<p>Since the historic compromise between employers and workers in Germany in the late 1880s, whereby workers gave up their right to sue their employers in return for an administrative system that would compensate them for medical fees and income losses, Workers’ Compensation (WC) has been part of workers' protection against occupational hazards. Neo-liberal globalization, on both the domestic and global levels, with the accompanying the drives to increase productivity and reinforce international competitiveness are, however, undermining WC's effective functioning.<br />The worldwide vulnerability of WC is apparent, and South Korea and Canada are no exceptions. Despite the very different origins and developmental processes of WC in these two countries, in the context of neo-liberal globalization they seem similarly directed. The research aims to develop a comparative and contextualized analysis of the development of WC in these two countries, and to develop a critical analysis of the erosion of welfare through the recent changes in WC in them. Two research questions are thus explored: a) How has WC in South Korea and Canada developed since its adoption?; and b) How have the recent changes in WC in these two countries eroded the notions of the “welfare state” and “citizenship”, which are key to WC’s original purposes?<br />Using comparative policy analysis based on documents review, this research suggests that the advent of WC in Canada was a spontaneous response to social circumstances that demanded an institution to deal with the increase in occupational accidents that accompanied industrialization in the early 1900s. Conversely, WC in South Korea was established through the government imperative for economic growth and its other political purposes, which are typical features of the developmental welfare models.<br />The initial development of WC in Canada was thus radically different from its counterpart in South Korea; but recent reforms in the two countries demonstrate how neo-liberal ideology and managerialism have both led WC in the same direction. For instance, the employers' financial incentive of the experience rating system prevents the compensation of injured workers, and eventually renders WC ineffective as a social safety net. Early return-to-work programs are consistent with the “welfare-to-work” model for injured workers, and amount to a method of shifting costs from employers to public tax payers. The WC reforms in question, in both countries, reflect a very narrow and restricted conception – a neo-liberal conception – of citizenship.<br />These “anti-labour” elements of social insurance for injured workers are mainly products of neo-liberal globalization, which emphasizes efficiency and competitiveness above all else. In the context of neo-liberal managerialism, a number of workers in developed countries who are, mostly, non-regular and migrant workers are precluded from the protection of WC. While workers in the North are implicitly marginalized, their counterparts in the South are explicitly ignored by social security systems.</p> / Master of Social Work (MSW)

As financial intermediaries, banks are "special" because they play an important role in transferring funds from surplus spending units to deficit spending units and serve as a channel of monetary policy. Therefore, the safety and soundness of banks is essential to the financial stability and economic development. This study investigates how bank governance mechanisms, namely, executive compensation and board of directors, affect bank safety. Given the unique nature that bank assets are opaque, bank governance is expected to be different from corporate governance of industrial firms. This study also investigates how the opaqueness nature of bank assets affects the compensation design of bank executives. Chapter 1 investigates the association between asset opacity and CEO pay-performance sensitivity of bank holding companies (BHCs). Contrary to the monitoring cost hypothesis according to which when information asymmetry is high firms rely more heavily on equity-based compensation, I find that when the share of opaque assets in total assets increases, pay-performance sensitivity in BHCs declines. This finding supports the view that when the share of opaque assets increases, managers can pursue risky projects to a greater extent in the interests of shareholders but at the expenses of bondholders, and, hence, the optimal compensation structure in BHCs with larger share of opaque assets has a lower pay-performance sensitivity to restrain managerial risk-taking incentives, reducing the conflicts of interests between shareholders and bondholders. The negative effect of asset opacity on pay-performance sensitivity is robust after accounting for the endogeneity of asset opacity and using various compensation measures. In addition, I find that higher pay-performance sensitivity generally leads to a greater share of opaque assets in total assets. The results of this study suggest that asset opacity is an important determinant of compensation structure in the banking industry. BHCs should use caution when using stocks and options to promote prudent risk taking under bank asset opacity conditions because opaque bank assets make risk-shifting behaviors induced by equity-based compensation difficult to monitor, threatening the bank stability. Regulators should also account for this opacity effect. Chapter 2 investigates the relationship between insolvency risk and executive compensation for BHCs over the 1992-2008 period. I employ CEO compensation sensitivity to risk (vega) and pay-share inequality between the CEO and other executives as measures of compensation and employ a simultaneous equation model to account for the endogeneity problem between vega and risk. Five main results are obtained. First, CEO compensations in BHCs have risen in response to deregulation to resemble those of the industrial firms. Second, higher vegas lead to greater bank instability. Third, the association between bank stability and managerial compensation is bi-directional; higher vegas induce greater risk and vice versa. Fourth, BHCs in the next to the largest-size group increase CEO vegas the most and have the strongest potential to create instability in the financial industry, such as the one witnessed in 2007-2009. Fifth, increased pay-share inequality has effects opposite to those of the increase in vega; greater pay-share inequality is associated with greater bank stability. Implications of executive compensation effects on instability for depositors, deposit insurers and regulators are drawn. Chapter 3 investigates the association between the structure of board of directors and risk taking of bank holding companies. I use the number of directors on the risk committee and the frequency of its meetings to measure the strength of risk management exercised by bank boards. Several interesting findings are obtained. First, banks with stronger risk committees, namely risk committees with a greater number of directors and more frequent meetings, are associated with more diversified loan portfolios, greater amounts of safer loans, less mortgage-backed securities, and lower market risk. These results continue to hold even after controlling for the possible endogeneity problem using the dynamic panel GMM estimator. Overall, these results suggest that stronger risk management by bank boards has a positive and significant impact on banks' safety and soundness. Second, the percentage of banks having a risk committee has been increasing steadily since 1999, suggesting bank boards have gradually taken a greater role in risk management and their fiduciary duties have expanded beyond shareholders to include depositors. However, less than half of bank boards have a risk committee before 2007, suggesting weak risk management at the top level and the possibility that bank boards may have failed to control the excessive risk-taking in the banking industry leading to the recent financial crisis. Finally, the percentage of banks with a risk committee is still less than 60% after the crisis, suggesting that depositors and bank supervisors could enhance the stability of banks by further improving the effectiveness of internal risk control at bank boards. / Business Administration/Finance

