1,720,956 research outputs found
Essays in law, politics and corporate finance
Get PDFThis thesis examines some of the interaction between law, and politics and corporate finance. These institutions help shape the incentives of firms and other economic actors. One section of this thesis investigates the value of firm political connections to U.S. congressional candidates in close elections using a regression discontinuity design. It describes the federal political institutions in the United States and construct a database of contributions from publicly traded firms to candidates for federal office. In a sample of o-cycle special elections, set exogenously to the contributing firms, the author compares the outcomes of firms that contributed to winning candidates to firms that contributed to losing candidates, and finds the wedge between these firms to be 1.7% to 6.8% of firm equity value. The author studies which congressional committee assignment seats are most valuable to examine which areas of policy matter most and shows that these connections matter for future sales. The author then documents additional actions that firms take to develop and maintain their political connections {lcub} engaging professional lobbyists and directly employing former government employees {lcub} and shows that these actions seem to form a cohesive political strategy. A second section of the thesis studies incentives in civil litigation cases in the United States. The author describes how the institutional setup of the United States' class action shapes the incentives of plaintis and defendants and examine whether the market learns about firms by observing their behavior during litigation. The author develops a simple model of litigation and show that with information asymmetries firms may have an incentive to engage in costly litigation to prevent future lawsuits. The author examines the value implications of a firm's decision to settle a class action lawsuit and provides evidence consistent with the model, showing that firms which exit litigation by settlement trade at lower Q ratios. This reduction is not driven by profitability, leverage, size, or bankruptcy risk. Furthermore, firms that ultimately settle, but spend more money during litigation prior to settlement trade at higher Q ratios
The Governance Role of Institutional Investors
Get PDFThis thesis consists of chapters on the governance role of institutional investors. Chapter 1 provides an introduction of the three essays as well as provides a brief summary of their main findings. Chapter 2 examines whether certain types of institutional investors use their ownership rights as a mechanism of exerting influence on portfolio firms to amplify their political voice. We show that ownership may be an important mechanism through which institutional investors amplify their political influence. In particular, we find that the probability that a firm’s Political Action Committee (PAC) donates to a politician supported by an investor’s PAC nearly doubles after the investor acquires a large stake, and that it increases five-fold when the investor obtains a board seat. The relationship is stronger for private funds, and those with high partisanship, suggesting the relationship is driven by investor preferences rather than strategic concerns. Chapter 3 examines whether institutional investors may partially offset the social trade-offs due to outsourcing government services to private enterprises. Consistent with prior theoretical work, I find evidence that institutional investors, in particular investors with a long holding horizon, have a positive impact on social outcomes of privatized prisons. Overall this chapter provides evidence that social trade-offs due to privatization may be partially mitigated by institutional investors due to litigation and reputation risks. Chapter 3 examines whether institutional investors have an impact on product market outcomes. The empirical literature on the potential anti-competitive effects of common-ownership relies heavily on financial institution mergers to make causal inferences. I find that more than 85% of newly-formed common-ownership relationships due to such financial institution mergers are no longer commonly-held by the acquiring institution during the post-merger period (with most being liquidated in the first quarter following the merger). Firms that are no longer commonly-held by the merged institution drive the anti-competitive results found in previous studies. The fact that portfolio firms are so quickly rebalanced casts doubt on the utility of financial institution mergers as a natural experiment. Taken together, my thesis finds that institutional investors have a crucial governance role that benefits society.Ph.D
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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