Business Commons^™

What Accounts For The Effect Of Sustainability Engagement On Stock Price Crash Risk During The Covid-19 Pandemic—Agency Theory Or Legitimacy Theory?, Junru Zhang, Chen Zheng, Yuan G. Shan

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

In this study, we conduct a textual analysis of the third-party disclosure of corporate sustainability news focused on the Standard and Poor's 500 firms in the United States market during the first and second quarter of 2020. We find a positive relationship between corporate sustainability news release and firm-specific stock price crash risk. This finding is surprising, but it indeed aligns with agency theory. It indicates that the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic exacerbated the tendency of managers under increasing financial pressure to use the sustainability information release as a mechanism to mask and withhold bad news for extended periods at …

The Hidden Scams In Business & Finance, Jake Patten, Carter Harrell, Claude Auguste, Sheldon Jerome Downing Ii

ENGL 1102 Showcase

For our research papers, we chose to look into different kinds of scams lurking in the business world, and how they can affect businesses and society as a whole. There are hundreds of different scams at any given time, but we decided to focus on lesser-known scams that the majority of people don't even think about. These scams include rigged casinos, charity fraud, business email compromise, and embezzlement within smaller businesses.

We chose this topic in an attempt to bring more attention to the criminal side of the business world that people otherwise see as harmless. Especially with the recent …

Environmental, Social, And Governance (Esg) And Artificial Intelligence In Finance: State-Of-The-Art And Research Takeaways, Tristan Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The rapidly growing research landscape in finance, encompassing environmental, social, and governance (ESG) topics and associated Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications, presents challenges for both new researchers and seasoned practitioners. This study aims to systematically map the research area, identify knowledge gaps, and examine potential research areas for researchers and practitioners. The investigation focuses on three primary research questions: the main research themes concerning ESG and AI in finance, the evolution of research intensity and interest in these areas, and the application and evolution of AI techniques specifically in research studies within the ESG and AI in finance domain. Eight archetypical …

Investing In Climate: A Role For 'Sovereign Climate Funds', Marianna Kozintseva, Thierry Wizman

Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics

Efforts to address climate change have generally been focused on deploying mitigation technologies. However, it is adaptation technologies (and climate risk transfer) that will have to gain an increasing share of an investment pool dedicated to climate if human systems are to stay resilient to climate forces. Just like mitigation projects, adaptation projects have a strong public goods aspect, wherein public returns exceed private returns, and thus call for the state’s involvement. We argue that sovereign climate funds (SCFs) - new types of sovereign wealth funds with a climate investment mandate - can be critical purpose-built conduits especially for undertaking …

Analyzing Global Utilization And Missed Opportunities In Debt-For-Nature Swaps With Generative Ai, Nataliya Tkachenko, Simon Frieder, Ryan-Rhys Griffiths, Christoph Nedopil

Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics

We deploy a prompt-augmented GPT-4 model to distill comprehensive datasets on the global application of debt-for-nature swaps (DNS), a pivotal financial tool for environmental conservation. Our analysis includes 195 nations and identifies 21 countries that have not yet used DNS before as prime candidates for DNS. A significant proportion demonstrates consistent commitments to conservation finance (0.86 accuracy as compared to historical swaps records). Conversely, 35 countries previously active in DNS before 2010 have since been identified as unsuitable. Notably, Argentina, grappling with soaring inflation and a substantial sovereign debt crisis, and Poland, which has achieved economic stability and gained access …

Audit Evidence, Technology, And Judgement: A Review Of The Literature In Response To Ed‐500, Dereck Barr‐Pulliam, Christopher G. Calvin, Marc Eulerich, Arpine Maghakyan

Accounting Faculty Publications

In October 2022, the International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board (IAASB) issued Exposure Draft 500 (ED-500). This is focused on revising and integrating the standard auditors use when evaluating audit evidence during an external audit. This study contributes to the ongoing discourse as the IAASB evaluates feedback to ED-500 and executes its standard-setting agenda. We review academic literature published in the past 10 years to synthesize extant knowledge specifically on the use of technology and the application of professional skepticism during audit evidence evaluation. Our review offers factors the IAASB should consider when seeking to modernize and future-proof its standards, …

Bowlero Atlantic Station, Llc V. Regal Cinemas, Inc., Et Al., Order On Partial Motions To Dismiss, John J. Goger

Georgia Business Court Opinions

No abstract provided.

