Scholars @Bentley (Bentley University)
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Digital Innovation and Socioeconomic Transformation: Mobile Money in Sub-Saharan Africa
Get PDFDigital innovation enabled by digital technologies has the potential to transform existing socioeconomic practices, processes, and structures. In spite of the transformative potential, the relation between digital innovation and resulting socioeconomic transformation has been underexplored, especially at the societal level in developing countries. To fill this research gap, this dissertation is dedicated to investigating how and why digital innovation leads to socioeconomic transformation, when it does. Drawing on the digital innovation and technological transition literatures, I propose a multilevel theoretical framework that illustrates the processes and mechanisms through which digital innovation enables socioeconomic transformation in developing countries context. This dissertation examines the framework by focusing on a particular instance of digital innovation: Mobile Money (MM) in Sub-Saharan Africa. MM provides basic financial services to both banked and unbanked population at a convenient, secure, and affordable way via mobile phones. As such, the disruptive mobile-based financial services have been argued to address financial services gap in developing countries and in particular hold the potential to play transformative roles in Sub-Saharan Africa where traditional banking infrastructure remained underdeveloped.
Based on the multilevel theoretical framework, I design and conduct three essays using a mix of qualitative and quantitative research methods to investigate the transformative role of MM at multiple levels of analysis. Overall, the findings show that MM has been transforming the way people conduct financial transactions (i.e., money transfer and storage) and that MM, when widely adopted in a society, can serve as a digital pathway for developing countries to leapfrog the traditional financial services gap and achieve socioeconomic development. This dissertation contributes to the digital innovation by proposing and examining the multilevel framework illustrating how and why digital innovation leads to societal-level transformation. Furthermore, the findings add knowledge to the MM literature by systematically documenting empirical evidence of socioeconomic benefits across multiple levels and the potential unintended consequences. Future research agenda is proposed to further our understanding of the emerging MM phenomenon (i.e., social mechanisms) and more broadly to examine the theoretical and empirical links between digital innovation and socioeconomic transformation
Bordering work in contemporary political discourse: The case of the US/Mexico border wall proposal
Get PDFIn this article, I use a critical discourse analytic approach to investigate how President Trump’s campaign goal to build a wall along the US/Mexico border has been discussed in United States political discourse. The data analyzed are 30 videotaped speeches and other public events which occurred between October 2016 and March 2018. These data are publicly available from the cable news channel C-SPAN’s online video archive. The analysis focuses on the communicative techniques and strategies used to persuade others and justify one’s position in the interactions and events studied. In this article, I show how the border wall proposal is reformulated into a debate about border security, and how diverse ways of referring to persons without approved documentation are used to support arguments on both sides of the debate
Studies of Financial Analysts: Over-Optimism, Investment Value and Herding Behavior
Get PDFFinancial research analysts are experts who analyze the financial markets and company fundamentals to make investment recommendations. Based on the US analysts’ stock recommendations, I examine the issue of financial analysts’ over-optimism, the investment value of analysts’ stock recommendations, and analysts’ leader-follower herding behavior. The goal of this thesis is to enhance the understanding of the roles that financial analysts play in promoting information transmission in the financial market. The study of analysts’ over-optimism focuses on the market reaction asymmetry. Consistent with analysts being over-optimistic, the financial market responds more strongly to analysts’ unfavorable recommendations than to their corresponding favorable recommendations. This market reaction asymmetry reflects how investors perceive analysts’ over-optimism and discount the potential bias. The study measures the effect of regulatory efforts to reduce the market reaction asymmetry through the adoption of NASD Rule 2711, NYSE Rule 472 and the Global Analyst Research Settlement. However, after considering the “Self-Correction” mechanism of the financial market, the analysis indicates that the actual over-optimism mitigation due to the regulatory intervention was only a 0.7% reduction in the market reaction asymmetry. viii The study of the investment value of analysts’ recommendations is performed through a portfolio construction approach. I use both a passive asset allocation strategy and an active asset allocation strategy to create recommendation-based portfolios. The passive strategy utilizes a market-value weighting to rebalance the portfolio and the active strategy uses a Black-Litterman model to determine the optimal stock weight in rebalancing. I find that both strategies generate positive abnormal returns. The active asset allocation strategy outperforms the passive strategy as it allows investors to gain incremental values by overweighting outperforming industries and underweighting underperforming industries. In studying analysts’ herding behavior, herding behavior is defined as issuing leader-follower recommendations in the presence of clustered recommendations. Based on a network analysis approach, I find that analysts’ herding network structure and analysts’ centrality can explain their performance on non-herding recommendations. This finding is consistent with a learning by herding hypothesis, which states that analysts can acquire knowledge from other analysts when learning is the motivation to herd
A Resource View of Information Security Incident Response
Get PDFThis dissertation investigates managerial and strategic aspects of InfoSec incident preparation and response. This dissertation is presented in four chapters:
Chapter 1: an introduction
Chapter 2: a systematic literature review
Chapter 3: two field-based case studies of InfoSec incident response processes
Chapter 4: a repertory grid study identifying characteristics of effective individual incident responders.
