by Chou Hsin Yi, Samtani Lavina Santu. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 81-90). / ABSTRACT --- p.iii / TABLE OF CONTENTS --- p.iii / ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS --- p.v / Chapter CHAPTER I --- INTRODUCTION --- p.1 / The Concept of Telecommuting --- p.1 / """Telecommuting"" and ""Teleworking""" --- p.1 / "Definition of "" Telecommuting “" --- p.3 / Driving Forces --- p.4 / Who is a Telecommuter? --- p.6 / Telecommuting in the Context of Hong Kong --- p.8 / Methodology --- p.10 / Chapter CHAPTER II --- TELECOMMUTING AS A PRACTICE --- p.13 / Pervasive in Traditional and IT-Related Industries --- p.13 / Successful Examples --- p.13 / Nationwide Figures --- p.14 / Actors and Driving Forces --- p.16 / Individual Perspective --- p.16 / Organizational Perspective --- p.19 / Societal Perspective --- p.21 / Not as Pervasive --- p.21 / Chapter CHAPTER III --- MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS & LOCAL TELECOMS --- p.23 / Background --- p.23 / The Two Voices: Managers and Employees --- p.23 / The Managers' Perspective --- p.24 / The Employees' Perspective --- p.30 / The Other Two Voices： Men and Women --- p.35 / Synopsis --- p.38 / Chapter CHAPTER IV --- INTERNET STARTUPS --- p.40 / Background --- p.40 / The Two Voices: Managers and Employees --- p.41 / The Managers' Perspective --- p.41 / The Employees' Perspective --- p.41 / The Other Two Voices: Men and Women --- p.47 / Synposis --- p.52 / Chapter CHAPTER V --- SELF-EMPLOYED ENTREPRENEURS --- p.54 / A Commercial Software Consultant --- p.55 / Technical Director at InstruX.com.hk --- p.55 / Synopsis --- p.58 / Chapter CHAPTER VI --- DISCUSSION --- p.60 / Type of Organisation --- p.62 / The Notion of Teamwork --- p.62 / Relationship Between Managers and Employees --- p.63 / Job-Related Perceptions --- p.66 / Gender-Related Perceptions --- p.65 / The Connection Between Work and Non-Work Domains --- p.67 / The Role of Technology --- p.69 / The Role of Relationships --- p.70 / Concluding Remarks --- p.71 / Food For Thought --- p.75 / APPENDIX --- p.76 / BIBLIOGRAPHY --- p.81

No description available.

No description available.

This thesis titled ``Essays in Private Capital" comprises of three essays focused on various parts of private capital. Private capital, also known as alternative assets are non-traded, broadly defined as private equity, real estate, venture capital, hedge funds, infrastructure and natural resource investments. The first chapter studies private equity, the second focuses on residential real estate, and the third is on commercial real estate. These are important asset classes given the low interest rate environment, and the recent COVID-19 and Silicon Valley Bank crisis which had large exposures to private assets. The first essay titled ``Desperate Capital Breeds Productivity Loss: Evidence from Public Pension Investments in Private Equity" studies investor heterogeneity in private equity and its ultimate effect on target firms. Using novel micro-data on individual investments in private equity funds funds and buyout deals combined with confidential Census data, I show that capital contributed by the most underfunded U.S. public pensions decreases efficiency at target firms, as pensions fuel the growth of low quality, new entrant private equity funds. These results get stronger post the financial crisis, when underfunded positions and their subsequent investments in private equity increased. The paper shows that traditionally positive post buyout efficiency results turn negative in recent years, as marginal investors matching with marginal private equity funds pull down the average. The most underfunded pensions also realize lower total private equity returns relative to the least underfunded ones. These results suggest possibility of a ``funding doom loop" as currently public pensions use assumed return on assets to calculate liabilities. The second essay titled ``Flattening the Curve: Pandemic-Induced Revaluation of Urban Real Estate" focuses on work from home with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and its effect on residential real estate prices across the U.S. We show that the COVID-19 pandemic brought house price and rent declines in city centers, and price and rent increases away from the center, thereby flattening the bid-rent curve in most U.S. metropolitan areas. Across MSAs, the flattening of the curve is larger where working from home is more prevalent, housing markets are more regulated, and supply is less elastic. Using a model predicting future residential price and rent evolution, we show urban revival in housing markets for the foreseeable future with urban rent growth exceeding suburban rent growth, as working from home recedes. In the third essay titled ``Work From Home and the Office Real Estate Apocalypse", we show remote work led to large drops in lease revenues, occupancy, lease renewal rates, and market rents in the commercial office sector. We revalue New York City office buildings taking into account both the cash flow and discount rate implications of these shocks, and find a 39% decline in long run value. For the U.S., we find a $413 billion value destruction. We show evidence of flight to quality, as higher quality buildings are buffered against these trends, while lower quality office is at risk of becoming a stranded asset. These valuation changes have repercussions for local public finances and financial stability.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, New York City (NYC) emerged as a global epicentre, revealing stark disparities in its impact across diverse neighbourhoods and populations. This dissertation delves into the uneven geographies of the pandemic city, critically examining the paradoxes, linkages, and questions embedded in the infrastructures that shape and are shaped by the politics of the city. As modern life becomes increasingly intertwined with complex digital control systems, these infrastructures, far from being rational, orderly or even intelligible, obscure systems of power that govern their stable flow and circulation. Drawing on Stephen Graham’s concept of infrastructural “disruption”, this research sheds light on how everyday infrastructures—often invisible until they fail—reveal intricate tensions between distance and access, between participation and criminalisation, and between mobility and class. Through a multi-scaled empirical analysis, this research delves deeper into the topological and topographical characteristics of urban infrastructure during a time of crisis to illuminate their role in mediating relationships between citizens, space and justice in our everyday lives. This dissertation is anchored around three categories of spatial unevenness: geographies of access, geographies of digital participation, and geographies of work. Three infrastructural modalities are interrogated during the COVID-19 moment in NYC: the built environment, a digital governance platform, and the personal mobile phone. The study seeks to answer pivotal questions regarding access to critical pandemic response infrastructure, patterns of civic participation in NYC’s 311 non-emergency hotline, and the spatial politics of remote work behaviour. Ultimately, by unmasking the intricate web of infrastructural politics, this research offers an in-depth understanding of the disproportionate impacts of the COVID-19 spread and emphasises the significance of spatial considerations in our theorisations of justice.

