Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2016, Management

A review of financial system stress measures reveals not only the absence of theory on financial stress, but also the absence of search for theory. To remedy this gap, this study conducts a rigorous investigation of the empirical validity and dynamic properties of financial stress measurement in the context of financial system complexity. We provide and validate four contributions to literature. First, we establish the relevance and comparative quality of macro-level stress measurement for the financial system relative to alternative measures of system conditions. Second, we establish theoretical foundations for measuring financial stress across multiple units of analysis. This measure builds on the understanding of stress origins and drivers and incorporates price, quantity, and behavioral variables to explain the pattern of apparently irrational choices of financial agents. At the macro-level, stress is supported empirically by hypotheses of association between behavioral aspects of heterogeneous financial agents and overall financial system stress. At the micro-level, we apply abductive inference to the empirical results to propose a new theoretical stress measure for heterogeneous agents and instruments. Defining financial stress theoretically allows continual measurement of financial stress at the level of the various heterogeneous partitions of the financial system (e.g. agents and instruments) as these partitions evolve through structural changes and financial innovations. Third, we build a theory of stress transmission across micro-level of sectoral agents to the macro-level of the financial system. This theory describes a process of stress transmission across financial intermediaries and the process by which its agent stress escalates to the financial system. Fourth, we examine the process by which unusual conditions in the financial markets manifest as critical states of financial system stress.

Committee: Kalle Lyytinen (Committee Chair); Lucia Alessi (Committee Member); Agostino Capponi (Committee Member); Myong-Hun Chang (Committee Member); Corinne Coen (Committee Member) Subjects: Banking; Economics; Finance; Management

Master of Information and Telecommunication Systems (MITS), Ohio University, 2015, Information and Telecommunication Systems (Communication)

This thesis addresses certain technical and financial challenges associated with the deployment and operation of relay spacecraft using the Internet Protocol as the primary routing protocol. Though IP in space has been a hot topic for nearly a decade, few studies address the capabilities of management protocols being used to operate a geostationary fleet. Likewise, few have addressed the real-world cost structure of replacing a traditional bent-pipe fleet with an IP-enabled fleet. Within our research, we investigate whether SNMP, TFTP, and SCP are capable of meeting the Tracking, Telemetry, and Command requirements set by a real-world geostationary relay service provider. We also investigate the driving forces of relay deployment and operational costs, identify Rough Order of Magnitude costs for a geostationary IP-enabled relay, and define a financial profile categorizing the costs of replacing a bent-pipe fleet with an IP-enabled fleet.

Committee: Hans Kruse (Advisor); Shawn Ostermann (Committee Member); Philip Campbell (Committee Member); Wesley Eddy (Committee Member) Subjects: Aerospace Engineering; Communication; Information Science; Information Systems; Information Technology; Technology

Doctor of Organization Development & Change (D.O.D.C.), Bowling Green State University, 2024, Organization Development

This qualitative study employed a socio-technical framework as a lens to investigate the banking experiences of low-income and higher-income individuals, shedding light on the nuances of their interactions with traditional banks. Using comparative deductive thematic analysis, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 18 participants, equally divided between low-income and higher-income groups. The study revealed disparities in banking experiences, with low-income community members facing less favorable outcomes in specific areas. The findings have significant practical implications for enhancing community relations, refining banking operations, and improving financial education, particularly in low-income communities. This research lays the groundwork for future studies to explore bank employees' perspectives and expand on the current findings, ultimately contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of the interactions between individuals and banking institutions. By illuminating the lived experiences of diverse community members, this study informs strategies for more inclusive and equitable banking products and services

Committee: Steven Cady Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Hee Soon Lee Ph.D. (Other); Carol Gorelick Ed.D. (Committee Member); Jeanelle Sears Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Banking; Business Administration; Comparative; Finance; Management; Organizational Behavior

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2020, Journalism (Communication)

