Business Commons^™

Assessing The Effectiveness Of Safety Training Provided To Corrections Personnel In Appalachia, Ali K. Al Yammahi

Online Theses and Dissertations

The context of the study was assessment of whether corrections officers in Appalachia are receiving adequate health and safety training who attended health and safety trainings sessions provided by the OSHA Training Institute and Education Center on the campus of Eastern Kentucky University. Participants included in the study were corrections officers who have been working in corrections for a minimum of two years. Participants were required to be working in Appalachian corrections during distribution of the questionnaire. Participants were selected by using convenience and snowball sampling procedures. The questionnaire was sent on 4 separate occasions, 10 of the expected 30 …

A Mediacentric Examination Of The Corporate Psychopath, Pamela Martha Brooks

Online Theses and Dissertations

The psychopathic personality disorder is an extraordinarily complex and multidimensional phenomenon. While its study has primarily focused on criminal and forensic populations, many researchers are broadening the scope of psychopathy research to include those in the corporate world. This, after striking similarities were revealed between the personalities of corporate leaders and clinically diagnosed psychopaths. One profession that may be attractive to psychopathic personalities is the media, specifically television and radio. This exploratory study utilized a blend of original and archival data. Calculated effect sizes were used to examine the existence of personality facets among three groups of media professionals and …

The Effects Of Strong Ties On Socialization, Colton Alan Burgess

Online Theses and Dissertations

Organizations that successfully socialize newcomers benefit from effective workforces comprised of employees who experience higher job performance, satisfaction, and commitment. Organizational insiders, known as social agents, play an integral role in facilitating the socialization of newcomers, as these individuals make up the networks in which newcomers work. To better understand in what ways social agents help assimilate newcomers, a more thorough understanding is needed concerning how tie strength between individuals facilitates the socialization process.

This thesis has two objectives. First, two types of antecedents to strong tie development are explored: orientation practices deployed by organizations to promote interaction between newcomers …

Investigating Key Components Of Classroom Engagement In Workforce Development Programming, Susan Leslie Cornelius

Online Theses and Dissertations

This is a qualitative study about students who attended First Line Supervision classes at a rural Kentucky Appalachian university. First Line Supervision classes are taught in six hour blocks and are designed to teach students leadership skills. These students took a series of leadership based topics to better prepare themselves for a leadership role in their current employment. In addition, they were seeking the necessary information needed to be successful in filling the educational gaps within their organizations. This study is important because participants identified: key components of classroom engagement; experiences in the classroom; types of classroom engagement currently taking …

Identifications Of Challenges And Success Factors Of Females Entering And Advancing In The Profession Of Emergency Management, Audra Cronen

Online Theses and Dissertations

This thesis focuses on how women in the emergency management field have identified and overcome challenges when entering and advancing in the profession. The two research questions were:

• What barriers have females experienced when entering and advancing in the field of emergency management?

• In what ways have females overcome barriers when entering and advancing in the field of emergency management?

These questions were answered by five women who work in the field of emergency management and responded to a series of interview questions. These women made it clear that while this is a predominately male-dominated field of work, …

The Implications Of The Trans-Pacific Partnership For Smes: Opportunities And Challenges, Heng Wang

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) will have profound implications for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) within and beyond the free trade area. SME issues get more attention in the TPP than previous FTAs. Since there is limited research on the impact of the FTAs on SMEs, it is of great significance to probe into the practical implications of the TPP for SMEs. The key question will be analyzed: what are the challenges and opportunities that the TPP hold for SMEs? It is argued that, first, the support to SMEs, tariff elimination or reduction, and the reduction of non-tariff barriers are major …

Responses To Change In The Global Political Economy Of Innovation – The Role Of Sub-National States In Industrial Transition, Dan Herman

