Date of Award
5-2019
Document Type
Campus Access Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Business Administration
First Advisor
Mine Ertugrul
Second Advisor
Atreya Chakraborty
Third Advisor
Jay Junghun Lee
Abstract
This dissertation contains three essays that study how a corporation interacts with its various stakeholders—consumers through corporate innovations, shareholders through corporate financial reporting, and the society through corporate social responsibility, respectively. The first essay, using product market perception data, studies how corporate innovation impacts end consumers’ assessment of a company’s products, and how such innovation-driven product market outcomes impact eventual financial performance. It documents that firms with more and higher quality innovation have more positive consumer perception of product innovativeness as well as product quality, and this positive association is driven by exploratory innovations rather than exploitative innovations. Product market perception predicted by firm innovation is positively related to firms’ value and performance. It contributes to the literature by providing a direct link between innovation and product market outcomes, which in turn creates financial value. The second essay provides evidence that option delta has a dominating effect over stock delta and vega in explaining the likelihood and extent of financial misstatements. It adds to the literature by showing that mixed results in prior studies about the association between portfolio delta and financial misreporting are attributable to the measurement error in portfolio delta as a proxy for managerial incentives for financial misstatements, and by revealing the differential effects of stock delta, option delta, and vega on providing corporate executives with incentives to misreport. The third essay examines the empirical association between the religiosity of corporate leadership and corporate social responsibility (CSR), and shows that in their CSR ratings firms with religious top managers outperform their peers with no religious managers. Baseline results are robust to alternative measures of managerial religiosity and different combinations of CSR rating categories. Additionally, after mitigating endogeneity with several econometric methodologies, the positive association between managerial religiosity and CSR remains statistically significant. The contribution lies in that while earlier literature documents the positive effect of community religiosity on firms’ benign behaviors, this essay demonstrates that it is actually the managers’ intrinsic values and spiritual commitments that matter. The findings echo earlier academic calls for restoring the emphasis on the religious education of college students.
Recommended Citation
Xu, Bo, "Three Essays on Corporate Finance" (2019). Graduate Doctoral Dissertations. 462.
https://scholarworks.umb.edu/doctoral_dissertations/462
Comments
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