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Coles College of Business 2023-2024 Projects

Click here to return to the main project listings page. Questions: Email our@kennesaw.edu.

  • 2023-2024 First Year Scholars: Memphis Fitzgerald, Abeer Asif Kayser, Suki Lewis, and Carter Pengelly

    • The turn of the 21st century was marred by corporate accounting scandals, which led to a stream of research studies that look at how carefully selected governance rules and provisions protect the rights of shareholders against managerial misconduct. Governance provisions are intended to help achieve corporate control where a given party can or can’t do certain things without an approval by others. Choosing appropriate governance provisions ensures not only a better focus on company operations but also helps a given company to achieve longevity in the marketplace. Previous studies demonstrate that adopting provisions which restrict shareholder rights tend to hurt company financial performance. Some other research studies indicate that focusing on a single provision is not meaningful. Rather sets or bundles of provisions need to be considered. This is like saying that a certain food item is bad for your health. However, some studies can argue that whether food items have health benefits or may be detrimental to your health depends on have they are mixed or blended together. This project will test these views by investigating both the individual and joint influence of corporate governance factors. In other words, the purpose of this project is to investigate the effect of each of the ingredients (i.e., corporate governance factors) and the recipes (i.e., a mix or bundle of ingredients) on company financial performance.

      To achieve this purpose, first-year scholars will collect data for approximately 75 restaurant companies that will be analyzed and coded qualitatively and quantitively. Some sample data items that will be used measure whether the company is family owned, the number of independent directors serving on the board, whether the CEO is also a board member, whether the company has large shareholders etc. Next, statistical analyses will be conducted to determine which factors influence company performance and results will be written up. The findings of the project will be presented at local and/or national undergraduate research conferences.

    • Student Outcomes:
      •  First-year scholars will develop some knowledge of the restaurant industry and the restaurant chains/companies.
      • First-year scholars will learn how to collect secondary firm-level (company) data from company documents and input it into Microsoft Excel to build a dataset.
      • First-year scholars will be exposed data analysis and obtaining statistical output(s).
      • First-year scholars will learn how to prepare tables by including results from the statistical outputs.
      • First-year scholars will learn how to report these results in a research paper.
      • First-year scholars can present their papers at Spring 2023 Symposium of Student Scholars.
      • The scholars can write a research paper that may be published in undergraduate research journals such as Kennesaw Journal of Undergraduate Research or other regional or national-level publications.

    • In the first two months, there will be bi-weekly or online meetings with the student where tasks and the overall progress of the project will be discussed. Later, the first-year scholars can share their progress via bi-weekly checkpoints that can be communicated via e-mail. The scholars’ weekly tasks may vary depending on the stage of the project. The breakdown of specific duties will be communicated once the scholars are selected.

      While the tasks can vary from week to week, the overall duties can be summarized as follows:

      • Review company corporate documents and manually enter governance data in a spreadsheet such as Microsoft Excel (a template will be provided)
      • Conduct basic literature review to write the introduction section of the project.
      • Scholars may also be trained how to conduct basic statistical analysis in Excel. He/she will help with preparing tables and figures that will be used in presenting the research paper at academic conferences and/or submitted to academic journals.
      • The first-year scholar will learn how to use a reference manager software such as Zotero where he/she will build a bibliography of relevant studies.
      • In addition, the scholar will learn how to insert the citations into the research paper.

    • Online

    • Dr. Melih Madanoglu, mmadano1@kennesaw.edu

  • 2023-2024 First Year Scholars: Neema Desamu-Thorpe

    • The research studies the impact of CEO (Chief Executive Officers) characteristics of public corporations on their companies' social media strategies in the domain of ESG. Multiple observable and unobservable characteristics are to be included, including degree of narcissism, neuroticism, along with demographic information. 
    • Students will learn analytical techniques in measuring corporate leaders' personality and other characteristics using various technological tools, including designing experiments to deploy via Mturk or Qualtrics. 

    • In the space below, briefly describe the types of activities that students will engage in each week.
      Student(s) will analyze corporate annual reports and letters to shareholders (provided) and determine whether a CEO and board of directors meet certain criteria (predefined). This can be accomplished manually or using computer scripts; Additionally students may learn how to design experiments in the social sciences and deploy them using actual research participants.

    • Hybrid

    • Dr. Nik Nikolov, ann4276@kennesaw.edu
      Dr. Pramod Iyer, piyer1@kennesaw.edu

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