Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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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 give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
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Item ANTECEDENTS AND CONSEQUENCES OF INSIDERS' EQUITY SHARE SELLING AT IPO: THREE ESSAYS(2013) Li, Qiang; Goldfarb, Brent; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Secondary share sales at IPO by insiders happen frequently and on a large scale. Current literature offers mixed explanations. For example, signaling theory (Leland & Pyle, 1977) suggests that secondary share sales at IPO by insiders signal poor quality of the IPO firm. The premise is that insiders have more private information about the firm than outsiders. Therefore, insider sales should be indicative of trouble in the firm. This implies that insiders' secondary share sales will be associated with poor pre- and post-IPO performance. Agency theory (Jensen & Meckling, 1976) suggests that insiders will lower their commitment to the firm after they sell part of their shares; after such sales, managerial and firm interests are more poorly aligned. This theory suggests that poor post-IPO performance is causally associated with insiders' secondary share sales at IPO. Finally, risk aversion may drive insiders to diversify their risk away from the focal firm by selling secondary shares at IPO. This would suggest that sales have nothing to do with firm quality or managerial commitment. Although the above theories provide different implications for practice, the mixed nature of their explanations prevent us from having a clear understanding of the phenomenon. Additionally, prior studies have been unable to tease them apart. To address this issue, this dissertation investigates the following related questions: what factors predict insiders' secondary share sales at IPO and how do such sales affect various firm performances. Only by looking at the antecedents and consequences of insiders' share sales at IPO, as well as finding exogenous variation that affects secondary share sales and is unrelated to the characteristics of the firm can we see if the sales are associated with firm quality or risk aversion or if insiders lower their commitment after sales. The answers to these questions are investigated in three essays. In Essay 1, I ask which CEOs sell shares at IPO and under what conditions? Using a sample of 651 U.S. software IPOs from 1990 to 2011, I find that when more of the CEO's wealth is tied up in the firm, they are more likely to sell. The effect is especially strong for CEO founders. Interestingly, when board members also engage in equity share sales at IPO, CEOs are more likely to sell. This latter result suggests weakened board oversight of the CEO. Using an instrumental variable approach, I tease apart cotemporaneous selling due to poor firm quality and selling that only occurs with the reduction of oversight. In Essay 2, I ask when equity share sales at IPO influence IPO underpricing. Through an analysis of 633 IPOs in the U.S. computer software industry, I find that the equity share sales by outside directors (VCs and other institutional investors) are associated with upward offer price revision pre-IPO and lower IPO underpricing. The interpretation is that outside directors may be able to bargain for a higher offer price when they attempt to sell part of their equity shares at IPO. As such, the upward offer price revision pre-IPO results from outsiders' bargaining leads to lower IPO underpricing. These results are robust to a Heckman two-stage approach that addresses potential selection bias. In Essay 3, I examine whether insiders' secondary share sales at IPO impacts a variety of performance measures post-IPO and the contingencies under which any impact may vary. Through the analysis of 500 IPOs of the U.S. computer software industry, in general, I find that insiders' secondary share sales at IPO are not associated with sales or sales growth. Rather, they are only associated with slower R&D growth in the year post-IPO. This effect is less negative for large firms. The results are robust to an instrumental variable approach to address the potential endogeneity issues. Taken together, this dissertation finds that insiders' secondary share sales are not significantly associated with post-IPO firm performances, providing no support to signaling theory or agency theory. The findings are more consistent with risk aversion theory and imply that insiders' secondary share sales at IPO are not a significant negative signal and traditional wisdom may overreact to the sales.Item Narratives of Human Agency Among Low Income Incarcerated Fathers(2012) Fang, Jennifer Jing; Roy, Kevin; Family Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Prior literature has focused on studying low income or incarcerated fathers from a deficit perspective. For example, there is ample evidence showing that high risk behaviors are associated with children who have non-custodial fathers and about mothers' perspectives on father absence. However, there is still a lack of literature about how these fathers experience agency to take control and make change in their lives in spite of the barriers they face. I conduct a secondary analysis of life history interviews of 40 fathers in a work release program. The theoretical framework that guides this study is narrative inquiry, using sensitizing concepts from McAdams' (2001) four themes of agency: self mastery, status/victory, achievement/responsibility, and empowerment. Out of McAdams' four themes, self mastery and achievement/responsibility were the most prominent themes of agency. Additional emergent themes of agency are found in fathers' life history narratives.Item Faculty Agency: Departmental contexts that matter in faculty careers(2012) Campbell, Corbin Martin; O'Meara, KerryAnn; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The purpose of this study was to investigate the organizational factors that influence faculty sense of agency in their professional lives and whether the relationship between organizational factors and faculty agency manifests differently by gender. Past literature on faculty has largely taken an approach that was termed a "narrative of constraint," focusing on the challenges that faculty face in modern academe, such as increased academic capitalism, striving, and new technologies (O'Meara, Terosky, & Neumann, 2008; Schuster & Finkelstein, 2006). More recently, certain scholars sought to understand what keeps faculty satisfied and thriving in a higher education context with multiple challenges (Baez, 2000a; Neumann, Terosky, & Schell, 2006; O'Meara, Terosky, & Neumann, 2008). The construct of agency is a powerful perspective to uncover how faculty navigate academe and succeed in their own goals. Guided by the O'Meara, Campbell, and Terosky (2011) framework on agency in faculty professional lives, this study used Structural Equation Modeling to investigate which organizational factors (perceptions of tenure and promotion process, work-life climate, transparency, person-department fit, professional development resources, and collegiality) influenced faculty agency perspective and agency behavior and whether agency was associated with important faculty outcomes, such as intent to stay, satisfaction, and productivity. Then, this studied investigated whether the resulting model differed by gender. Results showed that work-life climate and person-department fit had a positive direct influence on agency perspective and a positive indirect influence on agency behavior. Professional development resources had a positive influence on agency perspective, but a negligible influence on agency behavior. Results also showed a very large effect of agency perspective on agency behavior. The invariance test by gender demonstrated that the relationships between organizational factors and faculty sense of agency were the same for men and women. This study illustrated the importance of departmental contexts in faculty professional lives, regardless of gender. It has important implications for administrators regarding departmental role in faculty agency, and also contributes to the continued development of a theoretical framework on faculty agency.Item CONTRIBUTIONS OF AGENCY VS. NON-AGENCY TO SEQUENTIAL MEMORY IN 3-YEAR OLDS(2010) Shuck, Lauren Haumesser; Woodward, Amanda L.; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Two studies explored the effect of agency on memory in 3-year-old children when learning a sequence in a picture-book format. Previous research has shown that with both adults and older children, the inclusion of agency in free verbal recall is a central theme. However, very young children are often thought to have poor memory for social events because of their verbal limitations. By using a form of deferred imitation, Study 1 explored social episodic memory in a non-verbal sequential reconstruction task. Children who saw an agent in the picture sequence reconstructed more steps than those that did not see an agent present in the picture-books. Study 2 expanded upon these results by investigating the extent to which agency is necessary in order to improve memory, and what properties of the Study 1 increased performance. In this study, participants who were presented with an agent in only the first and last picture of the sequence did not reconstruct more steps than those that did not see an agent present. Taken together, agency may increase memory for a sequence but only if ample amounts of agentive cues are present throughout.