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Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work / L. Susan Williams / This study is about two grassroots political organizations that formed prior to the 2012 presidential election in the United States, each concerned with the nation's economy, corporate favoritism, government involvement, and growing income inequality. The study outlines an historical account of a culture of control, and then analyzes actions of two contemporary protest organizations – The Tea Party, known as politically conservative; and Occupy Wall Street (OWS), characterized as liberal – as the national election unfolded. Each group sought to change the political landscape and influence the outcome of the presidential election, but with competing messages and very different approaches. Seeking change from the inside, The Tea Party emphasized limited government regulation of the market economy. OWS intended to crumble the system by outside resistance and demanded government attention to economic inequality. Field research and content analysis provide insight into behaviors, beliefs, and actions of each group, which, in turn, identify efforts to resist the status quo. Content analysis of print news provides evidence of state responses toward each group, while also offering insight into media framing and public influence. Finally, a survey of official responses from host communities reveals specific efforts to control protest organizations, ranging from acts of diplomacy to violent opposition. Findings demonstrate how roles of the Tea Party and OWS are not always in conflict, such as media often portray; for example, both groups contested corporate control. The Tea Party met token success, but stopped short of influencing top echelons. OWS brought attention to system inequities, but failed to maintain significant pressure; instead, participants were criminalized for acts of protest. Ironically, in the end, both groups' efforts reinforced the culture of control they sought to resist. Theoretically, a cultural criminology framework, integrating symbolic interaction and social control, demonstrates how structural constraints oppose grassroots political efforts.

This paper uses Federal Funds Futures and the industry returns to analyze the Federal Reserve Policy's influence on Wall Street firms. According to the results, Wall Street produces high returns in response to the monetary policy when compared to other industries. While this positive response is consistent to both interest hikes and cuts, there exists significant cross-firm and cross-period variation. Besides, the result is robust to the alternative measure of event days and employment release.

Financial analysts play a key role in collecting, processing and disseminating information for the stock market. Selecting the best analysts among thousands of analysts is an important task for investors that determines future investment profitability. Extensive research has been dedicated to finding the best analysts of the market based on various criteria for different clienteles. The state of the art approach in this process has developed into so-called Star Rankings with lists of top analysts who have previously outperformed their peers. How useful are such star rankings? Do the recommendations of stars have higher investment value than the recommendations of non-stars (i.e., recommendations of Stars “shoot” more precisely before and after selection)? Or do star rankings simply represent the past performance that will regress to the mean in the future (i.e., in reality, Shooting Stars are not stars and quickly disappear from the sky)? The aim of this Ph.D. thesis is to empirically investigate the performance of sell-side analysts’ recommendations by focusing on a group of star analysts. This thesis comprises four papers that address two overarching questions. (1) Do star rankings capture any true skill, and, thus, can investors rely on the rankings? (Papers I and II) (2) How do market conditions impact star analysts? (Papers III and IV) Paper I examines the profitability persistence of the investment recommendations from analysts who are listed in the four different star rankings of Institutional Investor magazine, StarMine’s “Top Earnings Estimators”, “Top Stock Pickers” and The Wall Street Journal and shows the predictive power of each evaluation methodology. By investigating the precision of the signals that the various methodologies use in determining who the stars are, the study distinguishes between the star-selection methodologies that capture short-term stock-picking profitability and the methodologies that emphasize the more persistent skills of star analysts. As a result, this study documents that there are star-selection methods that select analysts based on more enduring analyst skills, and, thus, the performance of these methods’ stars persists even after ranking announcements. The results indicate that the choice of analyst ranking is economically important in making investment decisions. Paper II investigates the structure of the portfolios that are built on the recommendations of sell-side analysts and confirms that the abnormal returns are explained primarily by analysts’ stock-picking ability and only partially by the effect of over-weight in small-cap stocks. The study examines the number of stocks in the portfolios and the weights that are assigned to market-cap size deciles and GICS sectors and performs an attribution analysis that identifies the sources of overall value-added performance. Paper III examines the differences in seasonal patterns in the expected returns on target prices between star and non-star analysts. Although the market returns in the sample period do not possess any of the investigated seasonal effects, the results show that both groups of analysts, stars and non-stars, exhibit seasonal patterns and issue more optimistic target prices during the summer, with non-stars being more optimistic than stars. Interestingly, the results show that analysts are highly optimistic in May, which contradicts the adage “Sell in May and go away” but is consistent with the notion of a trade-generating hypothesis: since analysts face a conflict of interests, they may issue biased recommendations and target prices to generate a trade. A detailed analysis reveals that the optimism cycle is related to the calendar of companies’ earnings announcements rather than the market-specific effects. Paper IV discusses how a shift in economic conditions affects the competitiveness of sell-side analysts. The focus is on the changes that were triggered by the financial crisis of 2007-2009 and a post-crisis “uncertainty” period from 2010-2013. The study follows Bagnoli et al. (2008) in using a change in the turnover of rankings as a measure of a transformation in analysts’ competitive advantages. Paper IV extends their research and documents how different ranking systems capture analysts’ ability to handle changes in the economic environment. The results show that market conditions impact analyst groups differently, depending on the group’s competitive advantages. / <p>QC 20170412</p> / European Doctorate in Industrial Management

The thesis provides an analysis of the different ways the Occupy Wall Street was presented by OccupyWallSt.org ( the movement’s own media source), and The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today from July 2011 up to the end of June 2012. This was done by using Entman’ theory of media framing together with Castells’ network theory of power. The former provided a way of addressing the different types of frames that mainstream media utilize, while the latter offered an understanding of how power is built through the media processes. Additionally, Castells’ theory described another type of media frame which is mostly used by alternative media, the counter frame, which could successfully be applied to study the content that the social movement decided to provide about itself.The study first employs a quantitative approach by using Crawdad, a centering resonance analysis (CRA) software. This provides a reliable pool of data that was then analyzed by using the above theories. Additionally, in order to check the reliability of the qualitative conclusions, a statistical test was done for the overall top centers resulting from the CRA.

Both Sharon Hayes’s "In the Near Future" (2005-2009) and Catherine Opie’s photographs of assemblies and rallies (2007—) take protest as a topic of investigation. Hayes enacts solo protests in urban centers and documents her project’s iterations; Opie attends organized marches and demonstrations and photographs the gathered crowds. Yet while both projects perform or picture protest in the present-day, neither is wholly of this moment. In her staged actions, Hayes holds the signs and slogans of earlier social movements, and both she and Opie create and consider the images they capture in relation to experiences and visual records which predate them. This thesis considers the ways in which expectations and desires for present and future moments are rooted in understandings of social or political pasts, investigating the work of Hayes and Opie alongside the events of Occupy Wall Street and the histories of the movements these artists reference: ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), Queer Nation, and the Memphis Sanitation Strike of 1968. Focusing on the role of the documentary image in the creation and remembrance of historical events, the paper looks at how the longing to reinhabit a pictured past becomes incorporated within a desire to feel historical, and how fantasies of the past and future are absorbed into the charged space of present. Concentrating first on this temporal rearrangement (referred to by Hayes as an “unspooling of history”) and turning next to the reengagement and embodiment of symbolic imagery, this thesis explores how works by Hayes and Opie emphasize disappointment in the present scene while simultaneously endeavoring to establish alternative spaces of social and political possibility—both new sites and reimagined worlds of belonging. / text

