Theses and Dissertations

Date of Award

7-1-2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Management

First Advisor

Siamak Javadi

Second Advisor

Ahmed Elnahas

Third Advisor

Monika Rabarison

Abstract

This dissertation consists of two essays on how informational distortions originating from public corruption and from executives’ strategic use of corporate narratives affect firm-level investment and financing outcomes. In both cases, corporate governance operates as a central mechanism shaping these effects. In the first essay, using US public corruption conviction data, I find that corruption has a significant adverse impact on firms’ investment efficiency. This result is robust to different model specifications, alternative measures of corruption and investment inefficiency, and survives several tests using quasi-natural experiment, propensity score matching, and instrumental variables, to ease endogeneity concerns. I show that the effect is channeled by the quality of shareholder and creditor control rights. Moreover, the effect is stronger for financially unconstrained firms, those with higher levels of political risk and the ones operating in more competitive industries. The results highlight a previously unexplored mechanism with which corruption harms the economy and illustrate how it benefits from stronger control rights of shareholders and creditors at the firm-level. In the second essay, using corporate culture dimensions derived from earnings calls through a machine learning approach, we develop a novel measure of corporate culture-washing that captures corporate executives' tendency to overstate their firm’s cultural attributes. I find that such engaging in culture-washing is more likely to generate benefits such as improved access to government contracts, however, at the same time, shareholders and creditors appear less susceptible to these narratives and respond to corporate culture-washing by imposing higher costs of equity and debt financing. The effects are stronger in firms with weaker governance structures, where boards and public sector counterparties are less effective at filtering biased information. The results are robust to addressing endogeneity using CEO exogenous turnover as a quasi-natural experiment, propensity score matching, and Oster (2019). Furthermore, I find that culture-washing can also lead to increased compensation for all the executives. These results are also stronger in weak governance structures.

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Copyright 2026 Md Rezwan Hossain Ratul. All Rights Reserved. https://proquest.com/docview/3409025110

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