ABSTRACT. Workplace mistreatment remains a vexing issue for organizations as it is both highly prevalent and costly in terms of absenteeism and lost productivity (Dhanani et al., 2021). However, much of the extant research on workplace mistreatment suffers from (1) issues of construct validity, treating workplace mistreatment as a unitary construct despite its broad range of distinct manifestations, and (2) issues of measurement, relying almost exclusively on self-reports from the perspective of the victim (Yao et al., 2022; Park et al., 2022). Recent advances in theory (Dhanani & Bogart, 2025) and method (Al-Atwi et al., 2024) point toward a more nuanced picture. This meta-analysis seeks to quantitatively examine these nuances and uncover the differential antecedents and impacts of distinct manifestations of workplace mistreatment. We distinguish between acts of commission (e.g., verbal abuse, bullying, violence) and acts of omission (e.g., ostracism, workplace isolation, knowledge hiding). We further seek to examine whether the magnitude of these relationships is affected by the measurement method, incorporating studies that include not only the victim’s perspective but those of the perpetrator and the observer. This meta-analysis will synthesize hundreds of studies of individual mistreatment constructs. In this developmental presentation we will discuss the theoretical and practical implications of this work, highlighting the need for HR interventions to move beyond addressing overt hostility (i.e. acts of commission) and implement strategies that mitigate the subtle exclusionary behaviors that characterize acts of omission.

ABSTRACT. Extended Abstract

Human Resources serves as a bridge between employees and management, and its perceived credibility and effectiveness can significantly influence the level of perceived trust within an organization (Burke et al., 2007; Vanhala & Ahteela, 2011). Perceived organizational trust, or the expectation that a company will act responsibly for the benefit of its stakeholders (Dirks & Ferrin, 2002), is critical to an organization’s performance (Ha & Lee, 2022). A great deal of research has evaluated the importance of trust in organizations, particularly involving employee relationships and overall company efficiency and effectiveness (Mayer et al., 1995; Dirks & Ferrin, 2002). Despite this emphasis on trust, only 25% of US employees trust HR to handle toxic workplace behaviors effectively (Ahuja, 2025).

Additionally, Human Resources serves as a critical function within organizations by addressing employee concerns, resolving workplace conflicts, and ensuring that policies and practices promote a fair, respectful, and productive work environment. Through these responsibilities, HR plays a pivotal role in creating organizational trust (Oglesby et al., 2025). Trustworthiness is developed with honesty, transparency, and fairness, and by communicating messages employees believe to be valid (Pornpitakpan, 2004). Specifically, HR can build trust (and their own reputation) under the following conditions: 1) when HR is viewed as knowledgeable and competent; 2) when HR is perceived as empathetic and responsive to employee needs; and 3) when HR is seen as likeable and relatable to employees (Oglesby et al., 2025). Conversely, mishandling employee concerns and interactions could damage HR's reputation, diminishing departmental credibility and eroding organizational trust.

Our study seeks to investigate further the role of HR’s reputation in generating perceived organizational trust. The majority of research on HR reputation has focused on HR’s effectiveness through the administration of policies and procedures (Ferris et al., 2007), but recent research has investigated HR reputation through the lens of the personal reputations of HR personnel. We plan to examine both aspects of HR reputation through two central research questions: 1) how do Human Resource professionals utilize reputation as a signal of trustworthiness? and 2) how do employees interpret the actions, behaviors, and communication of HR personnel as they determine trustworthiness?

Our research draws on signaling and screening theories to investigate these questions. Both theories address situations of information asymmetry. Signaling theory (Spence, 1973) addresses how organizations or individuals signal an unobservable attribute (like trust), while screening theory (Stiglitz, 1975) focuses on how organizations or individuals screen or interpret those signals. From a signaling perspective, aspects of HR reputation (policies, practices, and personal reputation) serve as observable signals that communicate the organization’s trustworthiness. On the other hand, screening theory suggests that employees do not passively receive these signals but rather filter and evaluate them to form their own interpretation of the organization.