Developing countries and the poor within them (i.e., the other) receive scant attention in management and organization studies (MOS). The field, thus, suffers from both ethnocentric and class biases. This research effort seeks to reduce these biases, particularly in the conversation on power taking place between MOS' critical management studies and interorganizational collaboration research streams. / Articulating a case study of the Sialkot soccer ball child labour project in Pakistan (1995-2003), the thesis explores the communication constraints that are faced by weak actors in interorganizational domains (a social problem and a set of organizations having a stake or interest in that problem) located in the developing world. Relying on both written documents (private and public) and field interviews, especially with women soccer ball stitchers at the village level, a typology of communication constraints is developed. These constraints are examined from the perspectives of those at the bottom of the international supply chain and the injuries these groups suffer from them are documented in the thesis. It is found that the ability of weak actors to use communication to influence a domain is highly contingent on how space and time are configured in a domain. Domains have temporal rhythms and spatial configurations. The thesis identifies two types of temporal rhythms (technocratic and subsistence clocks) and a spatial configuration (imperial space) that severely militate against weak actors exercising agency in a domain through communication. Strategies (e.g., emergent collective struggle) that can prevent weak actors from becoming subalternalized (voiceless) in a domain are also discussed. The case study permits an investigation of contemporary transnational activism that often sires interorganizational collaboration projects in developing countries. The thesis identifies two types of transnational activism (thick and thin), delineates the various elements constituting them, and shows how thin activism can lead to interorganizational projects hurting weak and powerless groups that are intended to be assisted.

No description available.

This thesis contributes to two completely unrelated debates in the economic literature, similar only in the relatively high degree of controversy characterizing each one. <p>The first part is methodological and macroeconomic in nature, addressing the question of whether the distribution of income across countries is converging (i.e. are the poor catching up to the rich?) or diverging (i.e. are we witnessing the formation of two exclusive clubs, one for poor countries and another one for rich countries?). Applications of the simple Markov model to this question have generated evidence in favor of the divergence hypothesis. In the first chapter, I critically review these results. I use statistical inference to show that the divergence results are not statistically robust, and I explain that this instability of the results comes from the application of a model for discrete data to data that is actually continuous. In the second chapter, I reposition the whole convergence-divergence debate by placing it in the context of Silverman’s classic survey of non-parametric density estimation techniques. This allows me to use the basic notions of fuzzy logic to adapt the simple Markov chain model to continuous data. When I apply the newly adapted Markov chain model to the cross-country distribution question, I find evidence against the divergence hypothesis, and this evidence is statistically robust. <p>The second part of the thesis is empirical and microeconomic in nature. I question whether observed differences between husbands’ and wives’ participation in labor markets are due to different preferences or to different constraints. My identification strategy is based on the idea that the more power an individual has relative to his/her partner, the more his/her actions will reflect his/her preferences. I use 2001 PSID data on cohabiting couples to estimate a simultaneous equations model of the spousal time allocation decision. My results confirm the stylized fact that specialization and trade does not explain time allocation for couples in which the wife is the primary breadwinner, and suggest that power could provide a more general explanation of the observations. My results show that wives with relatively more power choose to work more on the labor market and less at home, whereas husbands with more power choose to do the opposite. Since women start out from a lower level of labor market participation than men do, it would seem that spouses’ agree that the ideal mix of market work and housework lies somewhere between the husbands’ and the wives’ current positions. / Doctorat en sciences économiques, Orientation économie / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished