In this dissertation I investigate initial public offering prospectuses to examine institutionalized
outcomes about risk and strategy and test whether information about those outcomes can be used to
predict firm performance. I use three conceptual perspectives—managerial risk, New Institutional theory,
and Organizational Cognition—to explore these outcomes in the main body of this thesis. The main body
contains four articles that, although connected by a common thread, are designed as independent standalone
papers. In Chapter 2 I examine the risk factor section of 529 prospectuses from firms that went
public of US stock exchanges in 1995 and 1996. Using this data I create a comprehensive content
cognitive map of 98 risk factors at represent the content of IPO field's risk knowledge structure. I then
identify three methods for measuring these risk factors—pervasiveness, priority, and proportion.
Following this I examine how the IPO field structures the risk knowledge structure. In Chapter 3 I use
the content map developed in Chapter 2 to test whether I can use this information to predict firm
performance. Using the IPO data, I develop several risk measures and compare these to existing proxy
measures. I then use multiple regression analyses to test the reliability and validity of the various
measures. The final result is a risk factor measure, the BROAD measure, which produced the most
consistent results. In Chapter 4 I expand the investigation by examining'how firms and fields make sense
of strategy and how it relates to the risk factors. In this chapter I compare three fields with differing"
levels of institutionalization to see whether I can find unique institutionalized outcomes—industry
recipes—about risk and strategy. In this Chapter I find strong support for the idea that fields have
distinctive industry recipes. The results show that the dynamics of these industry recipes differ according
to the level and type of institutionalization. Finally, in Chapter 5 I test firm level cognitive maps against
the field level industry recipes to examine whether conformity, convergence, or divergence matter to IPO
performance. There is some support for the idea that firm conformity to an industry recipe improves firm
performance. Additionally, in some institutional conditions, convergence toward an industry recipe also
improves IPO performance.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/13158 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Martens, Martin L. |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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