We plan to investigate these issues through a qualitative study by interviewing both human resource managers and employees. Specifically, this approach will allow us to examine how HR professionals intentionally craft and convey signals of trustworthiness, as well as how employees interpret, question, or discount those signals based on their experiences, expectations, and perceived credibility of HR. By capturing perspectives from both groups, the study aims to uncover where signals align or diverge from employee interpretations, offering deeper insight into how HR reputation shapes perceived organizational trust.

ABSTRACT. Extended Abstract

Organizational culture and organizational climate are two closely related concepts that aid in understanding the work environment. A positive work environment is crucial as it is a powerful indicator of critical employee outcomes, including performance, commitment, engagement, and motivation (Setiyani et al., 2019; Zhenjing et al., 2022). Organizational culture can be defined as “the predominate beliefs, values, attitudes, behaviors, and practices that are characteristic of a group of people” (Warrick, 2015, p. 4), while organizational climate represents “the shared perceptions of and the meaning attached to the policies, practices, and procedures employees experience and the behaviors they observe” (Schneider et al., 2013, p. 362).

While culture and climate research have each provided substantial insights into the work environment, little progress has been made in integrating these concepts into a unified framework (Schneider et al., 2026). Recently, Schneider and colleagues used an organizational gestalt approach to describe the interrelationships of culture and climate. They describe culture and climate as an integrated configuration that jointly influences outcomes, with culture driving what is expressed and climate capturing how it is perceived.

Culture is primarily organizationally driven and characterized by the “beliefs, values, attitudes, and norms that have evolved over time” (Ehrhart et al., 2025, p. 178). Leaders play a central role in shaping culture, but it is also influenced by group members, external influencers, and various internal and external practices, circumstances, and events (Warrick, 2015). Conversely, climate is primarily focused on the perceptions of individuals within the organization. Climate “provides individuals with indications for both understanding and giving sense of what their organization is about” (Gonzalez-Torres et al., 2023, p. 1). Specifically, climate represents how organizational members feel “about its fundamental elements: the established norms, values, and attitudes of the organization’s culture” (p. 1).

Building on this research, our study suggests that signaling and screening theories explain the interrelatedness of organizational culture and climate. In situations of information asymmetry, signaling theory (Spence, 1973) explains how one party uses signals and cues to convey desired information. For example, organizations use signals to convey their norms, values, and beliefs to their members (culture). Signals might include leadership role modeling, stories and language, daily practices and routines, symbols and artifacts, and processes and procedures. On the other hand, screening theory (Stiglitz, 1975) explains how individuals interpret signals to reduce uncertainty. For example, organizational members use screens to form perceptions of the work environment (climate). Members will evaluate whether the information derived from the screen is relevant, important, and useful in forming their overall perception.

We aim to make the following three contributions to theory and practice. First, we present a unified theoretical framework that draws on signaling and screening theories to explain the relationship between culture and climate. Second, we explore attributes of both effective signals and screens and make suggestions for organizations to better convey their desired culture. Third, we propose a dynamic feedback loop between climate and culture, in which screened perceptions guide the reinforcement or reshaping of cultural signals over time.

ABSTRACT. While a punchline to some, Hallmark Media's movies are a substantial business, generating $700 million in ad revenue a year in 2024, according to some estimates. During its most popular "Countdown to Christmas" period, Hallmark Media reels in 80 million viewers with gentle romantic stories often set in small towns. Amid the flurry cookie-making and cocoa, however, Hallmark is serving up another flavor of wish-fulfillment: women who own their own businesses. Hallmark movies often include heroines who are solo-entrepreneurs or running small businesses with family and friends. Many of these heroines face business issues during the films. This research would investigate Hallmark movies over the last five years, which includes all movies produced after the pandemic. It would use AI tools to analyze the number of heroines who are entrepreneurs, the type of entrepreneurial endeavor (solo, family business, partnership), and whether they face a business crisis in the movie. This research would also make comparisons about the number of female entrepreneurs across the United States and Canada and the percentage of Hallmark heroines who are entrepreneurs. What lessons do these Hallmark heroines have to teach entrepreneurs? How do they represent the realities of entrepreneurship? How do they misrepresent these issues? This is an abstract as of this deadline, but it would be expanded into a paper by later this year.

