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By matching a CEO's place of residence in his or her formative years with U.S. Census survey data, I obtain an estimate of the CEO's family wealth and study the link between the CEO's endowed social status and firm performance. I find that, on average, CEOs born into poor families

By matching a CEO's place of residence in his or her formative years with U.S. Census survey data, I obtain an estimate of the CEO's family wealth and study the link between the CEO's endowed social status and firm performance. I find that, on average, CEOs born into poor families outperform those born into wealthy families, as measured by a variety of proxies for firm performance. There is no evidence of higher risk-taking by the CEOs from low social status backgrounds. Further, CEOs from less privileged families perform better in firms with high R&D spending but they underperform CEOs from wealthy families when firms operate in a more uncertain environment. Taken together, my results show that endowed family wealth of a CEO is useful in identifying his or her managerial ability.
ContributorsDu, Fangfang (Author) / Babenko, Ilona (Thesis advisor) / Bates, Thomas (Thesis advisor) / Tserlukevich, Yuri (Committee member) / Wang, Jessie (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
Bitcoin is a form of virtual currency that can be used as a medium of exchange for goods or services. Different from other forms of virtual payment, bitcoin is de-centralized and puts all of the power in the hands of the user, rather than a banking institution. However, bitcoin's ability

Bitcoin is a form of virtual currency that can be used as a medium of exchange for goods or services. Different from other forms of virtual payment, bitcoin is de-centralized and puts all of the power in the hands of the user, rather than a banking institution. However, bitcoin's ability to develop as a renowned medium of exchange has been impeded, potentially due to a lack of knowledge, active bitcoin platforms, and support. In this paper, I conduct a survey to understand factors that affect households' adoption of bitcoin. In particular, I focus on factors that capture the potential benefit and cost of adopting bitcoin. Through a public survey, participants are asked a series of questions on their willingness to adopt bitcoin. I found significant results stating that subjects were more inclined toward bitcoin contingent upon the number of platforms accepting it, the number of acquaintances using bitcoin, and the degree of personal knowledge participants have about bitcoin. These findings suggest that perceived benefit captured by network effect and convenience of use, as well as the potential cost captured by uncertainty help shape the adoption of bitcoin.
ContributorsMorrissey, Michael Joshua (Author) / Wang, Jessie (Thesis director) / Ray, Colter (Committee member) / Department of Finance (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
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Description
The success of Bitcoin has generated significant interest in the financial community to understand whether the technological underpinnings of the cryptocurrency paradigm can be leveraged to improve the efficiency of financial processes in the existing infrastructure. Various alternative proposals, most notably, Ripple and Ethereum, aim to provide solutions to the

The success of Bitcoin has generated significant interest in the financial community to understand whether the technological underpinnings of the cryptocurrency paradigm can be leveraged to improve the efficiency of financial processes in the existing infrastructure. Various alternative proposals, most notably, Ripple and Ethereum, aim to provide solutions to the financial community in different ways. These proposals derive their security guarantees from either the computational hardness of proof-of-work or voting based distributed consensus mechanism, both of which can be computationally expensive. Furthermore, the financial audit requirements for a participating financial institutions have not been suitably addressed.

This thesis presents a novel approach of constructing a non-consensus based decentralized financial transaction processing model with a built-in efficient audit structure. The problem of decentralized inter-bank payment processing is used for the model design. The two key insights used in this work are (1) to utilize a majority signature based replicated storage protocol for transaction authorization, and (2) to construct individual self-verifiable audit trails for each node as opposed to a common Blockchain. Theoretical analysis shows that the model provides cryptographic security for transaction processing and the presented audit structure facilitates financial auditing of individual nodes in time independent of the number of transactions.
ContributorsGupta, Saurabh (Author) / Bazzi, Rida (Thesis advisor) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Herlihy, Maurice (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016