The focus of this report was the modern news media and how the industry has tried to adapt in a world where most news can be gathered with a few keystrokes for free. The report is segmented into four parts and investigates both how and what kind of news is consumed. The first part of the report focuses on the different types of news aggregators and how they affect the revenue of news sites. Pay-walls are also discussed, using The New York Times’ recent decision to charge for access to their web site as a starting point. Evidence shows that besides one glaring exception (The Wall Street Journal, which is examined as an aside) the attempts to charge customers for content that was once free have largely been fruitless. The second part investigates mobile-based applications (also known as “apps”) and their economic strengths and weaknesses; topics ranging from companies’ initial successes to the ease of piracy are examined. The third part examines the meteoric, although at times numerically misleading, rise of Twitter and its potential use as a news gathering and consuming source as well as its massive potential revenue streams. The fourth part examines what types of news are currently the most consumed, and dissects the profitability (and the attributes that lead to their popularity) of four genres: lifestyle, entertainment, business, and sports. The piece also looks at the potential of community-based, hyper-localized journalism, a venture that many claim profitable yet has failed to produce concrete results. Graphs are used as supplementary material for parts one and three. Taken as a whole, the report concludes that while there may be no sure-fire winner in the news media industry, the industry has finally shaken off the complacency that lead to hundreds of thousands of journalism jobs being lost and finally started to evolve. / text

Anti-hegemonic social movements have historically had a complicated and conflicting relationship with mainstream media, as it consistently undermines the emancipatory potential of these grassroots revolutionary movements, hence serving the interests of the dominant social forces of the hegemonic order. This work develops a comprehensive and critical analysis of the agency of mainstream media throughout the coverage of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) to understand how and why it consciously and relentlessly worked to neutralize the true dimension of the movement and its occupations, and thus to preserve the neoliberal capitalist world order from the ideological threat and the revolutionary challenge that OWS posed to it. Employing a historical materialist approach based on Gramsci's theory of hegemony - and the emphasis in the consensual aspect of power in the production of the hegemony that it entails - and its use in the study of world orders grounded in social relations, this work aims to investigate the mainstream media's active role in the building of the current neoliberal capitalist historic bloc, and its subservience to the hegemonic social forces throughout every stage of the coverage of OWS and its occupations: from the deliberate lack of interest and the total indifference in the movement to the...

This dissertation studies three topics in financial economics. In the first chapter, "ESG Investing in Emerging Markets: Betting on Firm Fundamentals or Riding Investor Preferences?", we examine the relation between firms' environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices and the pricing of corporate bonds in emerging markets, which is an important yet understudied market for ESG-related issues. Firms with different ESG scores can have different costs of capital, either because ESG scores help forecast future cash flows -- the "fundamental" channel -- or because investors have non-pecuniary preferences for high-ESG-score assets -- the "preference" channel. We identify the existence of a preference channel with a natural experiment -- the historical opening of the Chinese onshore bond market -- that leads to an increase in the proportion of international investors, who are more ESG-conscious. Consistent with theory, we find that the bond yield of companies with high ESG scores decreases more than that of companies with low ESG scores. By focusing on firms that also have bonds traded in the offshore market, which, as opposed to the onshore market, does not experience any change in regulation, we can control for issuer-time fixed effects in a triple difference design, hence reducing considerably the influence of the fundamental channel. In the second chapter, "Watch what they do, not what they say: Estimating regulatory costs from revealed preferences", we show that distortion in the size distribution of banks around regulatory thresholds can be used to identify costs of bank regulation. We build a structural model in which banks can strategically bunch their assets below regulatory thresholds to avoid regulations. The resulting distortion in the size distribution of banks reveals the magnitude of regulatory costs. Using U.S. bank data, we estimate the regulatory costs imposed by the Dodd-Frank Act. Although the estimated regulatory costs are substantial, they are significantly lower than those in self-reported estimates by banks. In the third chapter, "Fuzzy Bunching", we introduce a new fuzzy bunching approach that is robust to noise. The existing bunching approach identifies the extent of bunching from a sharp spike in the probability density function. In many finance settings, however, the sharp spike could be diffused by data noise. The key idea behind our fuzzy bunching estimator is to identify bunching from the area of a bulge in the cumulative distribution function. The fuzzy bunching approach also avoids density estimation, which makes it easy to implement in sparse data. We provide the theoretical foundation of this approach and illustrate the advantages by using simulated and real data.

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