ABSTRACT. This paper posits employee I-deal requests function as simultaneous needs and value signals that managers systematically distort through attribution, and that employees' anticipation of that distortion suppresses initiation behavior before negotiation begins.

ABSTRACT. This research provides empirical support for the development of team resiliency as a higher order construct (HOC) and mediating impact of shared leadership on team cooperation operating under stressful contexts.

ABSTRACT. This quantitative correlational study examined the relationship between supervisor-subordinate relationships and power distance and individualism/collectivism in an online university setting, as these factors are crucial for developing rapport, trust, and a sense of belonging among faculty (Fosslien & Duffy, 2022). Data was obtained via the LMX-7 and cultural dimension scales and managed through SurveyMonkey's data collection services. Data was collected from 116 participants using the LMX-7 scale and the Dorfman and Howell cultural dimensions instrument. The study's results suggested that, contrary to some theoretical expectations, the quality of leader-member relationships may not systematically vary with individual cultural orientation in this context. The weak association observed reflected the influence of other moderating factors, such as organizational culture, team dynamics, or situational demands, which were not measured in this study. Future research should consider examining these potential moderators to better understand under which conditions LMX and individualism/collectivism might be meaningfully linked. The study contributes to cross-cultural leadership scholarship in online higher education and recommends that future research employ multi-level and longitudinal designs to further clarify the cultural influences on faculty–leader relationships.

ABSTRACT. This conceptual paper develops constrained coordination signals: standardized early-warning communications that allow naval-production supply- network actors to share the operational consequences of emerging problems without automatically disclosing sensitive underlying causes or evidence.

ABSTRACT. The rapid growth of hybrid work arrangement has fundamentally changed traditional leadership practices within dispersed teams. Drawing on leader-member exchange theory, team shared mental models, social cognitive theory, and shared leadership theory, this study proposes an integrated model explaining how virtual leader presence enhances team effectiveness through self-leadership, shared leadership, and team cohesion. The core construct virtual leader presence is conceptualized as a team-level perception of leader visibility, accessibility, responsiveness, and social presence in virtual interactions. The study proposes that virtual leader presence acts as a leadership mechanism that stimulates both individual-level (self-leadership) and team-level leadership (shared leadership), together influences shared understanding and relational alignment, which collectively strengthens team cohesion in dispersed team context. In the process, team cohesion facilitates building trust, coordination, cooperation, collective performance, and ultimately improving team effectiveness. The proposed research methods include using a time-lagged, multi-source research design and analyzed with covariance-based structural equation modeling. By integrating relational, cognitive, and technological perspectives, this study extends leadership theory into digital context, advances a process-based approach in understanding of team effectiveness in dispersed teams in hybrid work environments.