In Western world, government intervention via media policy is supposed to help correct market failures such as the existence of external cost/benefit on third parties, the lack of public goods, or the abuse of monopoly power (Rolland, 2008; Hoskins et al., 2004; Picard, 1989). In communist nations, government intervention is more often viewed as to protect political ideas (Lee et al., 2006; Silverblatt & Zlobin, 2004; Siebert et al., 1978). However, in the post-communist era, communist governments were steered towards a market economy with a socialist orientation, leading to the ambiguity of their media policies' goals and subsequently, their policy outcomes. In this study, I choose to analyze media policies in Vietnam, a still communist nation, to understand its current policy goals and to evaluate the effectiveness of the policy on news quality and financial performance of Vietnamese press organizations. The study is done based on Freedman's (2008) definition of media policy, normative analyses and the public interest theory outlined by Hoskin et al. (2004), and financial commitment model developed and tested by many media economists (Lacy, 1989; Martin, 2003; Lacy & Martin, 2004). Three research questions are asked as following: (1) What changes in press laws have occurred in Vietnamese history in terms of Freedman's identified key policy tools, such as regulations regarding ownership, subsidies, taxes, advertising and content restrictions?; (2) Can the current, state-run news media policy be justified on the grounds of market failures according to the economic theory of government intervention?; and (3) How do news organizations perform under the current news media policy, assuming the positive relationship between media competition, as a result of changes in market structure, and media performance, including financial performance and news quality? A qualitative document analysis of 270 legal documents drawn from the Ministry of Information and Communication Arc (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Hugh Martin (Committee Chair) Subjects: Journalism

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, Industrial and Systems Engineering

Many decision problems are set in changing environments. For example, determining the optimal investment in cyber maintenance depends on whether there is evidence of an unusual vulnerability such as “Heartbleed” that is causing an especially high rate of incidents. This gives rise to the need for timely information to update decision models so that the optimal policies can be generated for each decision period. Social media provides a streaming source of relevant information, but that information needs to be efficiently transformed into numbers to enable the needed updates. This dissertation first explores the use of social media as an observation source for timely decision-making. To efficiently generate the observations for Bayesian updates, the dissertation proposes a novel computational method to fit an existing clustering model, called K-means Latent Dirichlet Allocation (KLDA). The method is illustrated using a cyber security problem related to changing maintenance policies during periods of elevated risk. Also, the dissertation studies four text corpora with 100 replications and show that KLDA is associated with significantly reduced computational times and more consistent model accuracy compared with collapsed Gibbs sampling. Because social media is becoming more popular, researchers have begun applying text analytics models and tools to extract information from these social media platforms. Many of the text analytics models are based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). But these models are often poor estimators of topic proportions for emerging topics. Therefore, the second part of dissertation proposes a visual summarizing technique based on topic models, a point system, and Twitter feeds to support passive summarizing and sensemaking. The associated “importance score” point system is intended to mitigate the weakness of topic models. The proposed method is called TWitter Importance Score Topic (TWIST) summarizing method. TWIST employs the topic propor (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Theodore Allen (Advisor); Steven MacEachern (Committee Member); Cathy Xia (Committee Member); Nena Couch (Other) Subjects: Finance; Industrial Engineering; Operations Research; Statistics; Systems Science

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, Social Work

Financial inclusion programs have seen remarkable growth throughout the last two decades, with continued annual growth of up to 15% predicted for micro-credit along in the Sub-Saharan African region over the next three years. However, as private investment funds begin to dominate microfinance funding streams, there is debate about the benefits of microcredit for the population most targeted with these funds: women in the Global South. One aspect of this debate concerns the need for social capital, resources embedded in social networks, for the success of microcredit lending. While its necessity is acknowledged, the way that social capital is created, structured, and employed in women's groups is not adequately understood. By better understanding these aspects of social capital, microcredit programs can be better designed, and the ethical implications of expanding microfinance services can be better understood. Employing a mixed methodology of qualitative interviewing and social network analysis, this study explores the phenomenon of social capital across a diverse sample of 12 women's collective financial groups, including both informal savings clubs and micro-credit groups located in the West African urban capital of Conakry, Guinea. A multi-dimensional model of social capital developed by the World Bank was modified for use with this research population and included six domains: Access to Resources, Trust, Communication, Cooperation, Social Cohesion, and Empowerment. In depth qualitative interviews with 84 members of collective finance groups were analyzed to answer the question: What are Guinean women's experiences as members of collective financial groups? Upon developing an understanding of the groups, this study then asked: How is social capital structured in the groups, and how do the social capital networks of collective financial groups function? Sociometric network analysis examined a global measure of social capital as well as analysis of each of s (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Mo Yee Lee PhD (Committee Chair); Sharvari Karandikar PhD (Committee Member); Keith Warren PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: African Studies; Social Work; Womens Studies

BA, Oberlin College, 2016, Politics

Private sector investment has become one of the most essential sources of international capital flows to developing countries. Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) as one type of private sector investment has the potential to drive economic growth and development. Understanding the factors that motivate or deter foreign investors from investing in a developing country therefore is crucial. This thesis examines the particular case of Pakistan and analyzes internal and external factors that have affected the inclines and declines in inflows of FDI to the country between 2000 and 2014. By performing a comparative sectoral analysis, this thesis examines the effects of government efficacy, national security, and global levels of FDI inflows on FDI inflows on three distinct sectors in Pakistan: Energy, Telecommunications, and Financial Services. The thesis argues that a rapidly deteriorating domestic situation post-2008 due to weakened governance and limited security provision within the country has increased the perceived levels of risk and uncertainty associated with investing in Pakistan. This has resulted in a sharp decline in FDI inflows to the country.

