The literature on International Diversification suggests that investors and analysts value foreign earnings differently than domestic earnings. Prior studies also show an overall "valuation discount" for firms with foreign operations. To my knowledge, no study has empirically tested and found there to be differences in earnings quality for these firms. This study investigates differences in the quality of earnings for U.S. firms with foreign operations using a direct measure (discretionary accruals) and an indirect measure (investor perception of earnings). I also consider the impact of audit quality on each measure of earnings quality. In the first part of my dissertation I find firms with foreign operations report lower discretionary accruals than firms with only domestic operations. This indicates that auditors, similar to investors and analysts, report more conservatively for firms with foreign operations. My results show that audit quality further reduces the absolute value of reported accruals, and I find a higher level of reported "income decreasing" accruals for these firms. In the second section of my dissertation I consider the impact of audit quality on investor perception of earnings. Similar to earlier papers I find that foreign earnings changes are more highly associated with changes in firm value than domestic earnings changes, and this larger earnings response is attributed to negative changes in foreign earnings. I also find that audit quality improves investor perception of foreign earnings for firms with foreign operations. While there are ample studies demonstrating that firms with foreign operations are valued differently than firms with purely domestic operations, my study is the first to provide empirical evidence about how audit quality impacts financial reporting, the quality of earnings, and investor perception of earnings for firms with foreign operations. / Business Administration/Accounting

This study examines how diversification changes firms' key characteristics, which consequently alter firms' value. The reason why I focus on this topic is because of the mixed findings in literature about the valuation effect of diversification. This study offers deeper insights to the influence of diversification on important valuation factors that are already identified in finance literature. Specifically, it examines if diversification affects firms' information asymmetry problem, firms' cost of capital and cash flow, and firms' production efficiency. The study looks at both the financial industry and non-financial industry and the chapters are arranged in the following order. Firstly, empirical studies show that investors do not value BHCs' pursuit of non-interest income generating activities and yet these activities have demonstrated a dramatic pace of growth in the recent decades. An interesting question is what factors drive the discontent of the investors with the diversification endeavors of the BHCs in non-interest income activities. The first chapter examines the subject from the view point of information opaqueness, which is unique in the banking industry in terms of its intensity. We propose that increased diversification into non-interest income activities deepens information asymmetry, making BHCs more opaque and curtailing their value, as a result. Two important results are obtained in support of this proposition. First, analysts' forecasts are less accurate and more dispersed for the BHCs with greater diversity of non-interest income activities, indicating that information asymmetry problem is more severe for these BHCs. Second, stock market reactions to earning announcements by these BHCs signaling new information to the market are larger, indicating that more information is revealed to the market by each announcement. These findings indicate that increased diversity of non-interest income activities is associated with more severe information asymmetry between insiders and outsiders and, hence, a lower valuation by shareholder. Secondly, since Lang and Stulz (1994) and Berger and Ofek (1995), corporate literature has taken the position that industrial diversification is associated with a firm value discount. However, the validity and the sources of the diversification discount are still highly debated. In particular, extant studies limit themselves to cash flow effects, totally overlooking the cost of capital as a factor determining firm value. Inspired by Lamont and Polk (2001), the second chapter examines how industrial and international diversification change the conglomerates' cost of capital (equity and debt), and thereby the firm value. Our empirical results, based on a sample of Russell 3000 firms over the 1998-2004 period, show that industrial (international) diversification is associated with a lower (higher) firm cost of capital. These findings also hold for firms fully financed with equity. In addition, international diversification is found to be associated with a lower operating cash flow while industrial diversification doesn't alter it. These results indicate that industrial (international) diversification is associated with firm value enhancement (destruction). Given the fact that the majority of the firms involved in industrial diversification also diversify internationally, failing to separate these two dimensions of diversification may result in mistakenly attributing the diversification discount to industrial diversification. Thirdly, financial conglomerates have been increasingly diversifying their business into banking, securities, and insurance activities, especially after the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA, 1999). The third chapter examines whether bank holding company (BHC) diversification is associated with improvement in production efficiency. By applying the data envelopment analysis (DEA), the Malmquist Index of productivity, and total factor productivity change as a decomposed factor of the index, are calculated for a sample of BHCs over the period 1997-2007. The following results are obtained. First, technical efficiency is negatively associated with activity diversification and the effect is primarily driven by BHCs that did not diversify through Section 20 subsidiaries before GLBA. Second, the degree of change in diversification over time does not affect the total factor productivity change but is negatively associated with technical efficiency change over time. This latter effect is also primarily shown on BHCs that did not have Section 20 subsidiaries before GLBA. Therefore, it can be concluded that diversification is on average associated with lower production efficiency of BHCs, especially those BHCs without first-mover advantage obtained through Section 20 subsidiaries. These chapters explores the possible channels through which diversification could alter firms' valuation. They contribute to the literature by offering further knowledge about the effect of diversification. / Business Administration