ABSTRACT. This dissertation establishes culture war exposure as a regime-conditional systematic risk factor that produces persistent mispricing in U.S. equity markets and identifies the informed-insider channel through which a substantial fraction of the resulting price discovery is realized. Essay 1 augments the Fama-French five-factor model with a culture war exposure factor and estimates loadings within a Markov regime-switching framework keyed to the VIX, using a curated panel of 160 culture war events across 107 firms (2000–2025). Culture war exposure earns an economically and statistically significant risk premium in high-volatility regimes and is indistinguishable from zero in low-volatility regimes. A complementary FOMO index, constructed from cross-sectional volume and price-dispersion measures, confirms that culture war risk co-moves with attention-driven sentiment dynamics rather than fundamentals alone. Essay 2 tests whether prices fully absorb culture war event information at announcement. Using a difference-in-differences design with matched control firms and FinBERT-based sentiment classification of contemporaneous news coverage, the analysis documents a mean post-event cumulative abnormal return of approximately −15% relative to matched controls, with magnitudes scaling in news sentiment polarity. The decline is not reversed within twelve months — a regularity termed the persistent mispricing of political-economic risk. Mispricing concentrates in firms with elevated political exposure (lobbying intensity, PAC activity) and survives placebo permutation, sample restrictions, and alternative event-classification rules. Essay 3 supplies the microfoundation by testing whether corporate insiders trade on advance knowledge of political decisions. Linking SEC Form 4 filings to 1,419 political events (2000–2025), the study assembles 39,342 pre-event insider trades and a matched non-political control sample of 14,361 trades. Pre-event insider sells are 55.7% directionally accurate against the eventual price reaction (p < 1×10⁻⁶⁶), exceeding the 53.2% accuracy observed in matched non-political windows by 2.5 percentage points (p < 0.001). Realized sell-side profits aggregate to $2.5 billion across the sample, with $479 million concentrated in 30-day windows preceding events that produced abnormal returns of −5% or worse. Three findings sharpen the interpretation. First, directional accuracy persists across the full 180-day pre-event window, consistent with information diffusion through political networks rather than last-minute leaks. Second, cultural events — where political stakes are most public — generate the highest per-event accuracy (56.4%) and largest per-trade profits. Third, the 2022 Rule 10b5-1 amendments, designed to curtail informed pre-event trading, coincide with the largest concentration of informed-trading profits in the sample period (71% sells accuracy, $1.57 billion over three years), raising the possibility that ex-ante commitment requirements have institutionalized rather than disrupted the channel. Together, the three essays describe a market structure in which culture war exposure functions as a regime-conditional, sentiment-amplified systematic risk factor that produces persistent post-event mispricing, and in which informed insiders extract a substantial share of the resulting price-discovery rent through a politically networked channel that current regulatory architecture institutionalizes rather than disrupts. Political identity is thus established not as a transitory market disturbance but as a structural feature of contemporary capital markets — a mispriced risk that models cannot see, sentiment amplifies, and regulation insulates from correction.

ABSTRACT. This paper argues that strategy execution failure persists because dominant organizational frameworks are structurally culture-blind, and proposes tacit cultural assumptions as the hidden interpretive mechanism through which strategy either takes hold or dissolves across functional groups.

ABSTRACT. As artificial intelligence (AI) rapidly scales across marketing functions, firms face an emerging strategic paradox: how to leverage AI for innovation while managing its largely overlooked environmental costs. While AI enables efficiency, personalization, and competitive advantage, its environmental implications, including energy consumption, emissions, and resource use, remain underexplored in both research and practice. Drawing on responsible innovation and paradox theory, this study examines how firms navigate these competing demands through strategic decision-making and governance processes. This research introduces AI sustainability awareness (AI-SA) as a leadership-level construct reflecting Chief Marketing Officers’ recognition of AI’s environmental impact. Further, we conceptualize responsible AI governance in marketing as the structures and policies that guide how AI is deployed within organizations. We propose that higher levels of AI-SA will be associated with more selective and strategically constrained AI use, increased adoption of responsible AI governance practices, and stronger alignment between sustainability commitments and AI deployment decisions. We also examine the moderating role of firm-wide sustainability policies in shaping these relationships. Using a multi-method design, this research combines in-depth interviews and survey data from marketing leaders to examine AI-SA, governance practices, and AI use in marketing. This study contributes to emerging AI in marketing literature by positioning sustainability and governance as central considerations in responsible AI adoption.

ABSTRACT. This paper develops and empirically tests a moderated parallel mediation framework predicting how four corporate tariff-related price message strategies differentially shape consumer fairness perceptions, psychological reactance, and downstream brand outcomes across a three-study research program.

ABSTRACT. Collegiate athletic departments face escalating financial pressures driven by rising operational costs, conference realignment, and evolving Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) legislation. Among the most visible and costly financial decisions are coaching severance agreements and contract buyouts. This study uses a lagged framework and 20 years of data from the Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database to examine whether coaching severance expenses predict later changes in athletic department revenues and expenditures among NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) institutions. Specifically, it analyzes subsequent impacts on ticket sales, donor contributions, recruiting, facilities, and coaching compensation. Preliminary results indicate that coaching severance serves as a significant predictor of future financial outcomes, functioning as an organizational signal of a renewed commitment to athletic success.

