<div>In my main dissertation essay, I investigate advertising spending during a recession. Advertising plays an important role in creating awareness, preference and purchase intent for many products and services. However, advertising is often cut when a firm needs to control costs. This empirical study examines a unique set of factors which motivated 553 firms to change their advertising spending during the Great Recession. The first half of the Great Recession had a moderate 2% decline in GDP and 1% to 2% cuts in advertising spending. The seasonality effect was weaker, which indicates that firms were not as likely to carryover spending from the prior year. The peak of the Great Recession had a GDP decline as high as 7%, which is considered severe. Average advertising spending declined by 13%. In addition to the seasonality effect, decreasing sales decreased advertising spending. Increasing firm risk tends to decrease advertising spending during the peak of the Great Recession, but not before. Finally, firms in high advertising intensity industries, where advertising is strategically important, had modest budget cuts. In contrast, firms in low-intensity industries had much larger percentage cuts.</div><div>The second essay examines real earnings management using advertising budgets” examines. Real earnings management occurs when managers change real activities to meet or beat important earnings benchmarks. Advertising has a limited short-term impact on firm sales for many products. Therefore, when a firm’s earnings are below key benchmarks for a fiscal quarter (year), managers are compelled to reduce advertising expenditures to boost earnings. This study examines factors which persuade firms to manage earnings using advertising budgets. Similar to earlier studies, we find firms suspect of managing earnings upwards reducing advertising expenses. The findings indicate that B2C firms are more likely to manage earnings by reducing advertising expenses than B2B firms. The findings also reveal that suspect firms which spend more in high advertising elasticity mediums such as TV do not reduce advertising spending as much as firms which spend more in low advertising elasticity mediums such as newspapers and magazines. The study also find evidence to suggest that suspect firms which report advertising expenditure in their income statement make smaller advertising spending cuts than firms which don’t report advertising expenditure. Finally, earnings management activity is much stronger during the last quarter of the fiscal year.</div>

The manager's personal wealth is one of the central building blocks of agency theory, which considers wealth to be an especially important source of individual utility. The managers' financial position, or the portion of their financial well-being that is not dependent on the firm, is also introduced in the original formulation of upper echelons theory. However, despite the importance of executive personal wealth to both theories, it is rarely mentioned, and even more scarcely studied. My research builds on and extends agency and upper echelons theories by focusing on executive personal wealth, defined here as the portion of executive net worth that is not attached to current employment at the firm (i.e., not contingent on current or future earnings). As such, this research provides an initial answer to the following research question: how does the average personal wealth of the top management team as well as within-team differences in wealth influence firm strategic choices with respect to risk? Specifically, I argue that external wealth alters how managers view firm decisions regarding risk; thus, I hypothesize that average top management team (TMT) wealth is negatively related to firm unrelated diversification, positively related to R&D investments, and positively related to firm risk. Next, I propose that two types of within-group diversity ? TMT wealth diversity and TMT pay dispersion ? attenuate the effect of average TMT wealth on these firm outcomes. I test my hypotheses on a panel dataset of over 700 firms/TMTs from the S&P1500 over 2002?2008 using panel tobit and fixed effect models, and conduct multiple robustness checks. Empirical results strongly and consistently support the hypothesized main effects of wealth. However, the results regarding the moderating effect of within-group diversity are weak, as the majority of the moderation hypotheses are not supported. The main conclusion is that wealthier TMTs are less risk averse with respect to firm strategic decisions, which manifests in greater R&D spending, lower unrelated diversification, and higher overall firm risk. Theoretical and empirical implications as well as suggestions for future research are discussed.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-03-15T19:26:32Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Lucas de Lima Neto.pdf: 1377873 bytes, checksum: 5662b7f0de6febdc2cd5287a685d2b41 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-08-30 / Since its beginning at 70´s in the USA, asset securitization has shown a strong increase in the issued amounts in Europe and in the USA. In spite of more modest figures, Brazilian asset securitization issues through FIDC have shown also a great increase. This work aims to investigate this impressive performance. An asset securitization program effectively mitigates firm´s risk because what occurs in this case is a risk transfer from the firm to SPV/FIDC in the moment that the firm sells its cash flow to SPV/FIDC. This transfer could be total or partial. It was possible to demonstrate how the receivables acquisition rate (rs) depends on arrangement costs (&#965;), time interval of receiving the cash flow (T), issuing debt market rate (rm) and the cash flow performance (&#948;). / As operações de securitização de ativos têm mostrado, desde que surgiram na década de 70 nos EUA, um forte crescimento no volume de suas emissões, tanto na Europa quanto nos EUA. No Brasil, apesar de ainda modestos os volumes de FIDCs encontram-se em franca expansão. Investigar as razões desse impressionante desempenho é o objetivo deste trabalho. Um programa de securitização de ativos efetivamente mitiga o risco da firma, pois ocorre uma transferência de risco da firma para o fundo quando ela vende o seu fluxo de caixa. A transferência de risco pode ser total ou parcial. Foi possível demonstrar a dependência da taxa de cessão dos recebíveis (rs) com relação aos custos de estruturação (&#965;), ao intervalo de tempo de recebimento do fluxo de caixa (T), à magnitude da taxa de mercado de emissão de dívida (rm) e à performance dos recebíveis da firma(&#948;).

In order to assess the continuing imbalance of top executives between genders, I examine the effects of gender diversity within top management teams on firm risk, performance, and executive compensation. Capitalizing on previous analysis, I apply three unique differentiators. First, I utilize current data from 2012 to 2017 from Compustat, CRSP, and ExecuComp. Second, I provide a unique subset view on a firm and individual performance of female CEOs to examine executive compensation. Third, my scope of analysis expands to S&P Composite 1500 companies. I use separate models to estimate the effect of gender diversity on firm risk by examining a firm’s beta and standard deviation of daily returns, on firm performance by examining a firm’s Tobin’sQ, and lastly on executive compensation by examining an executive’s natural logarithm of total compensation. My findings suggest gender diversity among executives appears to have an immaterial effect on a firm’s risk and performance. In turn, I also find that female executives continue to receive less compensation than their male colleagues. However, I find an average female CEO receives a higher level of compensation than an average male CEO. Lastly, I find as gender diversity increases among executives, specifically CEOs, the compensation differences between genders decreases.