This dissertation studies international acquisitions mainly in terms of their impact on firm competitiveness and CEO compensation. International acquisitions have been used extensively by multinational companies for internationalization purposes. They are the main drivers of foreign direct investment flow around the world. The large number of international acquisitions and the amount of money used for them make these acquisitions important corporate strategies to examine. This study explores from different perspectives the implications of international acquisitions for firms. In the first chapter, we assess the impact of international acquisitions on the competitiveness of companies. Competitiveness has been studied mostly at the country and industry levels; firm-level competitiveness has been understudied, and the impact the organizational choices of companies have on competitiveness have not been fully explored. This study attempts to fill this gap by examining the impact of international acquisitions on firm competitiveness. Building on the resource-based view, internalization theory, agency theory and managerial hubris we propose that international acquisitions enhance competitiveness. We also develop a competing hypothesis about the negative impact of IAs on competitiveness using agency view, integration issues, and information asymmetry perspective. We test our model with a sample of acquisitions between 1985 and 2007. We find that international acquisitions have a positive effect on firm competitiveness. We also find variations in the impact of international acquisitions across different dimensions of competitiveness and benchmarks. We also investigate factors that affect the success of international acquisitions. Our evidence suggests that the acquirer's resources and capabilities play a crucial role in the success of international acquisitions. In the second chapter, we explore the association between acquisitions and CEO compensation from two different perspectives. Agency theory, which assumes a conflict between shareholders' and executives' interests, predicts a positive impact of acquisitions on CEO compensation. In contrast, subscribers of stewardship theory question the assumption of a conflict of interest and propose that acquisitions have no impact on CEO compensation. We test the prediction of agency view with a sample of U.S. acquisitions for the period 1995 to 2007. Our results provide evidence for the agency view. Unlike prior studies, this study distinguishes between international and domestic acquisitions, and assesses their impact. We find that international acquisitions have less of a positive effect on CEO compensation than domestic acquisitions. Finally, we investigate some deal characteristics and show that the relatedness of the acquirer and the target influences post-acquisition CEO compensation. We provide an in-depth literature review of acquisition research in the third chapter. In addition to discussing the antecedents, outcomes, and success/failure factors of acquisitions in general, we focus on international acquisitions as well. We discuss the differences between international and domestic acquisitions and review the literature of international acquisitions as a mode of entry. More important, we identify theoretical and methodological gaps, unanswered questions, trends, and understudied areas in acquisition research. Building on these, we provide recommendations and directions for future acquisition research. Overall, this study examines the implications of international acquisitions for firms. Our findings indicate that international acquisition is an important phenomenon that influences the competitiveness of firms and governance through effects on CEO compensation. One of the major contributions of this study is to show that international acquisitions have different characteristics than domestic acquisitions. Our study also identifies issues that need to be resolved in acquisition research and propose ways to address those issues. Our study adds fresh insights to the literature on M&As, competitiveness, and CEO compensation. / Business Administration/International Business Administration