ABSTRACT. Modern e-commerce search systems often struggle to interpret complex user queries that implicitly contain structured product attributes, resulting in poor relevance and inefficient user experiences. Traditional keyword-based retrieval mechanisms treat such queries as flat text, failing to leverage the underlying semantic intent expressed through attributes like brand, size, color, and compatibility. This paper presents a proofof-concept system for automatic facet discovery that bridges the gap between unstructured user input and structured faceted search frameworks. The proposed approach analyzes search queries, maps relevant terms to predefined facet values, and dynamically applies these as filters to refine search results. By transforming free-text queries into hybrid structured queries, the system significantly improves retrieval accuracy and reduces the need for manual filtering. The architecture integrates with existing search infrastructures by utilizing indexed facet data and lightweight disambiguation strategies to resolve conflicts and ambiguities. Experimental demonstrations across multiple product domains highlight consistent improvements in relevance compared to conventional search implementations. While the current system relies on exact matching and heuristic-based logic, it establishes a strong foundation for future enhancements using advanced natural language processing and machine learning techniques. This work contributes toward more intelligent, usercentric search experiences in large-scale e-commerce environments.

ABSTRACT. Martial arts are often marketed as an extracurricular activity that improves both students’ mental and physical health. Thus, many studies examine the mental and educational impacts of participating in martial arts during childhood, particularly the development of life skills such as discipline, confidence, emotional regulation, social skills, resilience, goal setting, and communication. Based on Human Capital Theory and Positive Youth Development Theory, this paper claims that the structured educational environment develops these critical life skills in adolescents, which improves their productivity and future career opportunities. However, there is a distinct lack of research on how martial arts experience affects future career opportunities and experience. This study examines the relationship between martial arts and business success, specifically whether traits learned or refined through martial arts practice positively affect future career and business operations. It is expected that martial arts experience does positively impact future career opportunities and business success, as it has been proven that martial arts experience develops and applies the necessary life skills that are essential for business success.

ABSTRACT. Martial arts are often marketed as an extracurricular activity that improves both students’ mental and physical health. Thus, many studies examine the mental and educational impacts of participating in martial arts during childhood, particularly the development of life skills such as discipline, confidence, emotional regulation, social skills, resilience, goal setting, and communication. Based on Human Capital Theory and Positive Youth Development Theory, this paper claims that the structured educational environment develops these critical life skills in adolescents, which improves their productivity and future career opportunities. However, there is a distinct lack of research on how martial arts experience affects future career opportunities and experience. This study examines the relationship between martial arts and business success, specifically whether traits learned or refined through martial arts practice positively affect future career and business operations. It is expected that martial arts experience does positively impact future career opportunities and business success, as it has been proven that martial arts experience develops and applies the necessary life skills that are essential for business success.

ABSTRACT. Small businesses often derive their early competitive advantage from authenticity, founder involvement, and deep relational ties with customers and communities. Yet as these firms grow, the cumulative adoption of practices associated with market and professional logics—formalized hiring, delegated service, standardized operations, and external governance—can displace the community logic under which the firm originated, weakening the practice-level foundations that originally fueled success. This paper develops the Small Business Identity Life Cycle (SBILC), a conceptual framework explaining how authenticity and organizational identity evolve across stages of emergence, growth, identity drift, and decline or reinvention in founder-led firms. Drawing primarily on the institutional logics perspective and the institutional complexity literature, and integrating insights from organizational identity theory, small-business life-cycle research, and small business orientation, the framework theorizes identity drift as the displacement of community-logic practices by market and professional logics within the firm, in the absence of deliberate hybridization. The SBILC also specifies the conditions under which firms can reverse drift through hybridization responses—integrating community-logic commitments into scaled organizational structures—rather than through symbolic measures alone. By framing small-business growth as an institutional transformation rather than a purely operational process, this paper contributes a logics-grounded perspective on authenticity erosion and renewal. The framework offers actionable insights for founders and advisors seeking to grow without losing the distinctive identity that underpins long-term loyalty and resilience, while providing a foundation for future empirical research on identity dynamics in small businesses.

