Dissertation Defense Announcements

Childhood obesity has been on the rise for decades with negative impact on health, psychology of the people and with significant economic cost to the society. Some risk factors attributed to obesity are quality and quantity of food, sugary drinks, and sedentary lifestyle. This project evaluates the effect of an educational intervention to improve parents’ nutrition label literacy as parents make healthy food choices for their children.

The literature review discussed the causes and consequences of childhood obesity, and importance of nutrition label literacy in prevention of childhood obesity. This quantitative descriptive study was conducted at an outpatient pediatric clinic among parents. One of the aims of the project was to identify the participants’ nutrition label illiteracy by administering a Food Label Literacy for Applied Nutrition Knowledge (FLLANK) pretest. Thirty participants completed the pre and post intervention questionnaire. 73.3% of the participants had a least a 2-year college degree and 60% made more than $45,000/ year. The results showed that irrespective of socioeconomic status, the participants improved in their nutrition label literacy after the educational intervention. It is important for healthcare providers to initiate early intervention in nutrition literacy in prevention of childhood obesity.

This dissertation features financial market innovation and product market innovation. Two essays feature return predictability in commodity futures, which have been financialized during the past two decades. One essay studies the relation between CEO’s external job market tournament and product innovation in the stock market. The first essay identifies a trend factor that exploits the short-, intermediate-, and long-run moving averages of settlement price in commodity futures markets. The trend factor generates statistically and economically large returns during the sample period 2004-2019. It outperforms the well-known momentum factor by more than five times the Sharpe ratio and less downside risk. The trend factor cannot be explained by existing factor models and is priced cross-sectionally. Then we find that the trend factor can be explained by funding liquidity measured by TED spread. Overall, the results indicate that there are significant economic gains from using the information on historical prices in commodity futures markets. The second essay uses machine learning tools to study the serial dependence (lead-lag relations) of commodity futures returns. We use LASSO to select the predictors because the number of predictors is large relative to the number of observations. We find significant full-sample and out-of-sample predictability. In the full sample, we find that LASSO can identify a sparse set of predictors that either come from economically linked commodities or are likely driven by excessive speculative trading. The out-of-sample forecasts based on LASSO generate statistically and economically large gains. When we use more complex machine learning models such as regression trees and neural networks to forecast commodity futures returns, the out-of-sample performance is worse than LASSO portfolios, suggesting that nonlinearities and interactions do not appear substantial in the data. We also find that index trading due to financialization drives the excess comovement among commodity futures. The third essay examines how the tournament-like progression in the CEO labor market influences corporate innovation strategies. By exploiting a text-based proxy for product innovation based on product descriptions from 10-Ks, we find a significant positive relation between industry tournament incentives (ITIs) and product innovation. We then explore the trade-off effects of ITIs on product innovation created through long-term patenting technologies and short-term “routine” product development. We discover that ITIs strengthen routine product development activities but decrease patent-based innovation. Further analyses show that the effect of ITIs on product innovation is stronger when the product market is more competitive and when CEO characteristics indicate a higher probability of winning the tournament prize.

Wearable technology became popular not only in the consumer market, but also in the field of academic research. Studies related to smart wearables have increased dramatically during recent years. However, personal safety perspectives of wearable devices have not been adequately addressed in the literature so far. There have been debates regarding the potential health risk of using wireless technology and batteries from wearable devices. Regardless of the actual health risks from wearable devices, these controversial debates could affect and form users’ perceptions toward purchasing and using the technology. The uniqueness of wearable devices is that they are not only considered as technical devices, but also considered as fashion items. By adding perceived risk and fashnology (combination of fashion and technology) constructs to the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology 2 (UTAUT2), this study examines how perceived risks and fashion-related perceptions influence a consumer’s intention to purchase and use wireless earbuds. Based on survey data from a sample group of 205 respondents, Perceived Health Risk, Perceived Fashionability, and wearable comfort have a significant impact on a consumer’s intention to purchase wireless earbuds. These results fill in the gap of wearable technology literature and provide a reason why Perceived Health Risk should be studied more for future research. In addition, practitioners should make sure they produce wearable devices that are safe, fashionable, and comfortable to wear.

Latinas’ lack of knowledge regarding cervical cancer screening (CCS) guidelines has a significant impact on CCS adherence and ultimately impacts their health outcomes related to cervical cancer. Studies have demonstrated that small media, culturally relevant educational interventions are highly effective in improving Latinas’ knowledge of CCS (Moran et al., 2016; Thompson et al., 2019; Warner et al., 2018). The purpose of this scholarly project was to implement and evaluate the efficacy of a small media educational intervention on Latinas’ knowledge of CCS and human papillomavirus (HPV) and evaluate the participants’ satisfaction with the intervention. A convenience sample of 50 Hispanic female patients between the ages of 21-65 was obtained from a community health center in the Southeast region of the United States. The fotonovela utilized in the Thompson et al. (2019) study was the intervention used for this project; it was offered in Spanish and English and included information on CCS and HPV. A pre- and post-test questionnaire assessing the participants’ CCS and HPV knowledge was administered. In addition, the post-questionnaire included questions that evaluated the participants’ satisfaction with the fotonovela. Following implementation of the fotonovela, participants significantly increased their average post-test CCS and HPV knowledge scores (Pre: 50.6; Post: 83.6, p<.000). All 50 participants (100%) reported overall satisfaction with the fotonovela. The findings of this project were both statistically and clinically significant indicating that the fotonovela is an effective and favorable educational intervention, thus its implementation is warranted in healthcare settings that provide care to Latinas.