This thesis is about the effects of changing customer preferences on the United States Postal Service's retail network and offers a process for wider adoption of its current retail partnership program. The Contract Postal Unit (CPU) program represents 10 percent of the Postal Service's current...

Faced with a volatile global economy, a rapidly shrinking population and a declining birthrate, Japan needs to find ways to revamp its economic engine. One solution is to increase the participation of Japanese women in the workforce. Over the past decade Japanese society, its government and...

There are a variety of challenges facing the energy industry, from decreased access to sovereign reserves, to declining fields, innovation challenges, increased regulation and new energy policies. These challenges pose a threat to the basic industry structure. Oil & gas companies espouse four...

This thesis contains three separate essays that deal with word of mouth. In the first essay, "Promotional Chat on the Internet," we analyze the firms' incentives to anonymously supply positive reviews of products in chat rooms and other recommendation sites. This, in turn, lowers the credibility...

This thesis consists of two chapters that investigate two important issues in banking of the past decade: the effect of banking consolidation on the borrowers and the regulatory capital requirements for banks. The first chapter analyzes the effect of bank mergers on loan prices, and the welfare...

This thesis consists of three empirical essays on securitization and the resolution of financial distress, examining the information content of prices of mortgage-backed securities, the role of securitization in preventing mortgage renegotiation and the effect of minimum bids in ascending price...

This thesis consists of three essays examining issues related to human capital, careers, and financial economics. In the first chapter, I examine how the process of corporate bankruptcy varies by human capital intensity using a sample of 1,493 public firms that filed for Chapter 11 between 1980...

Venture capital investment performance data and performance attribution are not typically published. Venture investors articulate (and sell to LPs) conflicting strategies; the popular business literature and culture is rife with rapidly changing beliefs about the relative attractiveness of...

This thesis consists of three chapters of independent but related work that investigate theoretically and empirically the organizational forms of delegated portfolio management. The first chapter proposes a theory of the organizational forms of investment vehicles based on adverse selection....

Firm boundaries have been the subject of much scholarly interest in recent years, as firms increasingly hire external, "contingent" workers and outsource previously core activities. However, little empirical research has directly studied what happens differently inside the firm's boundaries,...