Implementation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and recovery in IT spending after the dot-com bust in 2002 have enhanced the Chief Information Officer's (CIO's) role and needed skills. The CIO significantly influences strategy implementation and firm performance through the management of IT resmyces. I posit that firms must appoint a CIO with an appropriate background (technical versus business) that is aligned with their strategic positioning (differentiation versus cost leadership) for IT resmyces to support the firm's strategy. I find that differentiators (cost leaders) are more likely to appoint a CIO with a technical (business) background. Notably, firms announcing aligned CIO appointments (technical CIOs for differentiators and business CIOs for cost leaders) have superior investor reactions. Second, I take the first step to understand the impact of CIO's education on determining their compensation. I find that CIO education characteristics are significant determinants of CIO compensation, addressing the ongoing debate regarding the desired CIO education. Furthermore, drawing on Agency theory, I separately examine salary and bonus due to their divergent roles in rewarding and incentivizing ability and effort. My findings suggest that CIO education characteristics strongly determine CIO salary whereas firm financial performance measures strongly determine CIO bonus, consistent with salary rewarding CIO ability and bonus incentivizing CIO effort. Third, I investigate the relationship between data breaches and Chief Information Officer (CIO) turnover. Executive turnover literature finds that CEOs and CFOs turnover when they fail to meet financial performance expectations. Unlike CEOs and CFOs, CIOs are directly responsible for IT performance and I argue that CIOs are more likely to turnover when they fail to meet their performance expectation as reflected by data breaches. Following previous work, I classify system breaches into system glitch, criminal attack, human error and other. I document that system glitches increase the likelihood of CIO turnover by two-fold. Furthermore, I find that the impact of system glitches on CIO turnover lasts for two years. / Business Administration/Accounting

Recently, video has become one of the most important multimedia resources to be shared in our work and daily life. With the development of high frame rate video (HFV), the write speed from high speed camera array sensor to the massive data storage device has been regarded as the main constraints on HFV applications. In this thesis, some low-complexity compression techniques are proposed for HFV acquisition and transmission. The core technique of our developed codec is the application of Slepian-Wolf coding theorem in video compression. The light-duty encoder employs SW encoding, resulting in lower computational cost. The pixel values are transformed into bit sequences, and then we assemble the bits on same bit plane into 8 bit streams. For each bit plane, there is a statistical BSC being constructed to describe the dependency between the source image and the SI image. Furthermore, an improved coding scheme is applied to exploit the spatial correlation between two consecutive bit planes, which is able to reduce the source coding rates. Different from the encoder, the collaborative heavy-duty decoder shoulders the burden of realizing high reconstruction fidelity. Motion estimation and motion compensation employ the block-matching algorithm to predict the SI image. And then the received syndrome sequence is able to be SW decoded with SI. To realize different compression goals, compression are separated to the original and the downsampled cases. With regard to the compression at the original resolution, it completes after SW decoding. While with respect to compression at reduced resolution, the SW decoded image is necessary to be upsampled by the state-of-the-art learning based SR technique: A+ . Since there are some important image details lost after the resolution resizing, ME and MC is applied to modify the upsampled image again, promoting the reconstruction PSNR. Experimental results show that the proposed low-complexity compression techniques are effective on improving reconstruction fidelity and compression ratio. / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc)

This dissertation proposes a miniaturized optical fiber based sensor system for the measurement of 3-dimensional vector magnetic fields. The operation of the sensor system is based on the detection of magnetostrictive dimensional changes in the sensor gage using a modified extrinsic Fabry-Perot Interferometer configuration. Because of the magnetostrictive reflector the gap length depends on the magnetic fields applied to the sensor. Since the diameter of the magnetostrictive sensor gage is 125 micrometer which is the same as that of the input/output fiber, the sensor is simply constructed by inserting the sensor gage and the input/output fiber into a small glass tube. The glass tube serves as both an aligner for the sensor gage and input/out fiber, and a passive temperature compensator. In addition, it also enhances the mechanical strength and compactness of the sensor. This sensor design shows 98 percent suppression of the thermally induced sensor output changes. The linear output of the sensor system is enhanced by transverse field annealing which increases magnetostrictive induction in the ferromagnetic sensor gage material and controls the sensor gage geometry. A 5-times increase in sensor sensitivity is obtained with the transverse field annealing and the use of a new magnetostrictive material. A modified sensor gage endface demonstrates 92 percent of fringe visibility, which further improves the performance of the interferometer. The signal fading in the interferometric sensors at the peak or bottom of a fringe is reduced by using a quadrature signal demodulation method. The system has been shown to have a resolution better than 100 nT over a measurement range from 100 to 40,000 nT. This research is supported financially by the Phillips Laboratory of the U.S. Air Force. / Ph. D.

