictability on future stock returns.

The Effects Of Patent Characteristics As Signals On The Growth Of Follow-On Innovations: Evidence From Chinese Patenting Activities In U.S, Wenxin Guo

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

As global trade and business activities intensified, cross-national patenting activities have been playing an increasingly important role in the process of innovation accumulation and growth. However, few studies (to my knowledge) have examined the characteristics of cross-national patents and their relationship to the accumulation and growth of innovation, especially in the context of a developing versus a developed country.
Motivated by the anecdotal evidence and `Patent Signaling Theory'(Spence, 1973), I investigate the possible influential factors on the `quality' of a US patent with a Chinese priority (thereafter `US-CN' patent) and their impact on the growth of follow-on innovation. By developing …

Three Sections Of Applications Of Co-Integration: Hedge Funds, Industry And Main Global Equity Markets, Zhongjian Lin

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Co-integration is an econometric property of time series variables. If two or more series are themselves non-stationary (unit root process), but a linear combination of them is stationary, then the series are said to be co-integrated. If there is a co-integration among some time series, we can say there is a long-run equilibrium. That is the non-stationary time series may diverge from each other in short-run, however they would arrive at equilibrium in long-run. Therefore, we can use this methodology to test the existence of commonality of some non-stationary time series. Here we apply a semi-parametric cointegration test introduced by …

Defining The International Accounting Standard Board's Governance Network, Patricia A. Rossman

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

There is little empirical research identifying the structural forces influencing the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB). The purpose of this study was to analyze the structural forces underlying international accounting regulation to contribute insights useable by the public, politicians, and scholars to conceptualize the processes of international accounting regulation. Based on stakeholder theory, legitimacy theory, and social network theory it was posited that this network is rationally created to serve certain stakeholder groups in the face of divergent stakeholder interests. The research questions for this study addressed the organizations which constituted the IASB's governance network, the professional and geographic perspectives …

The Joint Impact Of Brand Value And Advertising On Corporate Financial Performance And On Stock Return: A Case Study Of The Computer Industry, Alladin O. Ukiwe

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Firm's advertising and marketing expenditures do not always translate to measurable financial returns. Understanding brand value appropriation and financial consequences of advertising is important for more focused investments in branding and marketing. This quantitative study sought to understand the joint effects of advertising expenditure and brand value (BV) on firms return on assets (ROA) and on stock return (SR) in the computer industry. The theoretical framework of the study was the resource-based view theory that proposes that the intangible assets of a corporation have a direct relationship to its ability to sustain its competitive advantage. The key research question involved …

Powerful And Powerless Speech Styles In Employment Mock Interviews, Amanda M. Wilson

Honors Program Theses

This thesis examines powerful and powerless speech styles in employment mock interviews. A powerless speech style is defined as the use of linguistic features that have negative effects on how the speaker is perceived. Features analyzed in this study include intensifiers, hedges, and hesitations. A powerful speech style is defined as the absence of powerless linguistic features within speech. Twenty-eight examples of employment mock interviews conducted in the office of Career Services at the University of Northern Iowa were recorded for analysis in this thesis. Four common questions within the interviews were selected and the responses were transcribed and analyzed, …

Long-Term Care Insurance For The Elderly And Long-Term Care Insurance As A Viable Option For Today's Elderly, Brenda Joan Turnis

Honors Program Theses

Long-term care insurance policies have been sold for the last forty years, but many people are hesitant to invest in these plans. The purpose of this thesis is to provide a realistic view of how long-term care insurance is perceived in our society. It will also include factual evidence on the option of private long-term care insurance for the elderly. A review of research on long-term care will emphasize the coming crisis in long-term care and provide information on the viability of long-term care insurance in our communities.

