Pennathur, Anita

Local social capital, defined as the level of community interaction and social participation of a region, has been theorized to positively affect economic outcomes and discourage opportunistic behaviors in various settings. I examine whether local social capital is related to positive outcomes for entrepreneurs and their financial backers in the settings of reward crowdfunding and small business lending.
In my first study, I look at how local social capital influences the creators of successful reward crowdfunding campaigns. These creators, in turn, may influence the sentiment of their investors, or backers, towards their projects through missed delivery deadlines and poor communication. With comments collected from successful Kickstarter crowdfunding pages, I use textual analysis to construct a measure of the sentiment of project backers following the fundraising deadline.

The purpose of this study is to look at the effects that industry concentration has on the growth of local areas. People will go where the jobs are so by evaluating employment data one can also evaluate the growth of an area. Common economic basis calculations and indices were used to provide useful information about characteristics of growth, competitiveness, and concentrations of local industries compared to the national level. The key results show the complex nature of urban and regional development exemplified by changes in employment and that access to more and complex data will be necessary to gain a greater understanding of urban growth.

In Essay 1, I investigate the Equity Duration Hypothesis, which adapts Macaulay’s fixed income analysis to equity securities, finding evidence that dividend payers are less volatile than nonpayers and that dividend yield is negatively associated with volatility for the all-firms sample. Within the payer sample, however, I find unexpected evidence of a positive association when yield includes all dividends but a conflicting negative association when yield includes only quarterly dividends. This ambiguous evidence is corroborated by a one-year portfolio approach, as a previously strengthening negative relationship has transitioned to a strengthening positive one, with results demonstrably trending against the EDH in recent decades. I further find that high-yield stocks that have experienced negative price shocks are highly volatile and strong support for the EDH using firm-level earnings and cash flows as a proxy for dividends, allowing extension of the analysis to nonpaying firms. Unfortunately, I find abundant evidence supporting the assertions of many researchers who suggest that ED is not a unique asset pricing factor, but rather represents a composite of a firm’s characteristics and is redundant with other factors known to be associated with volatility.