ABSTRACT. The United States defense industrial base faces a critical production gap in the unmanned aerial systems (UAS) sector: retooling lag measured in years, severe cost asymmetry, and surge capacity that falls orders of magnitude short of operational need. This paper examines whether Northwest Florida — spanning Escambia, Santa Rosa, and Okaloosa counties with Pensacola as its coordinating center — has the workforce, infrastructure, institutional ecosystem, and policy alignment to support a scalable domestic UAS manufacturing operation. Across five analytical categories — workforce, collaborators, incentives, site selection, and military end-user requirements — the paper finds that Northwest Florida offers a quantifiable and distinctive foundation: approximately 5,200 pre-trained military separatees annually, a 50 to 55 percent cost-of-living-adjusted wage advantage over peer coastal defense locations, a ten-site industrial inventory with a clear primary recommendation, and a layered incentive environment anchored by Triumph Gulf Coast and federal SBIR/STTR pathways. The region is not yet a finished cluster — the private-sector layer is thin and governance coordination requires investment — but its readiness, not perfection, makes Northwest Florida the most credible coordinating center for a distributed UAS manufacturing strategy in the southeastern United States.

ABSTRACT. Work conditions are key drivers of supply chain performance. Supply chain resilience is critical for supply chain organizations. Research has focused on the physical resources necessary for a supply chain to be resilient during and after disruptions. However, there has been little research on how work conditions influence the resiliency of supply chain organizations. This study examines work conditions and their impact on supply chain resilience. Job Demands-Resources model and Resource-based view theory will be used to suggest that work conditions, with turnover intention as a mediating variable and leadership style as a moderating variable, can affect supply chain resilience. I plan to collect survey data from a random sample of 200 supply chain professionals from various professional purchasing organizations and networks to investigate the impact of work conditions on supply chain resilience.

ABSTRACT. The Tippy Type Effect: What Shoppers Reach For When They Don't Know They're Shopping

ABSTRACT. The United States defense industrial base faces a critical production gap in the unmanned aerial systems (UAS) sector: retooling lag measured in years, severe cost asymmetry, and surge capacity that falls orders of magnitude short of operational need. This paper examines whether Northwest Florida — spanning Escambia, Santa Rosa, and Okaloosa counties with Pensacola as its coordinating center — has the workforce, infrastructure, institutional ecosystem, and policy alignment to support a scalable domestic UAS manufacturing operation, using Swarm Dynamics AI, an MIT-born dual-use defense startup, as the primary industry case study. Across five analytical categories — workforce, collaborators, incentives, site selection, and military end-user requirements — the paper finds that Northwest Florida offers a quantifiable and distinctive foundation: approximately 5,200 pre-trained military separatees annually, a 50 to 55 percent cost-of-living-adjusted wage advantage over peer coastal defense locations, a ten-site industrial inventory with a clear primary recommendation, and a layered incentive environment anchored by Triumph Gulf Coast and federal SBIR/STTR pathways. The region is not yet a finished cluster — the private-sector layer is thin and governance coordination requires investment — but its readiness, not perfection, makes Northwest Florida the most credible coordinating center for a distributed UAS manufacturing strategy in the southeastern United States.