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This dissertation seeks to explore how sub-national levels of the state promote the development of new industrial sectors. To do so this dissertation builds on a series of theoretical perspectives on the role of the state in the economy and develops a unique view of how sub-national states coalesce and contrast within these perspectives. It does so through a series of empirical case studies focused on sub-national jurisdictions in North America that highlight diverse varieties of state actions that contribute, if not lead, industrial transitions and the development of new innovation-oriented industrial sectors. In so doing, the dissertation presents a …

Understanding The Influencers Of Second-Hand Apparel Shopping Behavior, Robyn Hobbs

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Shopping for second-hand apparel is rapidly growing and has become a notable segment of the retail market. The purpose of this study is to determine what influences consumers when shopping second-hand for apparel products in-store and online. According to the existing literature, a number of key factors play significant roles for second-hand apparel shopping consumer decisions. They include: social, costs, trends and environmental influencers. Past research has not concentrated in-depth on the hedonistic and social influences of second-hand apparel shopping, financial factors, and time spent shopping for second-hand apparel. This study has observed the socio-demographic profile of second-hand shoppers, what …

The Shareholder Value Of Empowered Boards, K.J. Martijn Cremers, Simone M. Sepe

Journal Articles

In the last decade, the balance of power between shareholders and boards has shifted dramatically. Changes in both the marketplace and the legal landscape governing it have turned the call for empowered shareholders into a new reality. Correspondingly, the authority that boards of directors have historically held in U.S. corporate law has been eroded. Empirical studies associating staggered boards with lower firm value have been interpreted to favor this shift of authority, supporting the view that protecting boards from shareholder pressure is detrimental to shareholder interests. This Article presents new empirical evidence on staggered boards that not only exposes the …

Firm-Specific Human Capital Investments As A Signal Of General Value: Revisiting Assumptions About Human Capital And How It Is Managed, Shad S. Morris, Sharon A. Alvarez, Jay B. Barney, Janice C. Molloy

Faculty Publications

Research Summary:

Prior scholarship has assumed that firm-specific and general human capital can be analyzed separately. This paper argues that, in some settings, this is not the case because prior firm-specific human capital investments can be a market signal of an individual’s willingness and ability to make such investments in the future. As such, the willingness and ability to make firm-specific investments is a type of general human capital that links firm-specific and general human capital in important ways. The paper develops theory about these investments, market signals, and value appropriation. Then the paper examines implications for human resource management …

Pipes, Pools And Filters: How Collaboration Networks Affect Innovative Performance, Harpeet Singh, David Kryscynski, Xinxin Li, Ram Gopal

Faculty Publications

Innovation requires inventors to have both "new knowledge" and the ability to combine and configure knowledge (i.e. "combinatory knowledge") and such knowledge may flow through networks. We argue that both combinatory knowledge and new knowledge are accessed through collaboration networks, but that inventors' abilities to access such knowledge depends on its location in the network. Combinatory knowledge transfers from direct contacts, but not easily from indirect contacts. In contrast, new knowledge transfers from both direct and indirect contacts, but is far more likely to be new and useful when it comes from indirect contacts. Exploring knowledge flows in 69,476 patents …

Benefit-Cost Analysis And Distributional Weights: An Overview, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

Standard cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is insensitive to distributional concerns. A policy that improves the lives of the rich, and makes the poor yet worse off, will be approved by CBA as long as the policy’s aggregate monetized benefits are positive. Distributional weights offer an apparent solution to this troubling feature of the CBA methodology: adjust costs and benefits with weighting factors that are inversely proportional to the well-being levels (as determined by income and also perhaps non-income attributes such as health) of the affected individuals.

