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Uncovered Magazine: A Magazine Prototype And Business Plan, Avery Bowman

Honors Theses

Through developing a skin care magazine prototype and business plan, this thesis aims to show how a print magazine can be successful to a young audience. By studying the history and development of both magazines and skin care and focusing on today’s industries, now is the perfect time to launch a skin care magazine. Uncovered Magazine will not only focus on filling this gap, but also will aim to empower women to find beauty in their natural skin.

The Ripple Effect: ‘Training The Trainer’ On The Impact Of Body Image Through A Dance/Movement Therapy Technique, Marina Gearhart

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

This thesis describes the capstone project which was a psychoeducation and experiential workshop for fitness trainers. The workshop investigated the impact trainers’ work may have on the body image of their clients through a dance/movement therapy (DMT) technique. The aim was to enhance the trainers’ sensitivity around body image issues of their clients and to create a space for vulnerable movement conversation that may in turn lead to better mental health advocacy for their clients within the scope of ethical practice. The participants of the workshop were six white female identifying trainers ranging from 24 to 35 years of age. …

Essays On Ipo Cycles And Windows Of Opportunity, Meng Chen

Dissertations - ALL

The dissertation consists of two chapters regarding private firms financing in the capital market. The first chapter explores the long-term failure rate of private firms that issued initial public offerings (IPOs) in the public capital market. We study busted, or failed, IPOs to examine the underwriter certification hypothesis and windows of opportunity hypothesis in the new issues market. Extensive literature pointed out that time-varying characteristics of information asymmetry might induce windows of opportunity in capital market when information asymmetry is relatively low. During windows of opportunity, private firms can issue public equity with lower information costs and more favorable terms. …

Do You See What I See? Do You See Me? Disability In China: The Perceptions Of Wheelchair Users And Able Bodied Citizens, Michelle Fisher

Master's Projects and Capstones

Abstract

This paper explores the state and perception of wheelchair users in China. My research outlines various disability models by which we can measure China’s level of effectiveness at providing access and services for its disabled population. In my analysis, I largely draw the conclusion that China is evolving out of a Charity state model into one which supports the rights of Chinese citizenry. There are many good laws in place in China, but they are not being enforced effectively at this point in time. There also seems to be a class division involved in the acceptance of educated disabled …

You're On Mute - How The Shift From In-Person To Virtual Board Meetings Impacts Board Governance And Communication In Nonprofit Associations, Theresa Hurley

Master's Projects and Capstones

Because of the Covid19 pandemic meeting restrictions that started in March 2020, almost all nonprofit boards had to move to virtual board meetings. Through a literature review, expert interviews and a survey of nonprofit association Executive Directors, Chief Executive Officers and board members, this capstone explores the impact of the shift from in-person to virtual board meetings on board governance and board communication and dynamics for nonprofit associations. Some findings were positive - virtual meetings are more cost-effective, are better attended and more convenient and efficient than in-person meetings. Other findings were negative - multiple communication challenges inherent in the …

Deai In Nonprofits: Through The Lens Of Museums And Gardens, Brittany Jones

Master's Projects and Capstones

This research works to understand and identify diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion (DEAI) practices within nonprofits through the examination of museums and public gardens. Museums and public gardens provide a generous example of nonprofit organizations that must dutifully serve the communities which surround them, as well as examine internal practices and structures. As the momentum of the racial justice movement increased in 2020, following horrific tragedies in the U.S., the work around DEAI is more relevant than ever. Through this research, identification of barriers and challenges which prevent organizations from doing DEAI work is examined. This research is carried out …

The Environmental Mandate Of Heaven: Confucian Global Governance And Environmentalism In Chinese Policies, Wanchu Changliao

Master's Projects and Capstones

Environmental degradation is a contemporary issue that has gained a lot of attention in recent history for China. The developing country’s industrial revolution has led to unprecedented carbon emissions, and despite efforts to curb population growth, China’s expanding and aging population has presented the country with numerous challenges. In this essay, I examine China’s environmental issues and the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) policy decisions through the lens of Confucian role relations. Through this lens, and given the multitude of challenges China is facing, it may be argued that the PRC is acting out its role as the leader and …

The Convenience Yield Determinants Of Corn Futures, Christopher R. Delong

Doctoral Dissertations (DBA)

This paper presents an in-depth analysis of the convenience yield determinants of corn futures. The estimated spot price and convenience yield are derived from Gibson and Schwartz’s (1990) two-factor model, and a deterministic seasonal component is added to the convenience yield. Numerous potentially novel determinants are regressed against the convenience yield while controlling for the spot price. The spot price is highly significant in all univariate regressions and is the main driver of changes in convenience yield. This research confirms the theory of storage, provides conflicting results regarding net hedging pressure, shows significant results for novel determinants, and proves that …

