Texas Christian University

About: Texas Christian University is a education organization based out in Fort Worth, Texas, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poison control. The organization has 3245 authors who have published 8258 publications receiving 282216 citations. The organization is also known as: TCU & Texas Christian University, TCU.

Measuring and Managing a Salesperson's Future Value to the Firm

Abstract: Research on sales force evaluation has mostly relied on reflective metrics such as sales volume, revenue, and manager evaluations to assess and manage a sales force. However, businesses are moving from a product-centric to a customer-centric view and from a backward-looking to a forward-looking strategic perspective, so sales organizations must adapt to the ever-changing marketplace to maximize performance. The authors propose a forward-looking and profit-oriented metric to evaluate and demonstrate the effects of training type and incentive type on a salesperson's future value. Using a latent class modeling approach, they identify two distinct segments in the sales force that exhibit different responses to varying levels of training and incentives. This suggests that a one-size-fits-all approach to sales force management may be suboptimal. Finally, the authors also evaluate the magnitude of the proposed effects in the short run as well as the long run and show that the magnitudes of the effects could vary...

Psychosocial correlates of AIDS-risk drug use and sexual behaviors.

Abstract: Theoretical and empirical research suggests psychosocial functioning is important in drug abuse intervention strategies, especially those focusing on efforts to change AIDS risk behaviors. Self-esteem, depression, anxiety, proneness to risk taking, decision-making confidence, self-assessment of drug use problems, and desire for help with drug problems, along with personal background and health history indicators, were assessed for 194 injection drug users in an AIDS prevention outreach program in New Orleans. Composite index scores for needle risk behaviors were associated with low self-esteem and low decision-making confidence as well as with higher scores on depression, anxiety, drug use problems, and desire for help. However, these psychosocial measures were not significantly related to the composite index for sex risks. Health history measures, represented by previous exposures to hepatitis and sexually transmitted diseases, were significantly related to both needle and sex risk indices. Implications for AIDS intervention efforts are discussed.

The Latest Movement to Going Private: An Empirical Study

Abstract: The number of firms going private is increasing at an unprecedented rate in the current decade. The ratio of companies going private to IPOs is in the 20%-30% range. My survey includes 110 of the 236 that went private between January 2001 and July 2003 (a 46.6 percent response rate). The cost of being public is the number one reason for going private by smaller firms. This relates directly to the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002. A null hypothesis of no relationship between market capitalization and going private because of cost could be rejected at an alpha level of 0.01. Of significance is that a number of smaller firms actually went private under a Form 15 deregistration by reducing their number of shareholders to under 300, but without buying in the other shares outstanding. We now have a number of private companies with public shareholders holding the majority of the shares.

Evolution of fluvial meander-belt deposits and implications for the completeness of the stratigraphic record

Abstract: The fragmentary nature of the stratigraphic record is particularly evident with respect to fluvial deposits, which are characterized by a hierarchy of depositional units deposited over a wide range of time scales and sedimentation rates. We quantified stratigraphic completeness in meander-belt deposits through deducing the total area of bar sedimentation versus what is ultimately preserved in the depositional record, using area as a surrogate metric for sediment volume. Data sets were evaluated for a numerical model, the modern Mississippi River valley, and the Cretaceous McMurray Formation. In each data set, the evolutionary history of a series of meander-belt elements was discerned. Migrated area between successive reconstructed paleochannel positions was measured, representing: total area of net bar migration (MA), the area of bar preserved (PA), and percent of bar preserved (PA/MA), at the accretion package, bar, and meanderbelt scale. Results of our analysis show that the average preservation percent ranges from 27.3% to 67.8% for an accretion package, 35.0% to 85.1% for a bar, and 38.2% to 67.6% for a meander belt. The processes that lead to a decrease in preservation include intra-meanderbend erosion (due to downstream translation or bar rotation), and increasing meanderbend sinuosity and eventual cutoff (neck and chute), as well as inter-meander-bend erosion due to avulsion and subsequent migration of the meandering channel. The results of this study document a decrease in preservation over time that follows a natural logarithmic function of decay; we have termed this the “survivability” curve. The results presented here document a systematic, monotonic decrease in preservation over time, which is consistent regardless of the spatial or temporal scale and agrees with probabilities of preservation at long time scales proposed by previous workers. A comparison between data sets allows for an estimation of the time span represented by meander-belt deposits in the deep time record.

Do Private Equity Consortiums Facilitate Collusion in Takeover Bidding

Abstract: We address whether the joint bidding by private equity consortiums facilitates collusion in the takeover market. We employ a sample of 870 takeovers of publicly traded targets in the 2003 to 2007 period, the time period which is the focus of investigation by the Justice Department and the source of cases for class action lawsuits. A unique aspect of our analysis is that we determine the identification of private equity bidders from actual merger documents rather than rely on sources such as Securities Data Corp and that we analyze both prominent private equity bidders as well as smaller private equity firms. Our analysis finds competitive reasons for consortium formation based on scale, risk and bidder expertise. We also find that both single private equity bidders and private equity consortiums are associated with significantly greater levels of takeover competition than other types of bidders. While we find some evidence that target abnormal returns are lower in private equity consortium deals for narrow windows around the initial takeover-related announcement date, we find that these results do not hold for longer event windows that better account for the differences in the takeover process across types of bidders. Analysis that controls for the endogenous selection of consortium formation also fails to find any negative effect of consortiums on either takeover competition or target returns. We also do not find any negative effects of consortiums formed by prominent private equity firms. We interpret the evidence to be inconsistent with a collusive explanation for consortium formation in the 2003 to 2007 period and to be consistent with competitive reasons for consortium formation.