This dissertation proposes an alternative perspective for studying the relationship between corporate performance and diversification. Extensive research into the relationship between diversification and economic performance has been conducted using two different perspectives. One perspective, pursued mainly by industrial organization economists, examined the effect that a firm's level (or degree) of diversity had on its performance. A second perspective, utilized by strategic management researchers, uses Rumelt's (1974) notion of product-market relatedness to explain performance differences among diversified firms. Rumelt (1974) hypothesized that firms which diversify into areas related to the original business by either products or markets would financially outperform those firms that diversify into areas unrelated (in a product or market sense) to the original business. Blackburn and Shrader (1990, pg. 1) argue that "a consensus seems to be forming that related corporate acquisitions are superior to unrelated acquisitions." This consensus view is not without its critics, however. Other research results (e.g. Barton, 1988) suggest that unrelated acquisitions need not produce inferior performance. This debate suggests that further research into the nature of the relationship between corporate diversification and its financial performance may be productive, especially if new ways of examining it can be devised. An alternative perspective for studying the relationship between corporate performance and diversification is proposed. Other dimensions of relatedness, such as the strategic similarity between a corporation's business units, may provide alternative means of defining relatedness. It will be argued that a redefinition of relatedness will prove valuable in expanding our ability to predict the effect corporate diversification strategy has on corporate performance. / Ph. D.

The factory-built housing industry, while originating from mobile homes, has seen new industry-segments emerge such as, for example, modular, panelized, and pre-cut homes. These new segments have promoted the ability of existing producers to diversify. As producers of factory-built homes merge their production capabilities amongst these industry-segments the structure and the capacity of the industry is profoundly changing. This study looks at both the manufactured home industry-segment as well as the entire factory-built home industry to analyze how the current state of the industry is positioned to drive these foreseeable changes. Analysis of the manufactured home industry-segment is highlighted by econometric modeling of market share data across manufactured housings' product life-cycle curve. Results of this modeling mimic three periods of product life cycle change that ends with the current market share decline. Being so, it is concluded that manufactured housing firms are currently seeking fight or flight strategies to combat deepening market share losses. Producers of manufactured housing who persist in this industry-segment will confront mounting consolidation whereas producers who flee are likely to undergo strategic transformations. A mail questionnaire alternatively targeted the U.S. factory-built home industry to assess how diversification currently impacts industry structure and market share positioning. Results of this questionnaire reveal that two-product producers are strategically diversifying to hedge current demand fluctuations in the U.S. residential home market while also promoting market share positions. As a result it is concluded that product diversification positively impacts market share growth within the factory-built home industry. / Master of Science

This thesis analyzes the potential for producers in Virginia to successfully participate in the market for berry crops, which include strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, and other novelty berries. A survey of current berry crop producers in Virginia is used to gain insight into the supply-side of the market, and a series of personal interviews with direct market berry crop producers and buyers from retail, wholesale, and processor outlets are conducted to assess the demand-side of the market. The results show that berry crop producers in the state are diverse along many dimensions, with certain groups better positioned to serve the unsaturated demand that exists through direct outlets and others better aligned to serve the increasing demand that exists among indirect buyers. Diversification into berry crop production involves high levels of risk, but the potential returns are likewise high. / Master of Science