Indeed, an academic literature dating from the 1950s discusses how to specify distributional weights. And …

The Influence Of Operational Resources And Activities On Indirect Personnel Costs: A Multilevel Modeling Approach, Bradley C. Boehmke, Alan W. Johnson, Edward D. White, Jeffery D. Weir, Mark A. Gallagher

Faculty Publications

Indirect activities often represent an underemphasized, yet significant, contributing source of costs for organizations. In order to manage indirect costs, organizations must understand how these costs behave relative to changes in operational resources and activities. This is of particular interest to the Air Force and its sister services, because recent and projected reductions in defense spending are forcing reductions in their operational variables, and insufficient research exists to help them understand how this may influence indirect costs. Furthermore, although academic research on indirect costs has advanced the knowledge behind the modeling and behavior of indirect costs, significant gaps in the …

Forging Tomorrow's Air, Space, And Cyber War Fighters: Recommendations For Integration And Development, Mark Reith

Faculty Publications

Today’s Airmen operate in contested environments, and years of technical-data spillage, coupled with policies emphasizing commercial-off-the-shelf acquisition, ensure that the immediate future will remain contested as our adversaries seek to exploit level playing fields. Long gone are the days of Operation Desert Storm and Enduring Freedom when air superiority dominated and the supporting elements of space, communications, and computers were largely out of reach for many nation-states. Since then, technology has become ubiquitously intertwined in weapon systems and today largely turns the gears of warfare, allowing a range of actors to erode national instruments of power.

Understanding Audit Quality: Insights From Audit Professionals And Investors*, Brant E. Christensen, Steven M. Glover, Thomas C. Omer, Marjorie K. Shelley

Faculty Publications

Projects seeking to define, measure, and evaluate audit quality are on the agendas of auditing standards setters as well as audit firms. The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) currently provides information regarding audit quality through the release of inspection reports, and the Board intends to establish and report audit quality indicators. To provide additional perspective on audit quality, we obtain auditors’ and investors’ views, definitions, and indicators of audit quality. We find that investors’ definitions of audit quality focus more on inputs to the audit process than do auditors’, and that investors view the number of PCAOB deficiencies as …

How Do Firms Use Cash Tax Savings: A Cross-Country Analysis, Danielle Higgins Green, Jon Kerr

Faculty Publications

Cash tax avoidance activities can serves as a significant source of additional cash flows for firms; how managers utilize this additional cash source and the resulting consequences is an empirical question. To answer our research question, we examine the association between the spread between a country’s enacted statutory rate for the year and the cash effective tax rate, and two uses of cash – investment and dividend payout – for an international sample of firms. In the cross-section, we find the firms are more likely to invest cash tax savings rather than distribute them in the form of dividends and …

Using Unstructured And Qualitative Disclosures To Explain Accruals, Richard Frankel, Jared Jennings, Joshua A. Lee

Faculty Publications

We examine the usefulness of support vector regressions (SVRs) in assessing the content of unstructured, qualitative disclosures by relating MD&A-based SVR-accrual estimates (MD&Aaccruals) to actual accruals. We find that MD&A accruals explain a statistically and economically significant portion of firm-level accruals and identify more persistent accruals. We find that the explanatory power of MD&A accruals is higher for more readable 10Ks, thereby providing evidence for the construct validity of the readability measures. To highlight the flexibility of the SVR method, we apply it to other dependent variables and disclosures. We find that MD&A-based cash-flow forecasts produced by SVR predict next …

Does Use Tax Evasion Provide A Competitive Advantage To E-Tailers?, Jeffrey L. Hoopes, Jacob Thornock, Braden M. Williams

Faculty Publications

Many online retail firms (e-tailers) do not collect sales tax from the majority of their customers. This practice provides these firms with a potential competitive advantage over traditional retailers. We examine stock market returns and analysts' sales forecast revisions surrounding federal legislative proposals, such as the Marketplace Fairness Act, that could erode this alleged competitive advantage for e-tailers. Following events that indicated an increased likelihood of federal sales tax legislation, we find negative abnormal stock returns for e-tail firms relative to traditional retail firms. We also find that analysts forecast a future reduction in sales revenue for e-tailers. These findings …

What Is Organizational History: Toward A Creative Synthesis Of History And Organization Studies, Paul C. Godfrey, John Hassard, Ellen S. O'Connor, Michael Rowlinson, Martin Ruef