Venture Capital Firm's Reputation Effect On Its Start-Up Company's Long Term Operating Performance And Survivorship, Huei Siang Yap

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In this paper, I tested the effects of three proxies for venture capitalist(VC) reputation on its invested company's long term industry-djusted operating performances (ROA , ROE), market-to-book ratio and survival time (time to delisting) in the aftermarket. VC's market share and VC's IPO share have strong and positive association with the post-IPO long-term performance metrics, and the effects are statistically significant even after accounting for self-selection bias. For long term survivorship of start-up companies, I applied hazard analysis to the IPO company's time to delisting with accelerated failure time (AFT) model as the baseline hazard function, and found that start …

The Customer Is King : Mutual Fund Relationships And Analyst Recommendations, Ping Liu

Lingnan Theses

I investigate whether the business relations between mutual funds and brokerage firms influence sell-side analyst coverage and recommendations. Using a comprehensive sample of analyst recommendations in China over the 2004-2008 period, I find that the likelihood of analyst coverage and analysts’ relative recommendations, benchmarked against consensus recommendations, are positively associated with the mutual fund business relationship. I measure the business relation by the weight of a stock in the mutual fund client’s portfolio and the commission revenue generated from the mutual fund clients. My results show that mutual funds take advantage of these optimistic recommendations by selling the stocks. I …

Anger-Expression Avoidance In Organizations In China : The Role Of Social Face, Xu Han

Lingnan Theses

Chinese people have been theorized to be particularly sensitive to social face and avoid direct discussion in conflict to promote interpersonal harmony. This study uses the theory of social face to predict Chinese employees’ strategies to avoid expressing anger with their supervisors in the organizations. Inspired by previous research, this study proposes that anger-expression avoidance is a complex behavior with different motivations and actions, leading to diverse outcomes. It identifies four strategies for the employees to avoid expressing anger with their boss; they are named outflanking (turn to the third party to resolve the anger), withdrawal (staying cool, ignoring, giving …

Relationship Conflict In Chinese State-Owned Enterprises : The Role Of Goal Interdependence, Yi Liao

Lingnan Theses

This study empirically examines the dynamics and conditions of relationship conflict between supervisors and employees in Chinese State-Owned Enterprises. It proposes that relationship conflict has significant effects on leadership in Chinese SOEs, specifically, it threatens leader-member relationships, lowers the possibility of open-minded discussion, influences leadership effectiveness and prevents future collaboration. This study uses Deutsch’s (1973) theory of goal interdependence to understand relationship conflict between supervisors and employees. Specifically, it proposes that three types of goal interdependence affect the experience of relationship conflict and its outcomes. Cooperative goals compare to competitive and independent goals can help reduce relationship conflict between supervisors …

Improving The Profitability Of Direct Marketing : A Quantile Regression Approach, Xi Zhang

Lingnan Theses

Direct marketing is to target consumers who are most likely to respond. A number of target selection methods have been employed to select potential customers. These methods either only consider the customer response probability and ignore the profit issue or assume that the estimates of profit are homogenous across customers when considering the expected amount of profit. Furthermore, the traditional analytical techniques based on ordinary least squares (OLS) regression, which focus on the average customer, cannot examine the differences of various customer groups or account for customer heterogeneity in profitability estimates. Quantile regression, instead of the point estimate for the …

"Seeing Is Believing?" : A Persuasion Knowledge Model On Attitudinal Evaluations In Advertisements, Yan Wu

Lingnan Theses

This study examines the effects of individuals' beliefs about persuasion tactics (i.e., persuasion knowledge) evoked in an advertisement on their attitudes toward the advertisement and the advertised brand. Drawing on persuasion knowledge theory, this thesis develops a conceptual model that argues how ad image incongruence, defined as an inappropriate match-up between model type (western versus local) and advertised product category (western product category versus local product category) featured in advertisements, leads to the use of persuasion knowledge, which in turn affects attitudinal evaluations. A series of experimental studies were conducted. The results suggest that individual’s use of persuasion knowledge mediates …

The Effect Of Remuneration Committee On Directors' Remuneration In Hong Kong, Shuk Fong, Ada Wong

