Doctor of Education (Ed.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2018, Leadership Studies

In 1785, Thomas Jefferson wrote,“The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers... [A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of news writers who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper” (Sec.51). Jefferson's views are as salient today as they were in 1785. Some 232 years later, a “mass of people” struggle to distinguish between news that is real and news that is false. The largest context for this struggle to date was the 2016 United States presidential election (Pew Center, 2016c). For some, the “fake news” found on social media has become a harbinger for the emergence of a despotic government (Pew Center). The purpose of this qualitative study was to understand the phenomenon of fake news through the lived experience of graduate students in the United States. The prospective student participants were pursuing advanced degrees in higher education. This research study utilized the uses and gratifications theory (UGT) approach to analyze how and why people used social media during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In light of the influence of fake news on the 2016 presidential election, this study also aimed to investigate the reasons why people believed that fake news were appealing. The thematic analysis revealed people were gratified by the use of social media for connecting with friends and family, gathering and sharing information, and as a vehicle of expression. Participants found a significant amount of fake news stories on social media during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. They tried to identify and differentiate between fake news and real news using the fact-checking websites and major news sources. However, the two significant themes that emerged during the interviews illustrated that (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Judith May (Committee Chair); Dawn Anderson (Committee Member); Angel González (Committee Member); Paul Johnson (Committee Member); Kristina LaVenia (Committee Member) Subjects: Educational Leadership; Mass Media

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2013, Business: Business Administration

This dissertation studies liquidity and its relationship with stock returns and real estate markets. Liquidity has wide ranging effects on financial markets and the financial crisis highlighted the important role played by liquidity in finance and real estate markets. The objective of this dissertation research is to examine the characteristics of liquidity in different financial markets and to study the effect of innovations in liquidity on stock return volatility. First, using high-frequency trading data on publicly-traded real estate investment trusts (REITs) and trading data on commercial real estate assets, we document the transmission of a liquidity shock from public to private markets. Furthermore we examine the relationship between liquidity in real estate markets (both public and private markets) and macroeconomic variables. We also show how the transmission mechanism differs between public and private markets. Second, using revisions to equity analyst consensus forecasts to measure cash-flow news directly, we are able to study the relationship between innovations in liquidity and stock-return volatility under the return-decomposition framework. We contend that both cash-flow news and expected return news correlate with liquidity shocks, and the cash-flow news component is a nontrivial channel through which liquidity correlates with stock returns. This dissertation research aims to fill in the gaps in the existing empirical literature on liquidity and sheds light on the important relationship between liquidity and stock returns.

Committee: Shaun Bond Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Brian Hatch Ph.D. (Committee Member); Steve Slezak Ph.D. (Committee Member); Nicolas Williams Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Business Administration