The slowdown of Moore's Law opened a new era of computer research and development. Researchers started exploring alternatives to the traditional CPU design. A constant increase in consumer demands led to the development of CMPs, GPUs, and FPGAs. Recent research proposed the development of heterogeneous-ISA systems and implemented the necessary systems software to make such systems functional. Evaluations have shown that heterogeneous-ISA systems can offer better throughput and energy efficiency than homogeneous-ISA systems. Due to their low cost, ARM servers are now being adopted in data centers (e.g., AWS Graviton). While prior work provided the infrastructure necessary to run applications on heterogeneous-ISA systems, their dependency on a specialized kernel and a custom compiler increases deployment and maintenance costs. This thesis presents HetMigrate, a framework to live-migrate Linux processes over heterogeneous-ISA systems. HetMigrate integrates with CRIU, a Linux mechanism for process migration, and runs on stock Linux operating systems which improves its deployability. Furthermore, HetMigrate transforms the process's state externally without instrumenting state transformation code into the process binaries which has security benefits and also improves deployability. Our evaluations on Redis server and NAS Parallel Benchmarks show that HetMigrate takes an average of 720ms to fully migrate a process across ISAs while maintaining its state. Moreover, live-migrating with HetMigrate reduces the attack surface of a process by up to 72.8% compared to prior work. Additionally, HetMigrate is easier to deploy in real-world systems compared to prior work. To prove the deployability we ran HetMigrate on a variety of environments like cloud instances (e.g. Cloud Lab), local setups virtualized with QEMU/KVM, and a server-embedded board pair. Similar to works in the past, we also evaluated the energy and throughput benefits that heterogeneous-ISA systems can offer by connecting a Xeon server to three embedded boards over the network. We observed that selectively offloading compute-intensive workloads to embedded boards can increase energy efficiency by up to 39% and throughput by up to 52% while increasing the cost by just 10%. / Master of Science / In 1965 Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors in a chip will double every two years. Commonly referred to as "Moore's Law" it no longer holds true and its slowdown opened a new era of computer research and development. Researchers started exploring alternatives to traditional computer designs. A constant increase in consumer demands led to the development of portable, faster, and cheaper computers. Some researchers also started exploring the performance and energy benefits of computing systems that had heterogeneous architecture. Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) is the interface between software and hardware. Recent research proposed the development of systems that had cores of different ISA and implemented the necessary software to make such systems functional. Evaluations have shown that heterogeneous-ISA systems can offer better throughput and energy efficiency than traditional systems. To decrease their cost-to-performance ratio data centers have started adopting servers belonging to diverse architectures making them heterogeneous in nature. While prior work provided the infrastructure necessary to run applications on heterogeneous systems, it suffered from deployability limitations. This thesis presents HetMigrate, a framework that enables stateful program migration in heterogeneous systems. HetMigrate runs on stock open-source operating systems which makes it easy to deploy. Our evaluations show that while HetMigrate performs two orders of magnitude slower than prior work, it can be deployed with ease.

Since there is segmentation and homogeneity among the real estate securities market that almost parallels that of the traditional financial capital markets, investing globally now adds new venues and outlets that were once very scarce or nonexistent to private investors less than a few decades ago. This paper will examine the various outlets that are now available to both domestic and international investors, the relationship that exists among those securities, and the present and future implications of such opportunities. The results imply that there are both strong and weak relationships across various countries in regards to their correlations, as some countries have positive and negative correlations with other various nations giving way to diversification possibilities. This information is useful to investors that wish to look beyond the borders of their nation for greater returns and diversification.

published_or_final_version / Business Administration / Master / Master of Business Administration