Faculty Publications

As a synthesis of organization theory and historiography, the field of organizational history is mature enough to contribute to wider theoretical and historiographical debates and is sufficiently developed for a theoretical consideration of its subject matter. In this introduction to the Special Topic Forum on History and Organization Studies, we take up the question, “What is organizational history?” and consider three distinct arguments that we believe frame the next phase of development for historical work within organization studies. First, we argue that following the “historic turn,” organizational history has developed as a subfield of organization studies that takes seriously the …

Information Exploitation? A Pre-Crisis Rmbs Issuer's Private Information, Darren Aiello

Faculty Publications

This paper describes an important borrower risk factor observed privately by the issuer of non-agency RMBS. The private information available to the issuer is drawn from behavioral cues exhibited early in the life of the loan. Mortgage borrowers that make their first six payments at least a day prior to the due date are 14.8 percentage points less likely to become delinquent (equivalent to a 91-point increase in FICO score). This effect is persistent, unobservable at loan origination, and privately observed by the issuer prior to securitization. Both the credit rating agencies and the investor do not appear to be …

When Training Gets Trumped: How Dual-Task Interference Inhibits Security Training, Jeffrey L. Jenkins, Bonnie Anderson, Anthony Osborn Vance, Scott Jensen

Faculty Publications

Security training programs are an important intervention to protect users and organizations against security threats. Unfortunately, users often ignore their training and engage in poor security behaviors. We explain how dual-task interference (DTI) is a primary cause of security training disregard. DTI is a cognitive limitation wherein humans cannot perform more than one task simultaneously without experiencing a deterioration of performance. In our context, we hypothesize how prompting users to perform security behaviors during high-DTI times may derail one’s previous security training, resulting in less secure behaviors.

We test our hypotheses in an experiment that compares users’ adherence to security …

Mitigating Bias Blind Spot Via A Serious Video Game, Elena Bessarabova, Cameron W. Piercy, Shawn King, Cindy Vincent, Norah E. Dunbar, Judee K. Burgoon, Claude H. Miller, Matthew Jensen, Aaron Elkins, David W. Wilson, Scott N. Wilson, Yu-Hao Lee

Faculty Publications

We employed a serious video game to train participants on bias blind spot (BBS), capturing training effects on BBS mitigation and knowledge at three points in time. Experiment 1 (N ¼ 703) compared the effects of hybrid training (a combination of implicit and explicit training) to implicit training; Experiment 2 (N ¼ 620) tested the effects of just-in-time versus delayed feedback; and Experiment 3 (N ¼ 626) examined the effects of singleplayer versus multiplayer learning environments. We also tested differences in game duration (30 vs. 60 min play) and repetition (single vs. repeated play). Overall, the video game decreased BBS …

Life Satisfaction Moderates The Associations Between Motives And Excessive Social Networking Site Usage, Jin-Liang Wang, James Gaskin, Hai-Zhen Wang, Dong Liu

Faculty Publications

It has been suggested that excessive social networking sites (SNS) users might use SNS as a method of coping with their life problems and that psychosocial well-being variables might interact with users’ motives for using SNS in predicting problematic SNS use. The present research explores whether the association between motives (i.e. self-expression and passing time) and excessive SNS usage is moderated by the user’s life satisfaction. A total of 996 college students were recruited from two colleges in Chongqing China. The participants were divided into excessive and nonexcessive SNS usage groups based on their mean score from the excessive SNS …

Real-Time Hand Tremor Detection Via Mouse Cursor Movements For Improved Human-Computer Interactions: An Exploratory Study, Parker A. Williams, Jeffrey L. Jenkins, Joseph S. Valacich

