Browsing by Author "Gupta, Vishal K."
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Item Top Management Teams and Corporate Behavior: Influence of Gender Diversity and Innovation Experience on Firm Outcomes(University of Alabama Libraries, 2024) Cao, Tianhua; Mortal, Sandra C.This dissertation comprises three essays examining the impact of gender diversity and professional experience on various aspects of corporate behavior. In the first essay, we investigate the relation between management gender diversity and employee welfare. Analyzing federal penalties on firms for labor violations, we find that higher female representation in management is associated with fewer violations. The effect is economically meaningful and more pronounced for managers in labor-related roles. Causal inference is supported through instrumental variables and the staggered adoption of universal demand laws that decrease shareholder litigation risk. Our findings suggest that one explanatory channel for this association is enhanced employee-related investment in firms with more gender-diverse management. In high-corruption regions, greater gender diversity mitigates the effect of corruption on labor violations.In the second essay, we examine the impact of CEOs with prior experience in innovative firms on fostering innovation in their current firms. Our findings reveal that firms led by innovation-experienced CEOs allocate more to R&D, generate more patents, and receive more citations. To address potential endogeneity, we utilize instrumental variable (IV) analysis, an exogenous CEO turnover setting, and tariff cuts as exogenous shocks to firms' innovation activities. The results suggest that CEOs' prior professional experience with innovation significantly boosts corporate innovation. Additionally, we identify resource reallocation and the recruitment of promising inventors as potential channels through which this innovation experience affects corporate outcomes.In the third essay, we provide a novel explanation for the purported link between CFO gender and firm-level risk-aversion (as captured by firm leverage), by examining the impact of Accounting Standards Update No. 2016-02 (ASU 2016-02). This update mandates the recognition of operating leases on the balance sheet, predictably increasing firms' financial leverage. We find that firms with female CFOs exhibit lower leverage compared to their male counterparts before the announcement of ASU 2016-02. However, this disparity diminishes post-announcement and approaches zero post-implementation. Further analysis reveals that firms with female CFOs consistently maintain higher levels of operating lease commitments and increase the use of existing debt post-ASU 2016-02. These results suggest that female executives are not inherently more risk-averse compared to male executives.Item Venture creation in the aftermath of COVID-19: The impact of US governor party affiliation and discretion(Springer, 2023) Borgholthaus, Cameron J.; White, Joshua, V; Markin, Erik; Gupta, Vishal K.; Southern Illinois University Edwardsville; University of Dayton; Saint Petersburg State University; Mississippi State University; University of Alabama TuscaloosaIn the USA, governors became central figures in the fight against the novel coronavirus. In many cases, state leaders were forced to choose between preserving life and protecting economic livelihood. While prior research has underscored the important role that US governors played in implementing healthcare policies at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we know little about how characteristics of state leaders impacted self-employment. In this paper, we draw from upper echelons theory to examine how governor party and discretion impacted venture creation in the food and restaurant industry. Interestingly, we find no significant relationship between governor party and venture creation. However, we find that when the governor and legislature were unified in their political party - irrespective of party line - there were a higher number of new food and restaurant ventures created. We also found this effect to be strengthened when small business unemployment levels were higher. We explore the implications of these results for how unity of command may be beneficial during times of crisis. Plain English Summary During the initial outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in the USA, governors played a critical role in creating policy that either helped to preserve life or protect economic livelihood. Our research examines how two particularly important characteristics of governors and the political environment - party affiliation and discretion - impacted new venture creation within the food and restaurant industry, which is an important indicator of economic recovery. Using a publicly available, hand-collected dataset inclusive of all 50 states, we find that the political party of the governor has no effect on venture creation. However, we demonstrate that when the governorship and state legislature were aligned and led by members with the same party affiliation, the state experienced a greater number of new venture creation in the food and restaurant industry than when leaders of these two branches of government were not aligned. We further found that the effect of governor discretion was stronger when small business unemployment levels were higher. Our findings have implications for practice by suggesting that a unity of command government structure can be advantageous for economic outcomes during crises.