This dissertation consists of three papers related to firms' resiliency to supply chain disruptions. The first paper seeks to evaluate the effects of supply chain disruptions on firms' performance by using a recent dataset of supply chain disruptions. To this end, we analyzed operating and stock market performances of over 300 firms that experienced a supply chain disruption during 2005 to the end of 2014. The results show that supply chain disruptions are still associated with a significant decrease in operating income, return on sales, return on assets, sales, and a negative performance in total assets. Supply chain disruptions are also associated with a significant negative abnormal stock return on the day of the supply chain disruption announcements. These results are in line with previous findings in the literature. In the second paper, in order to provide a more detailed characterization of negative impacts of disruptions on firms' performance, we develop three complementary measures of system loss: the initial loss due to the disruption, the maximum loss, and the total loss over time. Then, we utilize the contingent resource-based view to evaluate the moderating effects of operational slack and operational scope on the relationship between the severity of supply chain disruptions and the three complementary measures of system loss. We find that maintaining certain aspects of operational slack and broadening business scope can affect these different measures of loss in different ways, although these effects are contingent on the disruptions' severity. The third paper examines relationships between the origin of supply chain disruptions, firms' past experience, and the negative impacts of supply chain disruptions on firms' performance. This third study shows that the impact of external and internal supply chain disruptions on firms' performance can be different when firms do and do not have past experience with similar events. For example, the results show that past experience significantly decreases initial loss, recovery time, and total loss over time experienced by firms after internal disruptions, although past experience may not decrease initial loss, recovery time, and total loss over time in the case of external disruptions. / Ph. D. / Supply chain disruptions occur frequently in today’s complex and interdependent business environment. The Kumamoto earthquakes, Hanjin Shipping’s bankruptcy, and Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, are just a few events that led to major supply chain disruptions in the U.S. and other parts of the world in 2016 and 2017 alone. In this dissertation, we first use a recent dataset of supply chain disruptions to evaluate the effects of supply chain disruptions on firms' performance. The results show that supply chain disruptions are still associated with significant negative impacts on firms’ performance as they have been shown to be in previous studies of earlier datasets. Next, we provide a broader assessment of supply chain disruptions’ impacts on firms’ performance. To accomplish this, we specifically consider the negative impacts with respect to three complementary metrics borrowed from the systems resilience literature: the initial loss, the maximum loss, and the total loss over time. The initial loss and maximum loss metrics evaluate different characteristics of the magnitude of a disruption’s impact on a firm’s performance, whereas total loss over time gives a broader measure of the overall effect of that disruption on that firm, over time. By adopting a more comprehensive view of firms’ performance through the use of such systems resilience concepts, we develop new and expanded inferences about how and when maintaining operational slack and broadening operational scope can benefit firms by helping to reduce the negative impacts of disruptions. Finally, we study the relationships between the negative impacts of supply chain disruptions on firms’ performance, the origin of supply chain disruptions, and firms’ prior experience. The results show that the impact of internal and external supply chain disruptions on firms’ performance can be different when firms do and do not have past experience with similar events. In particular, the results show that past experience significantly decreases initial loss, recovery time, and total loss over time experienced by firms after internal disruptions. However, past experience may not decrease initial loss, recovery time, and total loss over time in the case of external disruptions.

Master of Arts / Department of Economics / Tracy M. Turner / Many municipalities are beginning to play a more central and active role in slowing and reversing the process of the economic stagnation of business and commerce within their cities. Many municipalities combat these problems through the use of providing existing businesses or start up businesses with financial assistance or incentives. Economic theory shows us that a firm’s decision on production and location is influenced by fiscal incentives that are afforded to them. This paper explores the external effects of municipally assisted redevelopment programs. This analysis strives to broaden our understanding of businesses redevelopment programs to include not just the impacts on the commercial side, but see the total effects which include the residential side as well. It analyzes key economic indicators of households who reside within and directly around publicly assisted redevelopment areas and compares these indicators to their non-redeveloped area counterparts. Specifically, it empirically examines the impact of redevelopment on house values and unemployment rates in seven large Midwestern cities: Des Moines, Wichita, Kansas City, St. Louis, Lincoln, Omaha, and Milwaukee, using census data at the block group and census tract levels. I find that redevelopment has a substantial impact in increasing house values and reducing unemployment rates in the vicinity of the redevelopment projects.

