Il s’avère difficile d’expliquer pourquoi certains individus décident de devenir entrepreneurs malgré le risque encouru. Dans cette thèse, j’analyse les effets de plusieurs mécanismes comportementaux sur la décision d’entrée en entrepreneuriat. Le premier essai propose de séparer les effets sur la décision d’entrer sur un marché de deux mécanismes comportementaux qui ont parfois pu être confondus : la confiance en soi et l’attitude envers l’ambiguïté. Cet essai met en avant le rôle fondamental de l’attitude envers l’ambiguïté dans la décision d’entrer sur un marché, en particulier quand les résultats de l’entrée dépendent directement des compétences du décideur, comme dans le cas de l’entrepreneuriat. La nature même de l’entrepreneuriat est d’investir du capital et du temps dans le but d’obtenir des bénéfices financiers dans le futur. Comprendre les préférences temporelles pour le temps et l’argent des entrepreneurs peut permettre d’améliorer notre compréhension des facteurs déterminants de l’entrée en entrepreneuriat. Alors que de nombreuses études analysent le choix inter-temporel pour l’argent, très peu d’études se sont intéressées à comment les individus escomptent leur futur temps, malgré le fait que le temps soit une ressource limitée et de valeur. Le deuxième essai examine cette question dans une expérience en laboratoire avec incitations réelles. A l’aide d’une expérience en ligne, le troisième essai analyse les préférences temporelles pour le temps et l’argent d’un échantillon de futurs entrepreneurs et de futurs managers. / Explaining why individuals enter into entrepreneurship has been challenging. In this thesis, I take a behavioral perspective and analyze the effects on entrepreneurial entry of behavioral mechanisms that have been understudied in the entrepreneurship literature. The first essay proposes to disentangle the effects on market entry of two mechanisms that may have been confounded: overconfidence and attitude toward ambiguity. This essay highlights the critical role of ambiguity attitude on the decision to enter a market, particularly when the result depends on one’s skills, such as entry into entrepreneurship. The very nature of entrepreneurship is to invest capital and time with the hope of receiving future financial benefits. I therefore argue that understanding entrepreneurs’ temporal preferences for time and money can provide new insights on the determinants of entry into entrepreneurship. While intertemporal choice involving money has been studied extensively in the behavioral literature, very few studies have analyzed the way people discount time, despite the fact that it is a scarce and valuable resource. The second essay investigates this issue in a laboratory experiment. Finally, using a lab-in-the-field experiment, the third essay analyzes temporal preferences for money and time of a comparable sample of future entrepreneurs and future managers.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(経済学) / 甲第19953号 / 経博第540号 / 新制||経||279(附属図書館) / 33049 / 京都大学大学院経済学研究科経済学専攻 / (主査)教授 江上 雅彦, 教授 若井 克俊, 教授 原 千秋 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Economics / Kyoto University / DFAM

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My dissertation consists of two chapters exploring several aspects of empirical corporate finance with a special focus on founder CEOs and family firms. Chapter 1 focuses on the impact of founder CEO leadership on firm value in publicly listed U.S. firms. Previous research on how founder CEOs affect firm value shows mixed results. Using a natural experiment whereby I measure the impact of the sudden deaths of CEOs during the period 1964–2018, I document that stock prices increase by 1.56% upon founder CEOs’ deaths and decrease by 2.89% upon professional CEOs’ deaths. Next, I develop a novel measure of managerial private benefits and discuss several new insights. First, I document that the positive stock price reactions to the sudden deaths of founder CEOs are mainly driven by the fact that founder CEOs extract two times greater private benefits relative to professional CEOs. Second, segregating private benefits into two parts – nepotism and non-nepotism – I find that investors react to both types of private benefits. Third, investor reactions are more pronounced for tunneling-related disclosed private benefits than for investment-related non-disclosed private benefits. Fourth, investors reactions are more pronounced for private benefits related to underinvestment than for private benefits related to overinvestment. Overall, my paper highlights the impact of CEO leadership styles on shareholder wealth. Chapter 2 examines significant family ownership in publicly listed U.S. firms. Instead of holding a diversified portfolio, family owners, such as the Waltons of Walmart, hold large fractions of their wealth in a single stock. To explain this decision, we build a unique model of ambiguity aversion wherein the family’s information advantage in their firm allows them to more accurately estimate value-at-risk in tail events relative to the diversified portfolio. Using an index of macroeconomic uncertainty, we find a strong, negative relation between the uncertainty beta and both family ownership and involvement. Also consistent with our predictions, we document that families with high absolute wealth or risk aversion are unlikely to exit the firm. Our analysis provides an explanation for a family owner’s decision to hold a concentrated stake in a single firm in countries with well-developed financial markets and legal regimes. / Business Administration/Finance