La motivation principale de cette thèse est de proposer un système de recommandation personnalisé pour les plateformes d’informations. Pour cela, nous avons démontré que les opinions peuvent constituer un descripteur efficace pour améliorer la qualité de la recommandation. Au cours de cette thèse, nous avons abordé ce problème en proposant trois contributions principales. Tout d’abord, nous avons proposé un modèle de profil qui décrit avec précision les intérêts des utilisateurs ainsi que le contenu des articles de presse. Le modèle de profil proposé repose sur trois éléments : les entités nommées, les aspects et les sentiments. Nous avons testé notre modèle de profil sur les trois applications différentes que sont l’identification des orientations politiques des utilisateurs, la recommandation personnalisée des articles de presse et enfin la diversification de la liste des articles recommandés. Deuxièmement, nous avons proposé une approche de classement des opinions permettant de filtrer et sélectionner seulement les opinions pertinentes. Pour cela, nous avons utilisé une variation de la technique de PageRank pour définir le score de chaque opinion. Les résultats montrent que notre approche surpasse deux approches récemment proposées pour le classement des opinions. Troisièmement, nous avons étudié différentes façons d’enrichir le contenu des articles de presse par les opinions : par toutes les opinions, par seulement le topk des opinions, et enfin par un ensemble d’opinions diversifiées. Les résultats montrent que l’enrichissement des contenus des articles de presse / In this thesis, we have investigated how to exploit user-generated-content for personalized news recommendation purpose. The intuition behind this line of research is that the opinions provided by users, on news websites, represent a strong indicator about their profiles. We have addressed this problem by proposing three main contributions. Firstly, we have proposed a profile model that accurately describes both users’ interests and news article contents. The profile model was tested on three different applications ranging from identifying the political orientation of users to the context of news recommendation and the diversification of the list of recommended news articles. Results show that our profile model give much better results compared to state-of-the-art models. Secondly, we have investigated the problem of noise on opinions and how we can retrieve only relevant opinions in response to a given query.The proposed opinion ranking strategy is based on users’ debates features. We have used a variation of PageRank technique to define the score of each opinion. Results show that our approach outperforms two recent proposed opinions ranking strategies, particularly for controversial topics. Thirdly, we have investigated different ways of leveraging opinions on news article contents including all opinions, topk opinions based on opinion ranking strategy, and a set of diverse opinion. To extract a list of diverse opinions, we have employed a variation of an existing opinion diversification model. Results show that diverse opinions give the best performance over other leveraging strategies.

La motivation principale de cette thèse est de proposer un système de recommandation personnalisé pour les plateformes d’informations. Pour cela, nous avons démontré que les opinions peuvent constituer un descripteur efficace pour améliorer la qualité de la recommandation. Au cours de cette thèse, nous avons abordé ce problème en proposant trois contributions principales. Tout d’abord, nous avons proposé un modèle de profil qui décrit avec précision les intérêts des utilisateurs ainsi que le contenu des articles de presse. Le modèle de profil proposé repose sur trois éléments : les entités nommées, les aspects et les sentiments. Nous avons testé notre modèle de profil sur les trois applications différentes que sont l’identification des orientations politiques des utilisateurs, la recommandation personnalisée des articles de presse et enfin la diversification de la liste des articles recommandés. Deuxièmement, nous avons proposé une approche de classement des opinions permettant de filtrer et sélectionner seulement les opinions pertinentes. Pour cela, nous avons utilisé une variation de la technique de PageRank pour définir le score de chaque opinion. Les résultats montrent que notre approche surpasse deux approches récemment proposées pour le classement des opinions. Troisièmement, nous avons étudié différentes façons d’enrichir le contenu des articles de presse par les opinions : par toutes les opinions, par seulement le topk des opinions, et enfin par un ensemble d’opinions diversifiées. Les résultats montrent que l’enrichissement des contenus des articles de presse / In this thesis, we have investigated how to exploit user-generated-content for personalized news recommendation purpose. The intuition behind this line of research is that the opinions provided by users, on news websites, represent a strong indicator about their profiles. We have addressed this problem by proposing three main contributions. Firstly, we have proposed a profile model that accurately describes both users’ interests and news article contents. The profile model was tested on three different applications ranging from identifying the political orientation of users to the context of news recommendation and the diversification of the list of recommended news articles. Results show that our profile model give much better results compared to state-of-the-art models. Secondly, we have investigated the problem of noise on opinions and how we can retrieve only relevant opinions in response to a given query.The proposed opinion ranking strategy is based on users’ debates features. We have used a variation of PageRank technique to define the score of each opinion. Results show that our approach outperforms two recent proposed opinions ranking strategies, particularly for controversial topics. Thirdly, we have investigated different ways of leveraging opinions on news article contents including all opinions, topk opinions based on opinion ranking strategy, and a set of diverse opinion. To extract a list of diverse opinions, we have employed a variation of an existing opinion diversification model. Results show that diverse opinions give the best performance over other leveraging strategies.