Promoting Esg Investing By Trustees: Risk Management And Structuring Solutions, Vincent Ooi, Alvin W. L. See

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The world is falling behind on its commitments to tackle some of the most pressing problems of this century: climate change, inequality, and other obstacles to building a sustainable future. In 2015, all Member States of the United Nations adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development which set out 17 Sustainable Development Goals (‘UNSDG’) and 169 targets spanning the spectrum of environmental, social and economic dimensions of development. At the mid-point to 2030, the UN Secretary-General reported that of the roughly 140 targets for which data is available, about 12 per cent are on track; more than half are moderately …

Leadership And Environmental Sustainability: An Integrative Conceptual Model Of Multilevel Antecedents And Consequences Of Leader Green Behavior, Hannes Zacher, Clara Kühner, Ian M. Katz, Cort W. Rudolph

Psychology Faculty Publications

Environmental sustainability is a strategic and ethical imperative for organizations, and numerous studies have investigated associations between leadership and employee pro-environmental or “green” behavior. However, these studies have typically focused on leadership styles that conflate leader behavior with its assumed antecedents or consequences. Moreover, the literature on relations between leadership and environmental sustainability constructs is fragmented and in need of systematic integration to effectively guide future research and practice. Accordingly, we pursue three goals in this conceptual paper. First, after a brief review of key insights from extant theoretical and empirical research, we define leadership in the context of environmental …

An Analysis Of The Public Participation Processes Employed For An Urban Greenway Project, Maeve O'Connell

Articles

The purpose of this study is to examine the public participation mechanisms employed for a proposed new infrastructure project. Public participation is a core characteristic of a contemporary democratic society as policy makers are increasingly encouraged to engage with citizens for learning and legitimacy. Participation is a loose concept with many forms and interpretations. This study explores the key characteristics of public participation formats, challenges to and the criteria for success. This analysis is then applied to the proposed local infrastructure consultation process. An additional survey is designed and its role in the public participation process is assessed. The processes …

Criminal Subsidiaries, Andrew K. Jennings

Faculty Articles

Corporate groups comprise parent companies and one or more subsidiaries, which parents use to manage liabilities, transactions, operations, and regulation. Those subsidiaries can also be used to manage criminal accountability when multiple entities within a corporate group share responsibility for a common offense. A parent, for instance, might reach a settlement with prosecutors that requires its subsidiary to plead guilty to a crime, without conviction of the parent itself—a subsidiary-only conviction (SOC). The parent will thus avoid bearing collateral consequences—such as contracting or industry bars—that would follow its own conviction. For the prosecutor, such settlements can respond to criminal law’s …

Data Science In Finance: Challenges And Opportunities, Xianrong Zheng, Elizabeth Gildea, Sheng Chai, Tongxiao Zhang, Shuxi Wang

Information Technology & Decision Sciences Faculty Publications

Data science has become increasingly popular due to emerging technologies, including generative AI, big data, deep learning, etc. It can provide insights from data that are hard to determine from a human perspective. Data science in finance helps to provide more personal and safer experiences for customers and develop cutting-edge solutions for a company. This paper surveys the challenges and opportunities in applying data science to finance. It provides a state-of-the-art review of financial technologies, algorithmic trading, and fraud detection. Also, the paper identifies two research topics. One is how to use generative AI in algorithmic trading. The other is …

You Fooled Me, So I'Ll Tell You About Myself! Personnel-Related Brand Betrayal Experiences And Disclosure Of Personal Information, Teck M. Tan, Jari Salo, Jaakko Aspara

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Past research has extensively studied the negative effects of brand betrayals on consumer attitudes, but largely ignored their potential positive consequences. Also, while previous research has focused on betrayals made by the brand itself, it has paid less attention to betrayals by the brand's personnel. This paper focuses on one potentially important positive consequence of brand personnel betrayal experiences (a consumer's feeling of being betrayed by the brand staff members): the increased willingness of consumers to share personal insights and information with the brand after experiencing a brand personnel betrayal. A field data set and two online experiments show that …

Corporate Racial Responsibility, Gina-Gail S. Fletcher, H. Timothy Lovelace Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

The 2020 mass protests in response to the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor had a significant impact on American corporations. Several large public companies pledged an estimated $50 billion to advancing racial equity and committed to various initiatives to internally improve diversity, equity, and inclusion. While many applauded corporations’ willingness to engage with racial issues, some considered it further evidence of corporate capitulation to extreme progressivism at shareholders’ expense. Others, while thinking corporate engagement was long overdue, critiqued corporate commitment as insincere.

