Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

Market Reaction To Seasoned Equity Offerings: The Relevance Of Leverage, Growth Opportunities, And Corporate Structure, Mojib U. Ahmed

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

Empirical work on the market's reaction to seasoned equity offerings has rarely considered the impact of the issuing firm's leverage level or its corporate structure. This work is an attempt to include these parameters in order to better understand the market's reaction to such issue announcements.

The current finance literature recognizes the fact that leverage plays an important role in assessing the value of the firm. Leverage has both negative and positive impacts on the value of a firm (McConnell and Servaes, 1995), and thus, has both negative and positive impacts on the market's reaction to seasoned equity offerings. This …

Measuring And Evaluating Sales Force Training Effectiveness: A Proposed And An Empirically Tested Model, Ashraf Magdy Attia

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

Recent reports show that 95% of organizations conduct some form of sales training and organizations spend more than $30 billion dollars annually on sales training programs. According to {\it Sales \& Marketing Management\/} (1993), the average estimated field training costs for a sales trainee is \$37,000. Due to the accelerating investments in sales training, Honeycutt, Ford, and Rao (1995) found that 57% of sales training executives said that the major area in greatest need of additional research is determining sales training effectiveness.

The research contained herein addresses a gap in the marketing literature by: (1) proposing and testing a model …

Three Essays On European Union Advances Toward A Single Currency And Its Implications For Business And Investors, Charlotte Anne Bond

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

The first chapter examines the changes in various European currencies' exchange rates through the time period 1980 through 1997. Specifically, we are interested to determine if there is any affect to the volatility of these exchange rates and specific events related to the advancement of European Unification. In order to move to a single currency it is imperative that the separate currencies become less volatile to facilitate the move to a single currency. In this study, we examine whether this is the case and discuss which currencies appear to display this behavior. It is observed that of the 14 currencies …

The Pricing Behaviors Of Stock Index Futures: Some Preliminary Evidence In The Korean Market, Jaehoon Min

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

This research examines the pricing behaviors of futures contract in the Korean market in its early inception period. This research is mainly organized into three parts. The first chapter investigates the mispricing of futures contract relative to its theoretical value. Consistent with earlier studies regarding futures markets in other countries, futures have been persistently underpriced in the Korean market. Even after accounting for 10 minute execution lag in the arbitrage trading, arbitrage opportunities have been largely unexploited. Market inertia caused by institutional investors' unfamiliarity is presumed to be largely responsible for underpricing of futures. Unfavorable spot market condition also hinders …

The Corporate Effects Of R&D And Patent-Grants: Evidence From Intra-Industry Analysis, Steven Alan Lifland

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

This study examines the intra-industry effect of announcements of technological advancement on the market valuation of both the announcing firm and the announcing firm's relative industry competitors. This paper consists of two parts. Essay I discusses firm specific and intra-industry valuation effects of a firm's Research and Development (R&D) expenditures, while Essay II concentrates on the firm-specific and intra-industry valuation effects of a firm's patent-grant announcement. Specifically, this study examines the validity of the competitive and free-rider hypotheses to explain the market response to announcements of R&D spending and the granting of patents.

While the evidence shows that the market …

The Valuation Effects Of Corporate Investment Decisions: Evidence From Domestic And Foreign Plant Announcements, Bum Suk Kim

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

This study examines the effects of corporate investment decisions--announcements of plants--on the value of the firm, using event-study methodology. This paper consists of two parts. Essay I discusses the valuation effects of domestic investments, while Essay II analyses the valuation effects of foreign investments undertaken by U.S. firms and compares the valuation effects between the two investments. Specifically, this study examines the validity of the overinvestment hypothesis and whether focus-increasing investments enhance the value of the firm.

First, the evidence shows that the valuation effects of the investment decision depend on the firm's investment opportunities, proxied by Tobin's q. That …

Volatility Risk Premiums In Futures Markets: Investment Prices And Commercial Bank Performance, Richard P. Gregory

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

This dissertation is an in depth study of the measurement of pricing biases in futures options, and whether this bias is due to volatility risk premia, market overreaction to public information or information asymmetry. Futures options for thirteen different contracts are used. Additionally, the contracts are from three different marketplaces.

Six hypotheses are tested. The first is whether implied option volatilities from the Black (1976) futures option model is the only significant determinant of the volatility processes of the underlying futures contracts. For this estimation, we use both a GARCH (1,1) model and the Partially Non-parametric model of Engle and …

Non-United States Firms' Exchange Rate Exposure And The Pricing Of Exchange Rate Risk In Foreign Stock Markets, Patricia Hill Hamlin Hall

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

This two part dissertation is an in depth study of the measurement of foreign currency economic exposure faced by foreign firms and whether or not this exposure is associated with significant risk premia within these firms' national equity markets. Firms from four foreign countries; Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan and Canada are classified as purely domestic firms, exporters with low (20%-39%) percentages of foreign sales to total sales, exporters with high (over 40%) percentages of foreign sales to total sales, or multinational corporations.

Essay I focuses on the economic exposure of these non-US firms. Foreign exchange rate volatility can impact …

New Paradigms For Evaluating Performance And Performance Persistency Of Domestic And Globally Diversified Portfolios, Larry Joseph Prather

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

This manuscript reexamines performance evaluation of managed portfolios. Past measures of portfolio evaluation such as the Sharpe, Treynor, and Jensen measures are subject either to the inability to rank performance based on statistical significance, or are dependent on both a single factor CAPM return generating process and the selected market portfolio. Recent studies show performance ranking is sensitive to the selection of the market proxy when the security market line is used to evaluate performance. Additionally, CAPM based measures that appeared to work well in the 1960's no longer appear to function effectively. Many anomalies to CAPM have been documented …

Taxes And Dividend Policies: An International Study, Chinwe Edna Nweke

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

The tax effects hypothesis states that dividends have a negative impact on the value of a firm due to the preferential treatment given to capital gains over dividend income in some countries. This study tests the tax effects hypothesis in five countries: Australia, France, Germany, Japan and United States. The countries are selected because each had a significant tax law change within the period of study (1983-1991) and therefore provides an excellent opportunity for validation of this hypothesis.

The tax effects hypothesis is tested by first examining the effects of tax law changes on dividend payout ratios and then by …