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Publication Antitrust for the Streaming Era: A Case for Regulating Streaming Giants(2023-12-01) Thrower, LolaMedia and entertainment is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few firms, including Big Tech players. In the Streaming Video on Demand (streaming) market, the trend towards consolidation, vertical integration, price discrimination, and user data collection raises antitrust concerns. The repeal of the Paramount Decrees without replacement further underscores the industry’s potential for unfair competition. This paper explores the trends and practices in today’s streaming sector requiring regulatory attention to protect consumers and other market stakeholders. Navigating the historical context of the Paramount Decrees and antitrust in Hollywood, this paper proposes new regulation and renewed antitrust measures to promote fair competition in a modern, tech-driven entertainment landscape.Publication Electricity Sector Liberalization in South Africa: A Comparative Analysis of Reforms and Outcomes(2023-03-01) Cingo, Luyanda ThabangThis paper explores the current crises in South African state-owned enterprises, through a case-study of the state-owned power utility, Eskom. In order to understand the extent of the crisis, as well as to explore the possible impact of the privatization, the paper will employ a textual analysis of various stakeholders in the South African Economy and a differences-in-differences analysis of economic development indicators against a benchmark of other emerging economies that have privatized their power utilities. The results of the study suggest that privatization of the electricity sector has a positive effect across various indicators. Further, my analysis suggests that privatization has disparate effects on electricity supply on urban and rural populations.Publication Effectiveness Behind the HUD-184 Loan Program(2023-05-01) McDonald, LaurenThis paper evaluates the effectiveness behind the HUD-184 Loan Program. This paper combines data with legislation to provide a timeline of the program’s history. The data has been collected through Congressional archives and HMDA sources in order to better understand the program’s main performance metric: the number of loans endorsed. There is discussion on the possible reasons behind the outcomes of the program, and the main drivers that may have influenced its effectiveness. The mortgage loan count levels for over 200 tribal counties during 2018 to 2021 are mapped below and used for a granular approach to understanding the program’s outcomes. This paper seeks to understand the HUD-184 Loan Program in a number of quantitative ways to build upon the work found in earlier research.Publication Sentiment Analysis in Banruptcy as a Predictor of Dip Loan Interest Rates(2023-04-01) Esmail, IbreezA number of recent papers have found a significant relationship between the sentiments of 10-K MD&A sections as well as other textual sources and bankruptcy outcomes, such as success. However, there has been no research on whether sentiment is a significant predictor of the interest rate on debtor-in-possession loans, which has been documented as having substantial benefits on the restructuring of firms in Chapter 11. This paper addresses this gap by analyzing whether the sentiment of company-produced texts—such as the MD&A section and press releases—as well as externally-produced texts—such as news articles—significantly predict for the spread on DIP loans. In general, findings were not significant, resulting in an inability to prove a statistically significant relationship between sentiment and DIP loan interest rates. However, moderate, significant improvement results were found for models that added in a sentiment scores for external-source articles and a blended average of sentiment scores from all textual pieces.Publication Relative Levels of Financialization of the London Metal Exchange-Traded Base Metal Derivatives(2023-04-01) Jang, Eunwoo MichelleThe nickel market crash of March 2022 on the London Metal Exchange (LME) has reaffirmed the need for a study of financialization specifically focused on the base metal derivatives. This paper employs two methods to analyze time-varying levels of financialization in aluminum, copper, nickel, lead, zinc, and tin: (1) R-squared decomposition of the LME futures change in price slopes and volatility by financial variables and metal-specific fundamental variables, and (2) Granger causality between net position changes of money managers and returns of the LME futures. The two methods’ results are corroborated to suggest a relative ranking of the six LME-traded base metals in the order of: copper, zinc, nickel, aluminum, tin, and lead. The findings also suggest that there may exist an inflection point in the financialization curve at which a base metal enters into a period of de-financialization.Publication Valuation of R&D Intensive Firms in the Technology Industry(2023-12-01) Huang, JunbinPast literature has widely studied the effects of R&D investments, but academics and investors have different views on how R&D investments affect future revenue and firm valuation. This study proposes capitalization and accelerated amortization of R&D expenditure through exponential smoothing. We find the model provides significant advantages in predicting future revenue from R&D investments over traditional models. This study also introduces a heterogeneous R&D capitalization model that reveals unobserved characteristics behind the quality of R&D investments. We find that the unobserved heterogeneity provides statistically reliable and economically relevant information in the construction of investment portfolios.Publication Addressing Mental Health at Work: Managerial Interventions to Promote Employee Utilization of Resources(2023) Korn, HunterMental health is becoming a growing crisis in the United States, with