Using similar disjunctive writing styles, Michael Ondaatje and Daphne Marlatt create characters who defy stability, consistency, and predictability. Both authors undermine the notion that the self is a unified entity determined to resist an ambiguity in the search for univocal meaning. Rather, the worlds inhabited by Buddy Bolden, Lalla Dickman, Mervyn Ondaatje, and Ina as found in Coming Through Slaughter, Running in the Family, and Ana Historic subscribe to uniformity by valourizing social and textual conventions. Within these contexts of closure, all characters succumb to some degree of hysteria, madness, or death. In Ondaatje's novels scandal becomes a release from the monotony of a unified self, while in Ana Historic Annie Anderson's continual displacement of pronouns effectively suspends female identity. Ondaatje and Marlett fictionalize the post-structuralist work of Roland Barthes in "The Death of the Author" in that both authors create characters whose boundaries are never fixed, but always shifting according to the contexts in which they find themselves. On this basis the self as embodied in the pronoun "I" contains not a set persona, but a network of competing voices. In the final chapter of this thesis, I examine the implications for authorship which Ondaatje and Marlatt raise in their contention that the self exists without a central core. During moments of autobiography, Ondaatje and Marlatt implicitly contest the defacement of their signatures on novels which call for an obfuscation of identity, but arrest that movement when it folds back on the author's domain--the outer cover of the text. Because Ondaatje and Marlett elide themselves with their characters, they, too, are pulled into a vertigo of language that knows not identity, but the endless positing and erasure of tropes. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

The text that I have translated below, and for which the paper that precedes it is a critical introduction, is Kanai Mieko’s short novel, Yume no jikan. I have translated the title quite literally as Dream Time. The following critique will focus primarily on Yume no jikan, read with special attention paid to its intertextual relationship with Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and how I see those texts as informing Kanai’s treatment of the perceiving subject not only in Yume no jikan, but also in much of her fiction through the 1970s. In the end, I hope to articulate those elements of this piece that make it utterly fascinating to me as a reader, namely how I see Kanai constructing a Carrollian unsolvable riddle that thoroughly dismantles the authority of the perceiving subject, and by extension, challenges the authority of the narrative itself. I will demonstrate how this deconstruction is achieved through direct questioning of self-identity, omnipresent intertextuality, and persistent use of temporal ambiguity. In Yume no jikan, descriptions of the protagonist's dreams are interwoven into its basic framework, imbuing the narrative with an atmosphere resembling the liminal space/time between sleep and waking. In this narrative universe, dreams operate as unreliable memory, and the dreaming self as unreliable narrator.

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) was originally designed as an airborne ground-imaging radar technology. But it has long been desired to also be able to use SAR imaging systems to detect, locate, and track moving ground targets, a process called Ground Moving Target Indication (GMTI). Unfortunately, due to the nature of how SAR works, it is inherently poorly suited to the task of GMTI. SAR only focuses targets and image features that remain stationary during the data collection. A moving ground target therefore does not focus in a conventional SAR image, which complicates the process of performing GMTI with SAR systems. This thesis investigates the feasibility of performing GMTI with single-channel, unsquinted, broadside stripmap SAR despite this inherent limitation. This study focuses solely on the idealized case of direct energy returns from point targets on flat ground, where they and the airborne radar platform all move rectilinearly with constant speed. First, the various aspects of how SAR works, the signal processing used to collect the SAR data, and the backprojection image formation algorithm are explained. The effects of target motion are described and illustrated in actual and simulated SAR images. It is shown how the backprojection (BPJ) algorithm, typically used to image a stationary landscape scene, can also focus on moving targets when the target motion is known a priori. A SAR BPJ ambiguity function is also derived and presented. Next, the time-changing geometry between the airborne radar and a ground target is mathematically analyzed, and it is shown that the slant range between the radar and any ground target, moving or stationary, is a hyperbolic function of time. It is then shown that this hyperbolic range history causes the single-channel SAR GMTI problem to be underdetermined. Finally, a method is then presented for resolving the underdetermined nature of the problem. This is done by constraining a target's GMTI solution using contextual information in the SAR image. Using constraining information, a theoretical way is presented to perform limited GMTI with a single-channel SAR system by using a modified form of the BPJ imaging algorithm, and practical considerations are addressed that complicate the process. Instead of focusing on stationary pixels, this GMTI method uses the BPJ ambiguity function to search for moving targets on a straight path, such as a road, by performing matched filtering on a collection of moving pixels in a position-velocity image space. Nevertheless, it is concluded that for moving point targets, general GMTI with no path constraints is infeasible in practice with a single-channel SAR.

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems are versatile, high-resolution radar imagers useful for providing detailed intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, especially when atmospheric conditions are non-ideal for optical imagers. However, moving targets in SAR images are smeared. Along-track interferometry is a commonly-used method for extracting the motion parameters of moving targets but requires a dual-aperture SAR system, which may be power- size- or cost-prohibitive. This thesis presents a method of estimating target motion parameters in single-channel SAR data given geometric target motion constraints. I test this method on both simulated and actual SAR data. This estimation method includes an initial estimate, computation of the SAR ambiguity function, and application of the target motion constraints to form a focused image of the moving target. The constraints are imposed by assuming that target motion is restricted to a road. Finally, I measure its performance by investigating the error introduced in the motion estimates using both simulated and actual data.