Lingnan Theses

According to the Code on Corporate Governance Practices (CG Code), listed firms should be overseen by a board of directors that promotes the success of the firm through effective direction and supervision of the listed firm’s affairs. Remuneration paid to directors should be sufficient to attract and retain directors of a caliber required to run the company successfully, but companies should avoid paying more than is necessary. The board should appoint a remuneration committee consisting wholly or mainly of non-executive directors and chaired by a non-executive director. The role of the committee is to make recommendations to the board on …

Individual Reactions To Organizational Ethical Failures And Recovery Attempts: A Recovery Paradox?, James Caldwell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The vast majority of behavioral ethical research focuses on the antecedents of unethical behavior. Consequently, questions involving the consequences of organizational unethical behavior remain largely unanswered. Therefore, extant business ethics research largely neglects the impacts of organizational unethical behavior on individuals. Moreover, questions involving what organizations can do to correct or recover from having engaged in unethical behavior as well as individual responses to those efforts are also mostly ignored. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of unethical activity on employees and explore organizations that have failed ethically and their attempts at recovery. This study …

An Examination Of An Antecedent And Consequences Of Supervisor Morally Questionable Expediency, Rebecca Greenbaum

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Supervisor morally questionable expediency occurs when subordinates perceive that their supervisors engage in morally questionable behavior to expedite their work for self-serving purposes (Greenbaum & Folger, 2008). A supervisor's preoccupation with the bottom-line (Greenbaum, 2007; Greenbaum & Folger, 2008; Wolfe, 1988) is examined as an antecedent of morally questionable expediency. It was hypothesized that subordinates experience deontic reactions (Folger, 2001) in the form of a moral psychological contract violation. Consequently, subordinates were hypothesized to reduce performance, engage in antisocial behavior and supervisor-directed deviance. Survey data from 259 subordinate-supervisor dyads provided general support for this hypothesized model. However, post hoc analyses …

A Theory Of Complex Adaptive Inquiring Organizations: Application To Continuous Assurance Of Corporate Financial Information, John Kuhn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Drawing upon the theories of complexity and complex adaptive systems and the Singerian Inquiring System from C. West Churchman's seminal work The Design of Inquiring Systems the dissertation herein develops a systems design theory for continuous auditing systems. The dissertation consists of discussion of the two foundational theories, development of the Theory of Complex Adaptive Inquiring Organizations (CAIO) and associated design principles for a continuous auditing system supporting a CAIO, and instantiation of the CAIO theory. The instantiation consists of an agent-based model depicting the marketplace for Frontier Airlines that generates an anticipated market share used as an integral component …

Dags: An Information System Design Research Framework Supporting The Design, Development And Delivery Of More Effective Informat, Lascelles Adams

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Many IT systems fail to realize their objectives because not enough attention has been paid to the business context in which the system functions. One reason expressed--an emphasized technical focus which tend to omit business and organizational issues germane to the organization's and the system's success. When an organization's information system is in line with, and provides support for its business strategy--strategic alignment--superior business performance is often the result. Within the Requirements Engineering (RE) community there has been several attempts to develop and utilize approaches which can illuminate business and organizational informational needs. In this dissertation, the DAGS framework is …

Understanding The Antecedents And Consequences Of Sales And Use Tax Policy: Evidence From Three Studies, Amy Hageman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three separate but interrelated studies examining the antecedents and consequences of sales and use tax (SUT) policy. The first study investigates whether elements of the SUT system influence elements of economic development, and tests whether SUT rates and/or bases influence state-aggregated levels of capital expenditures and employment within the manufacturing sector from 1983-2006. Results indicate that elements of the tax base (i.e., SUT exemptions) affect these indicators of economic development, but the same relationship was not seen for SUT rates. The second study examines individual taxpayer compliance across different tax settings (i.e., the state use tax …