significant costs to the workplace. Despite the availability of company-sponsored mental health resources, they are often underutilized. Previous research has established that managers can improve resource usage through active promotion, and self-disclosure can play an important role in challenging stigma. However, existing research focuses on Employee Action Programs (EAPs) rather than a broader set of mental health resources, and self-disclosure literature revolves around employee self-disclosure but ignores manager self-disclosure. To address these gaps, I investigated how manager endorsement and self-disclosure influence resource utilization. I conducted interviews and a study that varied endorsement. I found that there is a relationship between managerial endorsement, perceived quality of the resource, and utilization. Study findings also point to future extensions such as conducting a cost-benefit analysis of self-disclosure, having a control condition in which mental health resources are not mentioned at all, and the effect of regular, active promotion.Publication "Smells Like Team Spirit": Turnover and Team Success Through the Lens of Rock Bands(2023-12-01) DiCampli, IsabellaThis paper focuses on exploring how team success differs across different levels of member turnover within teams. The increased use of teams in organizations has led to a growing literature on the way teams form and how they function. One important part of team development that researchers are often interested in is how long a team works together, or their tenure. Understanding the impact of team tenure on team performance allows organizations to take into account the impact of trends like member turnover when deciding how to structure their teams. With the growing importance and prevalence of team dynamics in organizations, the question begs itself: can team success be at all explained or predicted by patterns in member turnover? In order to answer this question, this research evaluates how member turnover affects team success by looking at turnover trends within musical groups formed in the 1950s-2000s. The specific research approach will be to use a regression analysis to determine if a musical group’s success can be at all attributed to the patterns of turnover they have experienced during their tenure, and then to use management theory to recommend best practices for organizations to use when thinking about teams. The reasons for focusing on musical groups as the basis for teamwork are trifold. First, the complexity and breadth of the paper’s objective necessitates choosing a narrow segment of teams to analyze, given that a “team” can be formed for many reasons and used in many contexts. Second, musical groups are one type of team where each shares a very specific objective, which is to make good music and achieve success and popularity, at least within their own genre fan base. Lastly, musical groups have member turnover information that is easily accessible, as band membership is often in the public eye. The following section will provide a brief overview of the reasons for musician turnover, in order to set the framework for the model creation.Publication A Sentiment Analysis of Customer Reviews of Two Products Sold on Amazon(2023-05-01) Campbell, BaileyNow more than ever, product reviews are used to help consumers make purchasing decisions. This form of online content serves as a potential source of data for researchers to look into for new ways to make conclusions about what marketing tactics or product qualities are valuable in today’s world of e-commerce. This case study of two nearly identical smart TVs investigates the correlation between review sentiment and consumer satisfaction in regards to a few factors: star ratings, product attributes, and price. Through sentiment analysis it was determined that sentiment towards a product is significantly less polarized than the star rating a consumer gives. An emotion map (word cloud) was used for an observational analysis into what attributes are important for the products in this case study. Price, pending further studies, was determined to have an effect on review sentiment for the two products through regression analysis.Publication Profitability in Sports Betting: A Case Study of Men's Tennis(2023-03-01) Ciobanu, RobertThis paper evaluates the feasibility of profit generation through sports betting. While sports gambling represents a large and rapidly growing economic sector, few bettors are actually profitable and there is limited evidence of successful publicly available strategies. We investigate how such a strategy can be built for the game of men’s tennis. Our methodology for creating a strategy consists of two components. First, it includes a predictive analytics component, in which we combine a large number of observable player, match, and tournament characteristics in order to estimate the probability of either player winning the match. We study both linear and non-linear multivariate combination approaches. Second, our methodology contains a financial strategy component, in which we focus on using money allocation techniques to achieve optimal returns. Through statistical simulations and back-testing, we find that it is possible to generate positive expected profits at sustainable levels of risk, with both formal and informal strategies. Interestingly, we also establish that building a successful strategy does not necessarily require the bettor’s model to have higher predictive accuracy than the betting markets. Instead, bettors can focus on a narrow segment of matches (for example “upsets” – i.e., matches in which the lower-ranked player wins) and outperform the market in that segment alone. We conclude that sports betting can be used as a profitable investment vehicle. Beyond tennis, these techniques can be applied to most other sports, especially those for which large volumes of historical data are publicly available.