Faculty Publications

Millions of people experience hand-tremors—rhythmic oscillation of the fingers, hands, or arm that cause shaking in the hand. People who experience hand tremors often experience difficulty in human computer interactions. For example, when browsing a website, people with hand tremors may have difficulty navigating or clicking on links in the website. With sever hand tremors, effective computing is difficult without assistance. Past research has developed interventions that can be automatically deployed by a website to make it more accessible to people with hand tremors. We build on this research by creating a methodology to unobtrusively detect hand tremors, allowing these …

Applying Basic Gamification Techniques To It Compliance Training: Evidence From The Lab And Field, Ryan J. Baxter, D. Kip Holderness, David A. Wood

Faculty Publications

Companies depend on strong internal controls to protect the integrity of accounting information systems. IT security and data privacy training are critical controls to safeguarding company information. However, employees often dislike the training, which can cause a lack of attention to and poor understanding of training concepts, leading to less effective internal controls. To improve the training experience, companies are implementing principles of games into employee training modules; a practice known as gamification. Using a laboratory experiment of data privacy training and a field study involving a publicly-traded bank’s rollout of IT security training, we test whether a training environment …

Comparing The Publication Process In Accounting, Economics, Finance, Management, Marketing, Psychology, And The Natural Sciences, David A. Wood

Faculty Publications

I present two types of data about the publication and review process in the accounting, economics, finance, management, marketing, psychology, and natural science disciplines. First, I collect all articles published in 2012 in top tier journals of these disciplines and compare the articles based on word counts, figures and tables included in each article, the time it took to be published, citations, the number of co-authors, and submission fees. I then survey academics in each discipline. Survey questions were designed to evaluate overall perceptions of the review process; changes in the review process in the last 5 years; opinions about …

Public Sector Personnel Economics: Wages, Promotions, And The Competence-Control Trade-Off, Charles M. Cameron, John De Figueiredo, David E. Lewis

Faculty Scholarship

We model personnel policies in public agencies, examining how wages and promotion standards can partially offset a fundamental contracting problem: the inability of public sector workers to contract on performance, and the inability of political masters to contract on forbearance from meddling. Despite the dual contracting problem, properly constructed personnel policies can encourage intrinsically motivated public sector employees to invest in expertise, seek promotion, remain in the public sector, and develop policy projects. However, doing so requires internal personnel policies that sort "slackers" from "zealots." Personnel policies that accomplish this task are quite different in agencies where acquired expertise has …

Misalignment: Corporate Risk-Taking And Public Duty, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

This article argues for a “public governance duty” to help manage excessive risk-taking by systemically important firms. Although governments worldwide, including the United States, have issued an array of regulations to attempt to curb that risk-taking by aligning managerial and investor interests, those regulations implicitly assume that investors would oppose excessively risky business ventures. That leaves a critical misalignment: because much of the harm from a systemically important firm’s failure would be externalized onto the public, including ordinary citizens impacted by an economic collapse, such a firm can engage in risk-taking ventures with positive expected value to its investors but …

Perspectives On Regulating Systemic Risk, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

This book chapter, which synthesizes several of the author’s articles, attempts to provide useful perspectives on regulating systemic risk. First, it argues that systemic shocks are inevitable. Accordingly, regulation should be designed not only to try to reduce those shocks but also to protect the financial system against their unavoidable impact. This could be done, the chapter explains, by applying chaos theory to help stabilize the financial system. The chapter then focuses on trying to prevent excessive corporate risk-taking, which is one of the leading triggers of systemic shocks and widely regarded to have been a principal cause of the …

Keynote Address, Regulating Corporate Governance In The Public Interest: The Case Of Systemic Risk, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

There’s long been a debate whether corporate governance law should require some duty to the public. The accepted wisdom is not to require such a duty—that corporate profit maximization provides jobs and other public benefits that exceed any harm. This is especially true, the argument goes, because imposing specific regulatory requirements and making certain actions illegal or tortious can mitigate the harm without unduly impairing corporate wealth production. Whether that is true in other contexts, this paper—delivered as the keynote address at the June 2016 National Business Law Scholars Conference at The University of Chicago Law School—questions if it’s true …