Increasing Referrals For Services Through Collaboration With Community Agencies, Benjamin Mohr

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

The purpose of the project is to investigate how a non-profit organization can collaborate better with other agencies to increase referrals for services. Research was conducted to determine the best avenue of increasing utilization of services in southeast Minnesota by strategic planning. A survey was conducted of 15 southeast Minnesota counties to conduct a SWOT analysis of 3 key services offered by Family Focus that are currently underutilized. Information was compiled in order to support a more comprehensive marketing plan to build relationships with county agencies and increase awareness and use of the services provided by the agency. Recommendations and …

Essays On Corporate Governance, Minhua Yang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is composed by two essays that explore the changes in corporate governance around the passage of Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) 2002. In the first essay, I examine the relation between board structure and compensation as a bargaining game between the board and the CEO. Bargaining game theories describe an endogenous process of determining the structure of director and CEO compensation. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) altered the equilibrium of power between the board and CEO by changing the monitoring role of the board. SOX essentially provides a natural experiment to test how a shock to the bargaining game alters the balance …

The Impact Of Using Situational Management Communication Styles In Intercollegiate Athletics, Glen A. Sisk

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

This study examined if supervisors within intercollegiate athletic settings have a higher tendency to use task-oriented management styles than supervisors outside of athletics. The study also assessed if athletic supervisors would have a higher tendency to adapt their leadership style based on situational factors. 214 respondents were asked to complete a five-part survey, comprised of two management communication styles, emotional intelligence, the Leadership Adaptability Style Index, and demographic information. Two additional questions raised in the study posed the same questions in relation to all respondents within athletics and those outside athletics. The results showed no significant differences in management styles …

The Intersection Of Punctuated Equilibrium And Leadership Emergence Within The Framework Of Naturalistic Decision Making, Linda Moerschell

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Punctuated equilibrium, a theory of unexpected and sudden change arising out of evolutionary biology and paleontology, has been applied to decision sciences, physics, organizational theory, and group behavior but never to leadership emergence theories. The purpose of the study was to discover how leadership emerges during a period of punctuated equilibrium, a sudden and unexpected change event, using a naturalistic decision making framework. Thus, the research question probed how leadership emergence could be theoretically modeled in a critical event. This grounded theory study was particularly unique because it drew from, and helped unify the four scientific foundations of complexity science, …

Managing Generational Diversity In The 21st Century, Matthew Joshua Rohden

Honors Program Theses

"Much has been written to describe generational differences in today's workforce, including the problems of managing ateam of multi-generational workers. These differences are often a source of conflict among employees but they could also be a source of strength." (Patota, 2007) This research is intended to show what type of generational diversity is present in the workplace in Iowa. It will be designed to show what types of conflict are common in the workplace due to generational diversity. Another aspect is the perception of each generation towards the other generations which will also be covered by this research. This information …

Personal Financial Knowledge Of College Students, Adam Moehn

Honors Program Theses

This research is about looking at what affects the personal financial knowledge and behaviors of college students. Primarily this research is focused on the effects of taking a personal financial course by answering the following questions.

- Does taking a personal finance course increase personal financial knowledge?

- Does taking a personal finance course improve financial behaviors?

- Does an increase in personal financial knowledge improve financial behaviors?

The answers to these questions will help to determine how important personal finance courses and personal financial knowledge are. This research will also look at other areas which may affect personal financial …

The Financial Fiasco: What Started It And How Long Will It Last?, Jodi Sweeney

Honors Program Theses

Throughout my college career, I have been able to watch something quite phenomenal unfold within my fields of study, real estate and finance. In the fall of 2005, the real estate market was still hot and booming. As the months and years have gone on, something happened that very few saw coming: A financial crisis that caused such turmoil Wall Street as we knew it will be dramatically changed. What caused this inevitable downturn? How much damage will it cause before it stops? What changes are needed to bring an end to this financial predicament? After thoroughly analyzing the critical …