PhD programmes

• Director: Dr. Jonathan Wareham (Esade - Universitat Ramon Llull)
• Date of defense: 22/06/2020

Abstract

Big science infrastructures are confronting increasing demands for public accountability, not only within scientific discovery but also their capacity to generate secondary economic value. To build and operate their sophisticated infrastructures, big science often generates frontier technologies by designing and building technical solutions to complex and unprecedented engineering problems. In parallel, the previous decade has seen the disruption of rapid technological changes impacting the way science is done and shared, which has led to the coining of the concept of Open Science (OS). Governments are quickly moving towards the OS paradigm and asking big science centres to "open up” the scientific process. Yet these two forces run in opposition as the commercialization of scientific outputs usually requires significant financial investments and companies are willing to bear this cost only if they can protect the innovation from imitation or unfair competition. This PhD dissertation aims at understanding how new applications of ICT are affecting primary research outcomes and the resultant technology transfer in the context of big and OS. It attempts to uncover the tensions in these two normative forces and identify the mechanisms that are employed to overcome them. The dissertation is comprised of four separate studies: 1) A mixed-method study combining two large-scale global online surveys to research scientists (2016, 2018), with two case studies in high energy physics and molecular biology scientific communities that assess explanatory factors behind scientific data-sharing practices; 2) A case study of Open Targets, an information infrastructure based upon data commons, where European Molecular Biology Laboratory-EBI and pharmaceutical companies collaborate and share scientific data and technological tools to accelerate drug discovery; 3) A study of a unique dataset of 170 projects funded under ATTRACT -a novel policy instrument of the European Commission lead by European big science infrastructures- which aims to understand the nature of the serendipitous process behind transitioning big science technologies to previously unanticipated commercial applications; and 4) a case study of White Rabbit technology, a sophisticated open-source hardware developed at the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN) in collaboration with an extensive ecosystem of companies.

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• Director: Dr. Luca del Viva (Esade - Universitat Ramon Llull) and Dr. Carmen Ansotegui (Esade - Universitat Ramon Llull)
• Date of defense: 06/07/2020

Abstract

This dissertation aims at empirically uncovering new aspects of the cross-section of equity returns and providing theoretical-backed and empirical explanations of the main findings. The dissertation documents novel pricing predictors and factors related to the uncertainty and imprecision levels of the information content embedded in different risk measures. The first chapter investigates whether the time-series volatility of book-to-market (BM), called value uncertainty (UNC), is priced in the cross-section of equity returns. A size-adjusted value-weighted factor with a long (short) position in high-UNC (low-UNC) stocks generates an annualized alpha of 6-8%. This value uncertainty premium is driven by outperformance of high-UNC firms and is not explained by established risk factors or firm characteristics, such as price and earnings momentum, investment, profitability, or BM itself. At the aggregate level, UNC is correlated with macroeconomic fundamentals and predicts future market returns and market volatility. The chapter also provides a rational asset-pricing explanation of the uncovered UNC premium. The second chapter extends the first chapter and examines the predictive power of the uncertainty of profitability (UP) on the cross-section of equity returns. A portfolio strategy that goes long in the high-UP decile portfolio and short in the low-UP decile portfolio generates an annual excess raw (risk-adjusted) return of 8% (10%). High-UP stocks would have higher returns during times of higher market-wide profitability, lower market volatility, and higher expected inflation justifying the documented premium. Moreover, firms with high uncertainty surrounding their asset growth (UAG) would outperform those with low asset growth uncertainty by 7% (12%) in terms of excess raw (risk-adjusted) return. Results shed light on the importance of the volatility of risk factors in investment decisions. The third chapter examines the impact that imprecision in management earnings guidance (IMP) has on equity returns. Empirical evidence reveals that high IMP (wider interval in the forecasted earnings) is associated with lower subsequent stock returns. Two complementary explanations are provided to explain the low returns. First, in a market that exhibits short-selling constraints and diversion of opinion regarding earnings estimates, high IMP discourages pessimistic investors while optimists believe in the high bound of the range and take long positions based on these beliefs, leading to stocks' overpricing and hence to lower subsequent returns. Second, high IMP may reflect genuine uncertainty regarding future earnings appealing to growth and lottery investors. Findings are robust at the portfolio and stock level of analysis, to the measurement of imprecision, and to different asset pricing models.

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• Director: Dr. Ariadna Dumitrescu (Esade - Universitat Ramon Llull)
• Date of defense: 08/07/2020

Abstract

This thesis aims to understand the relationship between corporate governance and performance by tracing its evolution over time and revisiting the methodological issues faced in measuring corporate governance. Empirical corporate governance literature shows that good governance stocks outperformed poor ones until investors’ increased attention to governance information made this anomaly disappear. On the contrary, first part of this thesis reveals that poor governance stocks have outperformed good ones in recent years. To explain this novel result, we examine whether investors become aware of the risks associated with poor governance after the 2008 global financial crisis and integrate this information into their investment decisions. Empirical evidence supports this explanation. In the second part of the thesis, we propose an unequal-weighted measure of corporate governance using anti-takeover provisions. In comparison with existing measures of governance that employ equal weighting methodology, this is the first study to explore multiple unequal weighting methodologies. Results show that the relationship between governance and performance is better explained when individual anti-takeover provisions’ heterogeneity is captured in the weights of the governance index. While the first two studies take the shareholders’ view of corporate governance, the third study of this thesis takes a stakeholders’ view by considering environmental, social and governance (ESG) characteristics together. Unlike prior literature that applies kitchen-sink measures of firms’ ESG-orientation, this study introduces a selective approach to measure corporate sustainability as an ESG subset. We show that corporate sustainability is the main driver of ESG’s relationship with financial performance. Overall, this thesis highlights the importance of governance and ESG information (and the way they are both measured) for both the firms and their investors. Governance is significantly related to performance and valuation, but conditional on the way it is measured. This, in turn, has important implications for managers, governance rating agencies, and regulators.

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• Director: Dr. Josep Francesc Mària, SJ (Esade - Universitat Ramon Llull)
• Date of defense: 30/07/2020

Abstract

Increased research focus on the relationship between employee evaluations of the socially responsible activities of their firms and their reactions to these evaluations has led to certain inconsistencies in the constructs and theoretical lenses used to understand the relationship. This dissertation seeks to clarify some ambiguities existing in current literature, and seeks to expand our understanding of the relationship by bringing together incongruent streams found within literature. The dissertation is based on three essays, each of which attempts to clarify a single aspect of the relationship between employees’ evaluations of corporate social responsibility and their reactions towards their firms. The first essay aims to synthesize the diverse constructs that have been used in prior literature to capture employees’ evaluations of their firms’ socially responsible behavior. The essay concludes by identifying five conceptually distinct evaluations that employees make using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, and uses structural equation modelling to identify the structure of interrelationships among these distinct evaluations. The second essay explores the theoretical lenses that have been used in literature to explain why employees respond to the socially responsible activities of their firms. The essay brings together insights from both organizational justice theory and social identity theory to develop a framework that incorporates ideas from both perspectives. The essay concludes by identifying the enhanced job meaningfulness has the largest effect size in terms of the mediating mechanism between employee perceptions of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and employee reactions to CSR. The last essay presents an alternative theoretical explanation for the relationship between employee perceptions of CSR and their attitudes towards the firm, based on the idea of cognitive consistency, using the balance theory of attitudes. An explanation of the relationship based on a desire for cognitive consistency allows for the relationship between employee evaluations of CSR and their attitudes towards the firm to flow in either causal direction. Using an experimental setting, evidence for the bi-directionality of the relationship was presented in the essay.

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