Software reuse is a powerful tool in order to reduce development and maintenance time and cost. Any software life cycle product can be reused, not only fragments of source code. A high degree of reuse correlates with a low defect density. In the literature, many theoretical and empirical researches have examined the relationship of software reuse and quality. In this thesis, the effects of reuse on software quality are investigated in an industrial setting. Throughout this study, we worked with Turkey&rsquo / s leading defense industry company: Aselsan&rsquo / s software engineering department. We aimed to explore their real-life software projects and interpret reuse and quality relations for their projects. With this intention, we defined four different hypotheses to determine reuse and quality relations / and in order to confirm these hypotheses / we designed three separate case studies. In these case studies, we collected and calculated reuse and quality metrics i.e. Object-oriented quality metrics, reuse rates and performance measures of individual modules, fault-proneness of software components, and productivity rates of different products. Finally, by analyzing these measurements, we developed suggestions to further benefit from reuse in Aselsan through systematic improvements to the reuse infrastructure and process. Similar case studies have been reported in the literature, however, in Turkey, there are not many case studies using real-life project data, particularly in the defense industry.

Japan obtained equal status with the west imperialism, like Britain and North America, after defeating Russia in 1905. For promoting their mainland policy, they set up the semi-official and semi-private company- South Manchuria Railway (SMR). It owned a huge Research Bureau to investigate some aspects like railway, natural resources, transportation and military, not only for satisfying colonial goal but also for producing rich, valuable and multidimensional knowledge .During forty-years, the Research Bureau attracted and enrolled many Japanese who had interests on, or preference to China. Japanese took this process as a approach or domain to contact with China. This process also reflected their own ideology, image and relative location to China by the rise of the Empire of Japan. This dissertation starts from reviewing important research results, such as Shina Resistance Report, Nōson Chūgoku Kankō Chōsa Surveys. The discussion goes further to four researchers in the SMR: Shūmei Ōkawa, Tachibana Shiraki, Amano Waranosuke and Itō Takeo, who were with various academic background and even standpoint. The investigators attempted to construct their own research approach and meanwhile suffered from dealing it with the subjective power structure. The last section focuses on the academic debate after the war time, in term of controversial interpretation about Mantetsu knowledge from Japanese Sinology. From these three perspectives, the dissertation intends to take Mantetsu as a example to portray the context, power relationship and conflicts within research institute in Japan. It would therefore generalize objectivity, autonomy and path-dependence from the Mantetsu knowledge.

This study mainly discusses the effect, in country level, of minority shareholder protection on shareholder wealth during mergers and acquisitions (M&A). In particular, based on the index of anti-director rights (ADRI) developed by LLSV (1998) and the index of shareholder protection index (SPI) by John Armour et al.(2009), I empirically examine the linkage between M&A activities and indexes as well as the components of these indexes. This study expects the result may show some relevance between of indices and M&A activities, and the legal value of this relevance. The purpose is to show whether minority shareholder protection is workable in M&A activities, and whether it can facilitate M&A markets. To begin with, this paper discusses LLSV¡¦s uniqueness in corporate law study ¡V using empirical method to value whether corporate law matters or not around the world. Then, I analyze LLSV¡¦s possible defects, review criticisms and effects they had incurred. Secondly, we design a study to compare the revised LLSV methodology developed by the Harvard scholar Spamann with SPI index through stock market and M&A market. I also code China¡¦s and Taiwan¡¦s data to make up the lack of samples of cross level variation, and take this as the basis for corporate institutional comparison. This study reports that each of sub-indexes from ADRI and SPI has different relevance to M&A activities: three are positive, five are negative, three are insignificant, and two are valueless of discussion (definition or design defect). Thus we may see the importance of law quantification. We appreciate further research and authorities¡¦ consideration following our work in Taiwan. Finally, the contribution of this study is to attempt to integrate empirical and comparative legal analysis, in response to global corporate governance issues of promoting cross research. On policy implications is that it can predict some investor protection mattes, direct the way of policy adjustment. Besides, this study can also suggest specific amendment for Company Law and Securities law to re-examine how to balance between market development and the protection of minority shareholders.