Drawing on historical evidence surrounding the passage of Title II of the Civil Rights Act of …

The Relationship Of Esg Component Scores And Creditworthiness On Publicly Listed Firms In The Asean-5 Countries, Shayne Jefferson Alvarez, Charlene Ashley C. Cu, Lance L. Lamberte, Patrick Henry G. Yap, Paulynne J. Castillo, Roberto B. Raymundo, Joel Q. Tanchuco

Angelo King Institute for Economic and Business Studies (AKI)

ESG ratings are crucial for ASEAN-5 businesses' creditworthiness. While existing studies often concentrate on ESG's impact on financial performance or general pillars, a detailed exploration of the 10 specific ESG components in the ASEAN-5 is lacking. This study addresses this gap, examining how ESG ratings affect a company's creditworthiness (probability of default) in publicly traded companies across the ASEAN-5 countries while considering potential heterogeneity. Utilizing annual data from 2013-2022 for 10 ESG components and Eikon Refinitiv's probability of default via the Starmine Combined Credit Risk Model across ASEAN-5, the study employs a panel OLS regression model with White's Robust Standard …

Worker's Rights, Vijay Pereira, Daicy Vaz, Arup Varma

School of Business: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This chapter discusses the rights of workers. It focuses on Bangladesh, China, India, and Vietnam.

Climate Change Concerns And Mortgage Lending, Tinghua Duan, Frank Weikai Li

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We examine whether beliefs about climate change affect loan officers’ mortgage lending decisions. We show that abnormally high local temperature leads to elevated attention to and belief in climate change in a region. Loan officers approve fewer mortgage applications and originate lower amounts of loans in abnormally warm weather. This effect is stronger among counties heavily exposed to the risk of sea-level rise, during periods of heightened public attention to climate change, and for loans originated by small lenders. Additional tests suggest that the negative relation between temperature and approval rate is not fully explained by changes in local economic …

On Sgx’S Voyage To Corporate Sustainability: Exploring Emerging Topics In Multi-Industry Corpora, Xinwen Ni, Min Bin Lin, Simon J.D. Schillebeeckx, Wolfgang Karl Hardle

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Topic modeling and LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) have proven valuable in various fields as an innovative approach to studying areas of interest and identifying topics in a dynamic content. The underlying assumption is that techniques like LDA can swiftly capture emerging topics in textual documents compared to other categorization tools. These unsupervised approaches have been used to identify new industries and technological domains. However, our study on the nascent topic of “sustainability” within the corpora of SGX-listed companies highlights clear limitations in employing techniques like LDA on sparse data. The dynamic LDA approach, also called DTM (Dynamic Topic Modelling),based on …

Professionalism In Artificial Intelligence: The Link Between Technology And Ethics, Anton Klarin, Hossein Ali Abadi, Rifat Sharmelly

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Ethical conduct of artificial intelligence (AI) is undoubtedly becoming an ever more pressing issue considering the inevitable integration of these technologies into our lives. The literature so far discussed the responsibility domains of AI; this study asks the question of how to instil ethicality into AI technologies. Through a three-step review of the AI ethics literature, we find that (i) the literature is weak in identifying solutions in ensuring ethical conduct of AI, (ii) the role of professional conduct is underexplored, and (iii) based on the values extracted from studies about AI ethical breaches, we thus propose a conceptual framework …

When Corporate Culture Matters: The Case Of Stakeholder Violations, Rashid Zaman

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

This study examines whether and how a strong corporate culture influences stakeholder violations. Using a longitudinal sample of monetary penalties imposed on US-listed firms for stakeholder violations, I find evidence that a strong corporate culture is significantly and negatively associated with such violations. This outcome remains robust to a series of robustness and endogeneity tests, including the application of the generalized method of moments (GMM), entropy balancing, and propensity score matching (PSM) estimation. The channel analysis evidence implies that information asymmetry is a possible mechanism through which a strong corporate culture is associated with stakeholder violations. A cross-sectional analysis demonstrates …

A Critical Librarianship Approach For Teaching Patent Searching: Who Becomes An Inventor In America?, Dave Zwicky, Ilana Stonebraker

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

The ways in which a technology is invented, owned, and approved are strongly influenced by the same oppressive and exclusionary structures that critical librarianship interrogates. Patents, limited-term grants of rights to inventions, are issued to inventors in exchange for detailed specifications of the invention. This paper examines current practices used by business librarians in teaching students how to find patents and how these practices could be critically informed given the nature of the United States patent system as it exists today. An output of this work is a suggested lesson plan with recommended resources.