Together these chapters demonstrate that the lenses of the Resource Based View, Theory of Complementary Resources, and Accounting Control Theory, can be combined to classify and analyze the resources organizations use during incident response. I find that incident response is maturing as a discipline and organizations rely on both defined procedures and improvisation when incidents occur. Most importantly there is no “one size fits all” approach to incident response. Incident responder characteristics include general skills (good communicators and problem solvers) and character attributes (such as an interest in “doing the right thing”).The combination of characteristics that make an individual successful in a particular incident response role is affected by other resources available to support InfoSec incident response
Representation of Industry in Introductory Biology Textbooks: A Missed Opportunity to Advance STEM Learning
Get PDFThe majority of students who enroll in undergraduate biology courses will eventually be employed in non-STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) business occupations. This work explores how representations of industry in undergraduate biology textbooks could impact STEM learning for these students and their ability to apply this learning in their chosen work. We used text analysis to identify passages with references to industry in 29 textbooks. Each passage was categorized for relevance to health or environment, for implied positive or negative connotations, and for descriptions of synergy or conflict between science and industry. We found few passages describing applications of STEM learning in non-STEM business occupations and a paucity of content to support context-based learning for students aiming at business careers. A significant number of passages embodied negative connotations regarding industry. Notable passages highlighted irregular or fraudulent business practices or included simplistic caricatures of business practice. We discuss how the representation of industry in these textbooks may impact student engagement, context-based learning, the ability of students to critically apply STEM learning in industry or business occupations, and heuristics that guide intuitive perceptions about the intersection between science and industry
Untangling the Health Impacts of Mexico - U.S. Migration
Get PDFResearch has found that immigrant health has a tendency to decline with time spent in the United States. Using data from the Mexican Migration Project from 2007-2014, this paper is the first to test the impact of domestic and international migration on different types of health measures. Results find cumulative U.S. migration experience has a negative impact both on self-reported and objective health measures. By contrast, the number of trips to the United States and migrations made within Mexico impact individual’s self-assessment of their health but not objective health measures. The analyses suggest that differences in self-reported versus objective health measures may help to explain mixed results in the literature. Results suggest that individual’s health will suffer considerably more from U.S. migrations than from migration within Mexico which is consistent with the acculturation hypothesis. Not surprisingly, high levels of BMI and smoking are significant predictors of negative self-reported and objective health. There is also a troubling significant negative trend in health over time observed in the sample. Taken as a whole, these results suggest that even short trips to the United States can have a negative health effect on immigrants if they are repeated
Desert-Based Justice
No full textJustice requires giving people what they deserve. Or so many philosophers—and according to many of those philosophers, everyone else—thought for centuries, until the 1970s and 1980s, however, perhaps under the influence of Rawls’s desert-less theory, desert was largely cast out of discussions of distributive justice. Now it is making a comeback. This chapter considers recent research on the concept of desert, debate about the conditions for desert, arguments for and against its requital, and connections between desert and other distributive ideals. It suggests that desert-sensitive theories of distributive justice, despite the challenges they face, have a promising future