KM is the process of creating value from the intangible assets of an enterprise. It deals with how best to leverage knowledge internally in the enterprise (in its individual employees, and the knowledge that gets built into its structures and systems) and externally to the customers and stakeholders. As KM initiatives, projects and systems are just beginning to appear in organisations, there is little research and empirical field data to guide the successful development and implementation of such systems or to guide the expectations of the potential benefits of such systems. In addition, about 84 per cent of KM programmes failed or exerted no significant impact on the adopting organisations worldwide due to inability to consider many critical factors that contribute to the success of KM project implementation. Hence, this study is an exploratory investigation into the KM implementation based on an integrated approach. This includes: (1) a comprehensive review of the relevant literature; (2) a comprehensive analysis of secondary case studies of KM implementations in 90 organisations presented in the literature, in order to arrive at the most critical factors of KM implementation and their degree of criticality; (3) exploratory global survey of 92 organisations in 23 countries that have already implemented or are in the process of implementing KM; (4) in-depth case studies of four leading organisations to understand how KM implementation processes and the critical factors identified are being addressed. Based on the empirical findings of the study, 28 critical factors were identified that must be carefully considered in the KM implementation to achieve a successful project. Moreover, the study proposes an integrated model for effective KM implementation which contains essential elements that contribute to project success.

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Made available in DSpace on 2015-04-11T14:02:51Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Sergio Roberto Costa Vieira.pdf: 3218639 bytes, checksum: 3935b43e35cc99b70f873c5ddb6e1882 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-07-18 / This thesis presents a requirements elicitation technique guided by business processes modeling. This technique, called REMO (Requirements elicitation by oriented Business Process Modeling), uses a set of heuristics to extract the software requirements from business process diagrams. The purpose of the technique is to aid systems analysts in the identification of functional requirements, non-functional requirements, and business rules. To accomplish such task, the REMO technique uses business process diagrams created using the BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) notation. This thesis describes how the REMO technique was created and evaluated using an empirical-based research method. Furthermore, we present the analyses of the results obtained through three controlled experiments, which showed evidence that the REMO technique may be considered useful to be applied in software development during a requirements elicitation. / Esta dissertação apresenta uma técnica de elicitação de requisitos orientada pela modelagem de processos de negócios. A técnica de elicitação é denominada como REMO (Requirements Elicitation oriented by business process MOdeling), uma técnica que utiliza um conjunto de heurísticas para extrair os requisitos de software a partir dos diagramas de processos de negócios. O propósito da técnica é apoiar os analistas de sistemas na identificação dos requisitos funcionais, não funcionais e regras de negócios a partir dos diagramas de processos de negócios feitos em BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation). Esta dissertação descreve como a técnica REMO foi elaborada e avaliada por meio de um método de pesquisa baseado em experimentação. Além disso, apresentam-se as análises dos resultados obtidos de três estudos experimentais controlados, que apontaram indícios de que a técnica REMO pode ser considerada útil para ser aplicada no desenvolvimento de software durante a elicitação de requisitos.

Context. Global Software Development (GSD) is the plan of action in which software development is performed under temporal, political, organizational and cultural boundaries. Offshore outsourced software development is the part of GSD, which refers to the transfer of certain software development activities to an external organization in another country. The primary factors driving offshore outsourced software development are low cost, access to a large pool of skilled laborers, increased productivity, high quality, market access and short development cycle. Requirements engineering (RE) and especially requirements elicitation is highly affected by the geographical distribution and multitude of stakeholders. Objectives. The goal of conducting this study is to explore the challenges and solutions associated with requirements elicitation phase during offshore software projects, both in research literature and in industrial practice. Moreover, this study examines that which of the challenges and practices reported in literature can be seen in industrial practice. This helped in finding out the similarities and differences between the state of art and state of practice. Methods. Data collection process has been done through systematic literature review (SLR) and web survey. SLR has been conducted using guidelines of Kitchenham and Charters. During SLR, The studies have been identified from the most reliable and authentic databases such as Compendex, Inspec (Engineering village) and Scopus. In the 2nd phase, survey has been conducted with 391 practitioners from various organizations involved in GSD projects. In the 3rd phase, qualitative comparative analysis has been applied as an analysis method. Results. In total 10 challenges and 45 solutions have been identified from SLR and survey. Through SLR, 8 challenges and 22 solutions have been identified. While through industrial survey, 2 additional challenges and 23 additional solutions have been identified. By analyzing the frequency of challenges, the most compelling challenges are communication, control and socio-cultural issues. Conclusions. The comparison between theory and practice explored the most compelling challenges and their associated solutions. It is concluded that socio-cultural awareness and proper communication between client and supplier organization’s personnel is paramount for successful requirements elicitation. The scarcity of research literature in this area suggests that more work needs to be done to explore some strategies to mitigate the impact of additional 2 challenges revealed through survey. / 0046 707123094