Dissertation
Essays on corporate investment and managerial attribution
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Drexel University
May 2023
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17918/00001771
Abstract
The dissertation empirically investigates the role of managerial traits, skill, and biases on corporate investment decisions. The first essay causally explores the impact of Diversity Inclusion and Equity (DEI) in the ranks of executive leadership on corporate intangible capital. Using a machine learning algorithm that is trained on the U. S Census to build a novel database that identifies the ethnicity of all C-Suite Executives. It explores the differentiating dimensions of leadership traits that are brought to the managerial decision-making process by DEI. The findings reveal that minority executives pioneer in building a firm's intangible capital by increasing its innovation output and growing its organizational capital. The second essay shows that the sharp decline in option compensation following SFAS 123R in 2005 has diminished the effectiveness of previous option-based managerial overconfidence measures. Thus, it proposes a new measure of managerial overconfidence: dollars at risk from voluntarily holding vested shares and options. It tests 16 predictions from the literature regarding overconfidence and finds strong evidence validating the proposed measure. The third and last essay lends empirical support to the premise that boards consider dynamic CEO performance to make their estimates about true CEO skill. It expands the focus of the relative performance evaluation from studying the relationship of CEO pay and turnover with contemporaneous skill performance to including persistent skill. Its findings show that boards do consider dynamic skill performance in their assessment of managerial skill and that persistent skill is associated with higher pay and a lower probability of turnover.
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Details
- Title
- Essays on corporate investment and managerial attribution
- Creators
- Wahib Ghazni
- Contributors
- David Becher (Advisor)
- Awarding Institution
- Drexel University
- Degree Awarded
- Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
- Publisher
- Drexel University; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Number of pages
- ix, 177 pages
- Resource Type
- Dissertation
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Bennett S. LeBow College of Business; Finance; Drexel University
- Other Identifier
- 991021212314504721