Davis Fellowship

In 1983, Norman S. Davis, a 1908 Rider graduate, gave a gift of Bucks County, Pa., farmland to Rider. Rider sold that land in 1988 for $4.43 million. One of the by-products of these funds was the establishment of the Davis Fellowship to sustain professional growth of the business faculty. The program is now in its 13th year and awards recipients up to $10,000 for their projects. The program allows business professors to enhance on-going research, move into a new area of intellectual activity, or develop professionally in an area other than research. Students are the ultimate beneficiaries.

Review the years below to see recent winners:

2004

May 25, 2004

The College of Business Administration’s four Davis Fellowship recipients for 2004-2005 will explore a variety of interesting topics to include building a data mining infrastructure, preparing an undergraduate course on Cuba and study trip, examining earnings management, and studying whether financial analysts’ forecasts of corporate earnings are efficient.

Dr. Manmohan D. Chaubey has announced that the new Davis Fellows are Dr. William Amadio, professor of computer information systems; Dr. Susan Denbo, associate professor of business policy and environment; Dr. Feng-Ying Liu, professor of finance; and Dr. Zaher Zantout, associate professor of finance.

“Each of the funded projects will advance the College’s mission and benefit our students in a variety of ways,” Dr. Chaubey said. “They continue the tradition of high standards for Davis Fellowships, and I look forward to seeing the outcomes of these efforts.”

Here is a brief synopsis of each project.

• Dr. Amadio will develop a computer-based infrastructure (hardware, software and data) to carry out a data-mining project. In data mining, the researcher applies mathematical models to massive amounts of disparate data in an effort to infer underlying structure, logic and relationships. In current data mining, theory and algorithms receive much more attention than useful applications. He plans to address this gap by developing solutions to a set of realistic problems. He also hopes to establish Rider as a center of technology for the practical application of data mining tools and techniques.
• Dr. Denbo plans to conduct an in depth review of the history of Cuba up to and including the present day. After completing this review, she will develop an undergraduate course on Cuba that she will teach during the 2005 spring semester. The culmination of this course will be a 10-day global business study trip to Cuba in May 2005. In preparation for this trip, Dr. Christine Lentz and she will run a global business study trip to Cuba for MBA students in January 2005.
• Dr. Liu will study earnings management and stock-price performance of private placements of common stock. Earning management, defined as “the practice of distorting the true financial performance of the company” by the Securities Exchange Commission, has been a specific concern to the SEC. Earnings management can be used to manipulate stock price upwards so that it can be sold at a higher price. This study will examine whether managers of firms issuing common stock privately manage earnings upwards prior to issuing the stock, and whether the documented poor performance of stock returns following private issues of common stock can be attributed to earnings management.
• Dr. Zantout will examine whether financial analysts’ forecasts of corporate earnings are efficient. In his proposal, he noted that many studies in the areas of financial economics and accounting examine the effects of major corporate disclosures on shareholders’ wealth, using what is known as the event study method. He will compare abnormal stock common returns using the event study method to the abnormal revisions of financial analysts; earnings forecasts using the Brous method, which supposedly can overcome some disadvantages of the event study method.

2003

May 27, 2003

Performance of ethnic businesses, the impact of the second Gulf War on emerging markets’ bond prices, measuring merit of shareholders’ class action lawsuits, and effect of educational technology on learning are the research projects Rider University College of Business Administration’s Davis Fellows will undertake in 2003-2004. The new Davis Fellows are Drs. Radha Chaganti, professor of business policy and environment; David Suk, associate professor of finance; Charmen Loh, associate professor of finance; and Margaret O’Reilly-Allen, assistant professor of accounting.

• As a Davis Fellow, Dr. Chaganti will examine the resources, strategies, management practices, and performance of ethnic businesses. She will study 197 Asian and Latino entrepreneurs and 343 entrepreneurs of European origin to assess the relative contribution of not only the social and human capital variables in the success of ethnic businesses, but also the impact of their business strategies and management practices.
• Dr. Suk will study the impact of the Second Gulf War on the emerging markets’ bond prices, specifically Brady bond prices. Brady bonds (named after former U.S. Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady) are considered a good indication of the sentiment of institutional investors towards emerging markets. He said the study is interesting because less developed countries are expected to have the least amount of financial cushion to withstand a global crisis.
• In the United States, shareholders often file class action lawsuits under the 1942 Securities and Exchange Commission Rule 10b-5, which makes it unlawful for companies to make misleading statements about their prospects or to omit negative information. Dr. Loh will study how to measure merit of such class actions, which researchers from various disciplines have long debated. His project seeks a novel approach to address the issue of merit.
• Dr. O’Reilly-Allen, who taught laptop computer courses for accounting majors this past year, will examine the most effective use of educational technology in the learning process. This research, she said, will be beneficial because it will ultimately provide a richer learning environment for students. She hopes to eventually present a series of seminars and workshops for other business faculty to demonstrate courseware and applications of technology in the learning process.

2002

Friday, June 21, 2002

Four Rider University professors in the College of Business Administration (CBA) have received Davis Fellowships for 2002-2003 to examine business decision making, inventory control, the impact of global events on the world's stock markets, and why some women and minority entrepreneurs succeed and others don't.

The Davis Fellows are Drs. Betsy Haywood-Sullivan of Fountainville, Pa., assistant professor of accounting; Cengiz Haksever of Plainsboro, N.J., professor of management sciences; Ilhan Meric of Voorhees, N.J., professor of finance, and Ronald Cook of Holland, Pa., associate professor of management.

• As a Davis Fellow, Haywood-Sullivan will study how managers can make the best possible decisions. She cites the fall of Enron as an example how poor business decision making can destroy the many stakeholders of that organization. She notes that understanding good and bad decision making is difficult because researchers have used different methods and measuring procedures and no framework exists embeds the findings of decision making research for business settings.
• She will use the fellowship to build this framework by reviewing business, psychology and social science databases. She hopes to build a coherent decision model and write a paper to assist researchers, practitioners and educators in gaining a better understanding of business decision making.
• Haksever plans to develop and computer test a method for optimal decision making in an inventory system with multiple products and constraints. He wrote in his proposal that the purpose of a mathematical model used in decision making is to help managers decide how much or many of each inventory item to order and when to order so that total annual inventory cost is minimized without exceeding some resource limits.
• The importance of this project is that no method or model exists that can handle more than one constraint in a multi-product, multi-constraint system.
• Meric will analyze the movements of the world's stock markets before and after Sept. 11, 2001. "The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 in the United States had worldwide implications, and they had a significant impact on the world's major equity markets," Meric said. "Although the effects of previous events with worldwide implications, such as the October 1987 stock market crash and the 1997-1998 emerging market crises, have been studied extensively, there are no published studies as yet on the effects of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the world's stock markets." He would like to be one of the first scholars to study the impact of the Sept. 11 events on the world's stock markets.
• Cook plans to evaluate data from students in the Entrepreneurial Training Institute (ETI), a microenterprise program targeting women and minority entrepreneurs in New Jersey. Sponsored by the New Jersey Development Authority, this eight-week program helps students develop business plans. Students present their business plans to an ETI panel of small business lenders familiar with minority and women entrepreneurs. Based on the score students receive, they can be considered for financing.
• Cook will study ETI students' previous business experience and educational level to see if first, there is a link between these characteristics and successful completion of the program, and second, if these characteristics also help students get a better score on their business plans.