ABSTRACT. Culture war events are increasingly shaping corporate outcomes, yet firms continue to treat them as episodic public relations issues rather than systematic financial risks. This research examines how political positioning affects firm value by triggering sentiment shifts among consumers and investors. An event study of 141 completed analyses drawn from a dataset of 160 culture war flashpoints from 2000–2025 reveals a mean cumulative abnormal return (CAR) of –15.51% (median: –9.65%; mean BHAR: –21.79%) across the [–10,+10] event window, with 37% of events producing statistically significant abnormal returns at the 5% level. Critically, firms across all three political alignment categories, liberal, conservative, and mixed, experience significant negative CARs (p < .01), confirming that culture war exposure destroys shareholder value regardless of partisan stance. Parallel trends testing validates the difference-in-differences design (F = 1.23, p = 0.268), and the pattern of negative DiD coefficients across 58% of matched pairs is consistent with a broad, systematic effect rather than idiosyncratic firm-level exposure. FinBERT sentiment analysis and panel regressions across the full study reveal that over 200% of the return effect is mediated through investor and consumer sentiment rather than fundamental performance, with these effects intensifying under high-VIX conditions. Mediation analysis further confirms social media as a primary transmission channel. Together, these findings bridge behavioral finance and marketing strategy, establishing culture war risk as a systematic, sentiment-amplified factor demanding integration into brand strategy, stakeholder governance, and narrative risk management in today's polarized business environment.

ABSTRACT. Accounting Standard Update 326 (ASC 326), the current expected credit loss standard (CECL), was phased in for commercial banks between 2020 and 2023. CECL was a substantial change by the Financial Accounting Standards Board in response to the lack of decision-usefulness of information provided by the previous standard, revealed by the economic distress of 2008-2009 (Schroeder, 2023). This study examines the causal effect of CECL adoption on loan loss provisions (LLP). The difference-in-difference (DiD) staggered treatment effects approach (Callaway & Sant’Anna, 2021) is employed to test the causal hypothesis and informs the formal statement of hypotheses. This method controls for covariates, corrects for two-way fixed effects issues, and produces doubly robust results using machine learning. As such, this method allows for causal inferences. A pre-requisite of causal inferences is that the pre-treatment period must demonstrate parallel trends, i.e., a consistent pre-treatment period trend that can be compared to the post-treatment period. An additional necessary assumption is that treatment, in this case CECL adoption, does not affect LLP prior to the adoption date. Once these assumptions are supported, multiple hypothesis tests for different staggered pre- and post-treatment periods and samples are performed for each quarter from 2020 to 2022. This study reveals a positive causal effect of CECL adoption on LLP for 96 adopters in first quarter 2020, and a negative causal effect on LLP for 22 adopters in first quarter 2021. However, the effects were not sustained beyond two quarters. In the aggregate, the average adoption effect by length of exposure revealed no appreciable and sustainable causal effect of CECL adoption on LLP over the 2020 to 2022 phased adoption period for public banks, raising the question of whether CECL has altered the landscape of LLP predictions after all.

ABSTRACT. There is a significant disparity in sports sponsorship when comparing Power Four schools to non-Power Four, with roughly 16% of sponsorship activity supporting non-Power Four (Football Bowl Subdivision, 2025). Additionally, the sports sponsorship literature has been plagued with a lack of comprehensive measures for sponsorship effectiveness (Crompton, 2004). This research seeks to determine the effectiveness of sponsorships of smaller schools compared to larger schools by proposing a fandom-integrated measure for effectiveness. Using Social Identity Theory (Tajfel, 1974), we attempt to explain how fandom influences sponsorship outcomes and acts as a competitive advantage for non-Power Four schools to compete for sponsorships.

ABSTRACT. This dissertation investigates how an adverse event, such as divorce, relates to resilience and leader developmental efficacy. Divorce-related grief is examined as a first- stage moderator between divorce and resilience. The totality of the model was assessed to see if gender moderated the model, such that women would show stronger relationships with the proposed constructs than men. The hypotheses were tested using a time- separated sample collected from the online platform Prolific, comprising 409 participants. With the removal of extreme outliers, the results showed that divorce status was positively, but not significantly, related to resilience. Divorce-related grief did not moderate the relationship between divorce and resilience, and the direction of the effect was opposite to what was predicted. When retaining outliers, divorce-related grief was significant. Resilience was positively and significantly related to leader developmental efficacy. To test for gender differences, a Multigroup Analysis (MGA) was conducted. However, measurement invariance was not sufficiently met, and this portion of the analysis was strictly exploratory in nature. Theoretical and practical implications, along with limitations and future research opportunities, are also addressed.