UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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2016 - 20172

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Author: search.filters.author.Zheng, Yue

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    Strategic Shareholders and IPO Disclosure: Evidence from Corporate Venture Capital
    (2017) Zheng, Yue; Hann, Rebecca N.; Business and Management: Accounting & Information Assurance; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This paper exploits the recent rise in corporate venture capitalists (CVC) to examine the effect of shareholders’ strategic incentives on firms’ IPO disclosure. CVCs’ investments are often driven by both financial and strategic incentives. I argue that, due to their strategic incentives, CVCs may influence their portfolio firms’ disclosure choices to protect proprietary information and avoid competitive harm not only to the portfolio firm but also to the CVC parent. Using a sample of venture capital (VC)-backed IPO firms from 1996 to 2014, I find that CVC-backed firms are more likely to redact material information in IPO prospectuses through confidential treatment orders than firms not backed by CVCs—the likelihood of redaction is 16% higher when a CVC is present. This result is robust to using propensity score matching and an instrumental variables approach. Furthermore, the disclosure effect is more pronounced for CVCs in the same industry as the portfolio firm, CVCs with a formal strategic partnership with the portfolio firm, and CVCs with fewer portfolio firms. These findings suggest that CVCs’ strategic incentives play an important role in their portfolio firms’ disclosure choices. CVC-backed firms are also more likely to redact information contained in agreements with collaborative partners, customers, or suppliers and in agreements associated with the CVC parents, which tend to contain proprietary information about the CVC. Taken together, this study offers new insights on how a previously unexplored factor—large shareholders’ strategic incentives—affects corporate disclosure decisions.
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    Intercepting Cyclic Dinucleotide Signaling with Small Molecules
    (2016) Zheng, Yue; Sintim, Herman O; Biochemistry; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Bacterial infections, especially the ones that are caused by multidrug-resistant strains, are becoming increasingly difficult to treat and put enormous stress on healthcare systems. Recently President Obama announced a new initiative to combat the growing problem of antibiotic resistance. New types of antibiotic drugs are always in need to catch up with the rapid speed of bacterial drug-resistance acquisition. Bacterial second messengers, cyclic dinucleotides, play important roles in signal transduction and therefore are currently generating great buzz in the microbiology community because it is believed that small molecules that inhibit cyclic dinucleotide signaling could become next-generation antibacterial agents. The first identified cyclic dinucleotide, c-di-GMP, has now been shown to regulate a large number of processes, such as virulence, biofilm formation, cell cycle, quorum sensing, etc. Recently, another cyclic dinucleotide, c-di-AMP, has emerged as a regulator of key processes in Gram-positive and mycobacteria. C-di-AMP is now known to regulate DNA damage sensing, fatty acid synthesis, potassium ion transport, cell wall homeostasis and host type I interferon response induction. Due to the central roles that cyclic dinucleotides play in bacteria, we are interested in small molecules that intercept cyclic dinucleotide signaling with the hope that these molecules would help us learn more details about cyclic dinucleotide signaling or could be used to inhibit bacterial viability or virulence. This dissertation documents the development of several small molecule inhibitors of a cyclic dinucleotide synthase (DisA from B. subtilis) and phosphodiesterases (RocR from P. aeruginosa and CdnP from M. tuberculosis). We also demonstrate that an inhibitor of RocR PDE can inhibit bacterial swarming motility, which is a virulence factor.