Women Entrepreneurs In China: Dialectical Discourses, Situated Activities, And The (Re)Production Of Gender And Entrepreneurship, Zhenyu Tian

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Despite the number of women entrepreneurs on the rise globally, the business world and the identity of the entrepreneur remain to be normed masculine and male gender stereotyped. This male gender stereotyping situates women who practice entrepreneurship in disadvantages, limiting their access to resources on which they depend to make meaning of their activities and identities. This imbalanced masculine gender order also manifests in China’s economy. Women entrepreneurs in China face complex contradictions and challenges when navigating an arena that privileges men and masculinity. However, not much is known about the micro-dynamics of Chinese women’s entrepreneurial experiences in light of …

How Covid-19 Has Accelerated The Shift Towards A More Sustainable Fashion Industry, Samantha Frances Casey

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Sustainability in fast fashion is a pertinent issue as the fashion industry is one of the most environmentally damaging industries. Fashion retailers have started to integrate sustainability initiatives, but consumer preference is vital to making firms change their practices. As the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world in 2020, worldwide lockdowns exposed the fragility of the consumer-driven fast-fashion business model. This thesis will examine how COVID-19 has and will continue to impact sustainability in the fashion industry. More specifically, this thesis will examine the implications of consumer sustainability preferences brought about by the pandemic. These implications accelerate the preexisting sustainability trends …

Program Design Features Attracting Youth In Diepsloot To Urban Agriculture: Exploring Rhiza Babuyile's Tiny Farm Agri-Program, Nyasha Frank Chibanda

Capstone Collection

The COVID-19 crisis has brought to the fore the fragility of our local, national, and regional food and economic systems. Urban Agriculture (UA) is one solution to rebuilding local food system resilience and creating sustainable livelihood opportunities for the region's growing youth population. Although there is an acknowledgment of the utility of the growing number of interventions promoting youth participation in UA, research on specific program design features that attract youth participation is limited. This Capstone research aimed to determine the program design features that attract unemployed youth (18-35 years) living in Diepsloot, Johannesburg, to participate in UA.

The study …

Grassroots Talent Development At La Maestra: Understanding The Perceptions Of Leaders And Staff, Gorn Huvanandana

Dissertations

This dissertation explored the leadership and staff perceptions of talent management (TM) in the San Diego-based community health center La Maestra. The organization initiated a scheme called Grassroots Talent Development (GTD) that focuses on developing its internal talents from the ground up, including using mentorship, on-the-job training, problem-solving techniques, and mission attachment reinforcement. The distinctive use of a holistic wellness model, Circle of Care (CoC), stemming from its core mission to serve underserved populations, has not only driven how the organization functions but also how it attracts, develops, and retains a diverse pool of talents. La Maestra innovated programs for …

Farm To Boardroom: How Improving Farm Conditions Leads To Sustained And Ethical Profit, Emily Mueller

Student Theses 2015-Present

As a society evolving and innovating at a pace faster than ever before seen in human history, we find ourselves at a crossroads of dealing with planetary boundaries and improving social standards. We are met with a crisis just thirty years away; the crisis of needing to be able to effectively and sustainably feed ten billion people across the globe. The 20th century brought on a booming age for industrializing the food system in order to increase yield and thus profit. The new process was a significant breakthrough at its time, but now we must face the question of when …

Peer Interactions In Decision Making, Yijun Chen

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

The broad research topic of my dissertation is individual’s decision making in the presence of peer interactions. I focus on empirical settings where individuals are connected with others in the peer network, and through peer interactions, their decisions are interdependent. Peer network structures in terms of who is connected with whom and the mechanisms of peer interactions convey valuable information on the decision making process. I employ quantitative empirical methods to uncover the information embedded in peer networks, provide insights on the mechanisms of peer interactions, and generate peer-network based managerial implications.Chapter 1 studies how participants collaborate to compete in …

Essays On Information And Liquidity, Swaminathan Balasubramaniam

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

The 2008 financial crisis has highlighted the challenges faced by financial systems in aggregating information, ensuring coordination among various market participants and providing adequate liquidity. In this backdrop, the three chapters of the dissertation explore (i) the role of disagreement in enabling communication and trade among strategic investors (ii) how uncertainty about what others know could be exploited in preventing coordination failures (ii) pricing liquid and illiquid assets in response to unforeseen liquidity demand.When do competing traders, endowed with different pieces of information pertaining to a security payoff, exchange information before trading? The first essay shows that competing traders share …

