Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 106-109).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 99-106).

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Business / Master / Master of Philosophy

This thesis comprises three essays on international business strategy with regards to services and technology. The first essay investigates why the average expense ratio paid by Canadian mutual fund investors is 50% higher than that paid in U.S. This discrepancy is commonly thought to exist because Canadian funds do not take advantage of economies of scale and have less competition. A monopolistic competition framework is used to develop a model for the mutual fund industry. By allowing each fund to have different attributes, the model permits funds to charge different expense ratios in equilibrium and is found to strongly fit the North American mutual fund market. Empirical analysis indicates that these two common explanations and measurable fund attributes account for 15% of the discrepancy. The second essay analyses the U.S. mutual fund decision to enter the Canadian market through either foreign direct investment (FDI) or trade in advisement services. The total value of U.S.-controlled funds amounts to 18% of the Canadian equity fund market. This paper investigates how the fund-level and firm-level characteristics affect the channel used to enter the Canadian market. Empirical results indicate that the funds offered through FDI are not especially successful in the U.S. market but are associated with companies with large market shares, whereas the funds offered through trade in advisement services are highly successful in the U.S. market and are from companies with relatively few successful funds. The third essay compares the motivation for acquisition between foreign and domestic acquirers of U.S. drug companies, especially with regard to technology transfer. An estimation of the acquisition decision reveals that foreign acquirers choose targets with high research intensity more as their own intensity decreases while domestic acquirers choose targets with high research intensity more as their own intensity increases. Domestic acquirers' post-acquisition innovative productivity increases mostly due to efficiency of knowledge synthesis because the targets are usually have familiar product lines. Foreign acquirers' innovative productivity does not increase after acquisition because they tend to take over firms in unfamiliar research areas that are usually highly technical and require a long-term commitment of R&D.

By construction, actively managed portfolios must differ from passively managed ones. Consequently, the manager’s problem can be viewed as selecting how to deviate from a passive portfolio composition. The purpose of this study is to see if we can infer the presence of superior skills through the analysis of the portfolio deviations from a benchmark. Based on the Black-Litterman approach, we hypothesize that positive signals should lead to an increase in weight, from which should follow that the largest deviations from a benchmark weight reveal the presence of superior skills. More precisely, this study looks at the subsequent performance of the securities corresponding to the largest deviations from different external benchmarks. We use a sample of 8385 US funds from the CRSP Survivorship bias free database from June 2003 to June 2004 to test our predictions. We use two external benchmarks to calculate the deviations: the CRSP value weighted index (consistent with the Black-Litterman model) and the investment objective of each fund. Our main result shows that a portfolio of the securities with the most important positive deviations with respect to a passive benchmark (either CRSP-VW or investment objective), would have earned a subsequent positive abnormal return (on a risk-adjusted basis) for one month after the portfolio date. The magnitude of this return is around 0.6% for all the funds, and can be as high as 2.77% for small caps value funds. This result is robust to all the performance measures used in this study.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 1976. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 120-126). Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center.

Project (M.B.A.) - Simon Fraser University, 2004. / Theses (Faculty of Business Administration) / Simon Fraser University. MBA-GAWM Program. Senior supervisor: Dr. Robert R. Grauer.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1961. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rhode Island, 2005. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 127-134).

I examine the motivations of mutual fund families when deciding what mutual funds to launch, when to launch them, and how they are going to be launched. I begin by analyzing the influence of investor preferences on the flow to open-end mutual funds by associating flow to a fund with the degree to which the fund has an in-favor or trendy name. Results show that funds which conform to market-wide trends generate significantly higher inflows compared to less trendy funds. In my third chapter I examine the decision to launch a fund and show that investment companies have motivation, in the absence of any investment ability, to launch a trendy fund. Launching a trendy fund is beneficial to the fund family, generating additional revenue through fee collection, but is potentially harmful to investors with trendy fund startups underperforming non-trendy fund startups by over 1% per year. My fourth chapter examines the process of mutual fund incubation and shows that funds generate greater inflows post-incubation as a result of investors' positive response to incubation period performance. However, incubation appears to be used for reasons beyond generating a track record of performance. Specifically, fund families are more likely to release underperforming incubated funds if they are struggling to attract inflows to a large objective class.