The Industrial Organization literature investigates the product market decisions of a firm while the corporate finance literature explores the financing decisions of the firm. But the truth is both the financing decisions and the product market decisions are interdependent and should be modeled together to develop a better understanding of a firm's decisions. This thesis takes a step in that direction. The manager of a firm caters to the equity holders of the firm who are protected by limited liability. Ex-ante debt is issued and at the time of product market decision, debt is exogenous. The traditional product market capital market interaction literature has argued that debt financing leads to more aggressive product market strategies. If debt is treated as endogenous and/or the switching state of nature is endogenous, it can be shown that debt financing may lead to less aggressive product market strategies. Further, if external financing consists of both debt and equity financing, it is shown that a financially constrained firm shall produce less than what it would have produced if it was not financially constrained. Finally, managerial compensation is reported to be one of the reasons for product market aggressiveness of a firm in the context of product market capital market interaction. / Ph. D.

The dissertation empirically examines the efficacy of internal control mechanisms by analyzing 94 forced turnovers of chief executive officers (CEOs). It seeks to answer two primary questions: One, do governance-related characteristics influence the promptness with which poorly-performing CEOs are removed from office; and two, are removals of CEOs followed by changes in internal control mechanisms? The results suggest that poorly performing managers are removed more quickly in firms that have a larger percentage of independent outside directors on their board, that have higher equity ownership by the non-CEO directors and lower equity ownership by the CEO, and that separate the positions of CEO and chairperson. The results also suggest that the removal of the CEO provides both the opportunity and the incentive to alter internal governance systems. There is significant turnover of board members and the new boards generally have a higher fraction of independent outside directors and are more likely to separate the positions of CEO and chairperson. In addition, the sensitivity of CEO compensation to firm performance increases significantly following turnover. These post-turnover improvements in monitoring and incentive schemes are more significant in those firms that require a crisis in the product and/or capital market before they remove their CEOs. However, there is no evidence of short-term improvement in operating performance following changes in CEOs and governance systems. Overall, the results suggest that board and ownership characteristics do influence the effectiveness of internal monitoring systems and that CEO turnover is associated with broad changes in monitoring and incentive systems. / Ph. D.

Boards of directors of corporations have been criticized for failing to effectively perform their roles of ratifying and monitoring managerial decisions, retaining and terminating top management, and evaluating and rewarding executive performance. critics have suggested that increasing the proportion of outside directors on the board increases independence and improves board effectiveness. Research has provided evidence that the composition of the board affects firm performance, the likelihood of chief executive turnover, and the monitoring of important decisions such as the adoption of poison pills and acquisitions. In this study, the effect of the composition of the board on the relationship between executive compensation and firm performance is investigated. The effect of board composition on the types of performance measures, accounting and stock return, used in the pay-performance relationship is also examined. Data were gathered from publicly available sources, including Forbes compensation surveys, firms’ proxy statements, and COMPUSTAT and CRSP tapes. These data were then statistically analyzed using a regression model with indicator variables for outsider-dominated boards. The types of performance measures, accounting and stock return, were then compared to test whether their usage in the pay-performance relationship differs between outsider-dominated and insider-dominated boards. The results of this study indicate that the association between compensation and stock return measures of performance is stronger when the board is composed of a majority of outside directors. There is no evidence, however, of a stronger association between compensation and accounting measures of performance for outsider-dominated boards. The results also reveal that outsider-dominated boards use both accounting and stock return measures of performance in the pay-performance relationship whereas insiders focus on accounting measures. These results imply that outside directors act in the interests of shareholders by linking compensation to stock return measures as well as accounting measures of performance. These findings are consistent with the conclusions of other board composition studies that outside directors play an important role in the corporate governance process. / Ph. D.

While there is a wide body of literature examining the relation between CEO compensation and firm performance, few studies have directly tested the proposition that a strong pay-performance link: leads to improved future performance. This paper tests the hypothesis that a strong pay-performance link: leads to better managerial decisions. Following Jensen and Murphy's (1990b) methodology, pay-performance sensitivities are estimated for the CEOs of 105 NYSE and AMEX firms. The relation between the estimated pay-performance sensitivities and subsequent acquisition performance is examined for a sample of 140 acquisitions over the period 1980-86. Acquisition performance is measured by cumulative abnormal announcement returns for the event windows: [0], (-1,+1], [- 5, + 1], [- 5, +40], and [- 20, +40]. After controlling for other variables that are related to acquisition performance, a significant positive relation is observed between measures of pay-performance sensitivity and subsequent acquisition performance. The results suggests that a strong pay performance link may better align CEO and shareholder interest, and lead to improved future CEO performance. In addition, evidence is presented that suggests that optimal compensation design should jointly consider both stock options and traditional forms of compensation. / Ph. D.