June 2015 - In This Issue:
WELCOME BACK TO BUSINESS BEANS.
Greetings from the College of Business. We are excited to bring you the second edition of Business Beans - our quarterly publication intended to bridge our faculty research with your business opportunities and strategies. It is our hope that each issue will generate innovative thoughts, bringing something new that might benefit your organization.  

So, grab a cup of joe and connect with us!


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W. Rhea Ingram
Dean, College of Business
By Dr. Tewhan Hahn
LONG TERM STOCK RETURN PERFORMANCE OF LAYOFF FIRMS

Corporate layoffs affect employees, their families, and economic landscape of the nation negatively. Corporate executives have often been criticized since they are the decision makers of the layoffs and viewed as main beneficiaries of the layoffs in the form of higher compensation. This study investigates the long term stock return performance of firms that laid-off employees due to low demand or restructuring. It is shown that layoff firms do not underperform after the layoff period, while they statistically significantly underperformed before the layoff. This result holds regardless of measures of return performance used (e.g., raw returns, market adjusted returns, and return adjusted for  Fama -French three risk factors to measure abnormal performance). One implication from the study is that although layoffs are painful to affected employees and families, they may help laying off firms to turn around and be able to hire back more people in the future, which justifies the drastic measures like layoffs for the society as a whole.  Learn More

 

CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES FACING PUBLIC HOSPITALS

By Dr. Keren Deal

Public hospitals, owned by state and local governments, play a vital role in the healthcare safety net for individuals who may not have access to healthcare otherwise. However, the number of these institutions continue to decline in the last twenty years. Many of these healthcare providers struggle with increased demand for services while facing overwhelming financial and competitive pressures that impact their financial viability. This article highlights the fiscal stress experienced by these public institutions since 2008, offers strategies to maintain financial viability given a study of best practices, and ends with a brief discussion on how the Affordable Care Act legislation might affect these entities in the near future. Learn More

 

IMPACTS OF COMPREHENSIVE INFORMATION SECURITY PROGRAMS ON INFORMATION SECURITY CULTURE
By Dr. Yan Chen

 

A large number of security breaches involve internal employee

negligence and insider breach. This situation, coupled with

the need to comply with regulatory mandates has led to the

establishment of comprehensive information security programs

in many organizations. However, the relationships between

comprehensive information security programs and security

culture are unclear. This research empirically tests a proposed research model to evaluate the influences of key components of comprehensive

information security programs on security culture. The results indicate that awareness of SETA programs has significant influences on security culture and on employees' awareness of organizational security policy, and that the awareness of security monitoring also impacts security culture. The proposed research model can be used as a benchmark to evaluate the effectiveness of comprehensive information security programs, to improve the design of such programs should gaps exist, and eventually assist in building a security culture. Learn More