An Exploration Of Accounting Topics Through A Series Of Case Studies, Joshua Pearson

Honors Theses

This thesis contains 12 case studies about various accounting and financial issues. The cases follow as: A Tale of Two Cities, Conceptual Overview of Assets, Excel Course, Taxodus: Playing the Global Tax Avoidance Game, Business Interview, Case Competition-Overview, Case Competition-Audit, Case Competition-Tax, Case Competition-Advisory, Case Competition-Earnings, Stock Price, and Analysis, and Financial Crisis of 2008. Other than the cases labeled case competition, none of these cases are meant to build off each other and should be taken by themselves. The series of case competition cases are part of a larger group case where each group chose a Fortune 500 company, …

Antecedent And Consequence Of Flux In Coordination Caused By Team Membership Change, Taejin Hwang

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Teams in diverse settings experience membership change. Although researchers have examined what happens in a team after membership change, we know little about what happens in a team after members are informed about the upcoming change and before the change actually happens. I develop and test a conceptual model of how teams respond to the news of upcoming membership change. Drawing on social identity theory, I propose that decreased team identification of members who will soon leave a team would necessitate members who will stay in a team to modify their coordination mechanisms which result in flux in coordination. Because …

Three Essays On Competition And Misconduct, Parasuram Balasubramanian

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines firm behavior in response to when regulators, market players or stakeholders address the issue of negative production externalities arising from firm activity. The first chapter examines how economic actors respond to an environmental regulation that seeks to foreclose certain market positions from future activity, in order to preserve natural resources. In chapter two, I examine how competition can have a monitoring effect on the likelihood of misconduct. Chapters one and two use satellite data on commercial fishing activity that allows me to observe fishing activity at a high spatial and temporal resolution. The third chapter addresses the …

Essays In Corporate Finance And Machine Learning, Manish Jha

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation focuses on two broad questions. First, why do shareholder’s preferences vary, and how various agents persuade them? And second, how public perceptions about the financial sector and regulations affect economic outcomes? While my research plan contributes to the two distinct fields of literature, a unifying theme of my research is the use of innovative machine learning techniques to overcome the empirical challenges that would typically prevent measuring these sentiments objectively.In my Chapter 1, I use a supervised machine learning model on mutual fund family’s proxy voting choices to estimate their preferences. I find that hedge fund activists tailor …

Essays In Investments, Lina Han

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Over the past decade, the asset management industry has experienced significant changes, with exponential growth due to the demand from individual investors. Within this context, my dissertation focuses on studying both individual and institutional investors’ behaviors. In Chapter 1, I study individual investors’ behaviors on the Alipay platform. I use unique, individual transaction data from a trading experiment implemented through the Alipay app and the same individuals’ trading history in the financial market. In response to the exogenous price movements in the experiment, investors tend to be contrarian traders. The sophisticated investors tend to be more contrarian than the less …

Leadership Development In Saudi Arabia’S Private Sector: A Mixed Methods Approach, Khaled Hanaky

Dissertations

There is currently a proliferation of business-focused leadership development programs in Saudi Arabia. These programs represent a reaction to the shortage of qualified leaders who can drive and sustain both recent and future advances introduced by Saudi Vision 2030, the national transformation program that is introducing social and economic reforms. Importantly, business leadership development has not been studied in this context of contemporary Saudi Arabia.

This study examined the state of Saudi leadership development programs by employing an explanatory sequential case study design that focused on a particular leadership development program. Through the use of surveys and participant interviews, results …

Does Winning Matter? An Examination Of The Impact Of Success On Former Student-Athlete Philanthropic Giving, Zach Harris

Dissertations

Intercollegiate athletic departments (ICAs) rely on philanthropic giving to remain relevant in the “arms race” that is college athletics. Donations provide the necessary resources (scholarships, upgraded facilities, etc.) to compete with rival programs for prospective student-athletes and fans. Previous research in ICA philanthropy has found that team success is one of the key factors driving donations to athletic programs. However, much of the research in this field has centered on athletic giving on a macro-level, focusing on the overall alumni population of an institution. While this research is important for colleges and universities, it misses on measuring the impact that …

Improving Pre-Departure Training For English Teacher Volunteers In Costa Rica: An Examination Of Aliarse And Recommendations, Derek Schwartz