Committee: Eve Sandberg (Advisor) Subjects: Political Science

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2014, East Asian Languages and Literatures

This paper performs an analysis on the current food safety assurance system in China. It analyzes the three major roles in the system: consumers, government regulators, and food product providers. This analysis allows us the better understand the inter-relationships between these groups within the system as well as their degree of influence of the level of safety of food products. From this analysis and research, this paper suggests methods for expediting the process of ensuring the safety of food products in China. These take into account the influence of the media, the current laws and regulations, as well as the economic relationships between the government, the industry, and consumers. The research in this paper places a strong emphasis on the influence of consumers within this system. Research was conducted on both the social changes and economic changes of Chinese food product consumers. The results proved that not only is the economic situation of consumers improving, but their views of food safety is changing as well. Consumers are becoming more concerned about the safety of their food products. There may even be a link between these economic changes and the social changes, due to the fact that these social changes are usually most prevalent in economically developed areas. Ultimately, this paper was written in hopes of finding feasible ways to improve the food safety climate in China, while being beneficial to consumers, the food industry, and the Chinese government. Safe food is a basic necessity of life that should be afforded to all people.

Committee: XiaoBin Jian (Advisor) Subjects: Economics; Food Science; Foreign Language; Health; Health Sciences; Public Health; Public Health Education; Public Policy; Regional Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2009, Family Resource Management

This is a study of the decision to use a financial planner in saving and investing decisions. Satterthwaite's (1979) improvements upon Stigler's (1961) model of the economics of information were used to define the practice of financial planning as a reputation good. The theory of the economics of information was used to model the likelihood of married couple households to prefer the services of a financial planner over other sources of information. In addition to search theory, seminal and current help-seeking articles revealed a need to place significant emphasis on the differences between men and women in their external search efforts for a financial professional. The objective of this study was to examine the predisposition of women to ask for help in financial affairs over men. An unweighted sample of 2,691 married couple households from the 2004 Survey of Consumer Finances was used to obtain the data necessary to achieve this objective. The respondent of the survey was the spouse who was most familiar with the household's finances. Each household was instructed to select the financially most knowledgeable spouse as the respondent for the survey. Within the sample of married couple households and only among those who used a financial planner, a weighted 23% of households had husband respondents who used a planner and 24% of households had wife respondents who used a planner. An initial logit model revealed that compared to male respondents in a married couple household, being a female respondent was positively associated with the likelihood of choosing a financial planner for saving and investment advice; having household income in the 10% and 15% tax bracket in 2004 was negatively associated with using a financial planner compared to households in the 25% bracket; having greater than or equal to $100,000 in financial assets was positively associated with using a financial planner; and being willing to take financial risks was negatively associated with using (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jonathan Fox PhD (Advisor); Sherman Hanna (Committee Member); Catherine Montalto (Committee Member) Subjects: Behaviorial Sciences; Demographics; Economics; Families and Family Life; Finance; Gender; Home Economics; Womens Studies

Master of Science (MS), Ohio University, 1989, Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering (Engineering)

A stochastic short term financial planning model using time series analysis

Committee: Robert Terry (Advisor) Subjects: Engineering, Industrial

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2012, Political Science

The Nabucco and South Stream gas pipeline projects and the two coalitions promoting them are in a political competition. In this political rivarly, the media has been playing a crucial role. Media is the best way to secure influence over public opinion and this factor becomes extremely important in an era when public opinion plays an increasingly important role in international relations. In this paper, content analysis of two major newspapers, Russian Vedomosti and British The Financial Times, was done in order to analyze how the two coalitions are trying to manage media coverage. As a result, it has been identified that messaging, reporting about “major breakthroughs,” and leaks to the press were all used as tools to influence public opinion.

Committee: Gulnaz Sharafutdinova PhD (Advisor); Ora John Reuter PhD (Committee Member); Christopher Kelley PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Asian Studies; Communication; Comparative; East European Studies; Energy; International Relations; Journalism; Mass Communications; Mass Media; Political Science