Capstone Collection

Volunteering outside of one’s country and culture is a challenging endeavor. While abroad, international volunteers generally encounter a new language, culture, and lifestyle which can create challenges for volunteers. Pre-departure training can buffer and lend nuance to the difficulties that volunteers face. In Costa Rica, the organization Aliarse manages a volunteer project that experiences high volunteer attrition and incorporates minimal pre-departure training. This case study draws on quantitative and qualitative data collected from questionnaires and semi-structured interviews of former Aliarse volunteers over two months. Results from the data found that ninety-four percent of the interviewees said interacting either directly or …

Douglas Dynamics, Inc. A Financial Analysis And Valuation Report, Jessicca Lhotak

Dissertations, Theses, and Projects

Douglas Dynamics, Inc. was founded in 1977 and is one of the many construction machinery companies in the industry. Their headquarters is located in Milwaukee, WI, but they sell products in the United States, Canada, Northern Europe, and Asia. The company consist of two segments, a Work Truck Attachment, and a Work Truck Solutions. Having these two segments allow the company to reach into different markets, but the main market is snow and ice management. They have been able to stay ahead of the competition by acquiring other construction machinery businesses and innovating their current products. In the beginning of …

The Initial Public Offering Quandary: Is There A State And Time Dependency?, Michael D. Herley

Doctoral Dissertations (DBA)

Initial public offerings (IPOs) continue to play a critical role in the capital markets and the overall economy. With the total number of IPOs remaining considerably below historic levels, developing a more thorough understanding of their drivers and how they vary under different conditions could benefit market participants and regulators. In this dissertation, I consider the relevant academic literature and extend the paradigm that stock market growth positively influences IPO activity, and market volatility tempers IPO volume—while also accounting for the present instability in the data through a regime-switching3 approach.

I will show that the interplay of the Chicago Board …

Technology Management Maturity Assessment Model In Healthcare, Amir Shaygan

Dissertations and Theses

Significant gaps in the practical transformation of clinical knowledge into practices, increasing healthcare costs, costly medical errors, healthcare institutions' obligations towards improving safety, clinical outcomes, and efficacy of care from one side; and the rise of disruptive innovations, the adoption of electronic health records and novel diagnostic tools, and the plethora of data from the other side has made the need for a new approach in managing the U.S healthcare systems an imperative. Continuous learning has been utilized to mitigate some of these issues have been in healthcare organizations. Continuous learning is especially important in the research centers that act …

Artisanal Collaborations And The Preservation Of Intangible Cultural Heritage, Susan G. Goodwin

School of Professional and Continuing Studies Nonprofit Studies Capstone Projects

This study is a qualitative comparative case study of two craft collaborations, utilizing inductive research and interviews. A key member of each group was interviewed via Zoom, the transcripts analyzed and distilled into themes comparing the balance between cultural preservation and economic empowerment. By examining the roles within these collaborations, three key elements of a successful artisanal collaboration were determined to be a long-term commitment, predictable funding, and community leadership. This model could be adapted to the many smaller groups promoting traditional handcraft as a method of empowerment and cultural preservation.

The Social Market Economy As A Formula For Peace, Prosperity, And Sustainability, Almuth D. Merkel

Doctor of International Conflict Management Dissertations

The social market economy was developed in Germany during the interwar period amidst political and economic turmoil. With clear demarcation lines differentiating it from socialism and laissez-faire capitalism, the social market economy became a formula for peace and prosperity for post WWII Germany. Since then, the success of the social market economy has inspired many other countries to adopt its principles. Drawing on evidence from economic history and the history of economic thought, this thesis first reviews the evolution of the fundamental principles that form the foundation of social-market economic thought. Blending the micro-economic utility maximization framework with traditional growth …

It Usage In Auditing And The Impact Of Covid-19, Olivia Beechem

Undergraduate Theses

The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically changed the world as we know it, and the audit field is no exception. The transition for a majority of public accounting firms and their clients to remote work amidst a global pandemic sparked my interest in the already rapidly evolving field of audit IT usage, which continually affects audit quality and efficiency. My research expands on existing studies completed on this topic prior to COVID-19 and includes three main research objectives. First, my research examines the usage and perceived importance of common types of IT audit applications, such as CAATs and data analytics, as …

Tax Reform Throughout U.S. History And The Economic Impact, Jacob Christopher Michel

Honors Thesis

The three largest tax reforms in recent years, The 1986 Tax Reform Act (TRA of 1986), The Bush Tax Cuts Act, and The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), differed in the treatment of taxable income through capital gains tax rate, depreciation treatment, limitation of losses, standard deduction, and the marginal rates in general. These provisions were studied to provide insight into how they affected various stakeholders. The TRA of 1986 and the Bush Tax Cuts Act have data determining whether they benefitted high-income taxpayers to the highest extent. The low-income taxpayers were also given tax breaks, however, not to …