Leviathan Inc. And Corporate Environmental Engagement, Po-Hsuan Hsu, Hao Liang, Pedro Matos

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In a 2010 special report, The Economist magazine termed the resurgence of state-owned, publicly listed enterprises “Leviathan Inc.” and criticized the poor governance and low efficiency of these firms. We compile a new comprehensive data set of state ownership of publicly listed firms in 44 countries over the period of 2004–2017 and show that state-owned enterprises are more responsive to environmental issues. The effect is more pronounced in economies lacking energy security and strong environmental regulation, and among firms with more local operations and higher domestic government ownership. We find a similar effect on corporate social engagement but not on …

Organisational Drivers And Sustainability Implementation In The Mining Industry: A Holistic Theoretical Framework, Prince Amoah, Gabriel Eweje

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

While few studies have examined the role of institutional pressures on sustainable business practices, there is a dearth of empirical research regarding the influence of internal organisational characteristics on sustainability implementation in developing countries. This paper examines internal organisational features and how they influence multinational companies (MNCs) operating in a resource-rich developing country to embrace and embed sustainability into corporate policies and practices. The findings show that the history of past sustainable practices, the level of internationalisation and managerial cognition internally drive MNCs to implement sustainability in their host countries. We discuss that managerial cognition drives MNCs to embrace sustainability …

Lendingpoint Consolidated, Inc., Et. Al. V. Bdo Usa, Llp, Et. Al., Order On Motions To Dismiss, Kelly L. Ellerbe

Georgia Business Court Opinions

No abstract provided.

Responsibility Boundaries And The Governance Of Global Value Chains: The Interplay Of Efficiency, Ethical, And Institutional Pressures In Global Strategy, Thomas Deberge

School of Business: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Research Summary

I explore the relationship of firm global strategy and global value chain (GVC) governance, within a context of expanding responsibility boundaries for unethical practices in the value chain. Specifically, focusing on the tantalum supply chain within the digital electronics GVC, I conduct a case-based process study that contextualizes the different strategic responses of three manufacturers of tantalum capacitors when faced with similar efficiency, ethical, and institutional pressures. Integrating the GVC and global strategy literatures, I find that structural inertia in GVCs limits the efficacy of strategies that preserve, rather than alter, the governance structure, instead requiring a strategic …

Rule Violation And Time-To-Enforcement In Weak Institutional Environments: A Good Faith Perspective, Jun Xia, Yusi Jiang, Heli Wang, Yuan Li

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Previous studies on corporate misconduct have focused mainly on preventing misconduct or remedying it after detection, but it remains unclear how misconduct can be effectively detected in the first place once it occurs. We apply the good faith perspective in the context of China, which represents a weak institutional environment, and argue that the ability of culpable leaders to conceal information may delay misconduct disclosure because such ability helps maintain the good faith of regulators. Moreover, we argue that because the regulators have faith in professionals (external auditors, institutional investors, and securities analysts) whose skills are in fact often underdeveloped …

Sustainability Transformation: The Role Of Accountancy And Finance Professionals In The Singapore Manufacturing Sector, Jiwei Wang, Holly I. Yang, Liandong Zhang, Sanli Pinar Darendeli, Ying-Chi Huang

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Sustainability is already reshaping the Singapore manufacturing sector. The majority of companies surveyed (70%) have started their sustainability transformation in one form or another, and many have initiated discussions. However, on the whole, only 37% of companies have implemented sustainability initiatives, and 21% have reported on sustainability. On the bright side, these percentages are slated to double within 1-3 years. The infusion of sustainability into the manufacturing sector has led to accountancy and finance professionals potentially playing a bigger role in their organisations, particularly in aligning the sustainability objectives with business strategies. The study notes that manufacturing companies are mostly …

Mitigating Industry Contagion Effects From Financial Reporting Fraud: A Competitive Dynamics Perspective Of Non-Errant Rival Firms Exploiting Product-Market Opportunities, Eugene Kang, Nongnapat Thosuwanchot, David Gomulya

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Existing studies show that financial reporting frauds by errant firms cause declines in stock market valuations for non-errant rival firms (i.e. industry contagion effects). We posit that contagion effects may be mitigated by investors’ expectations of non-errant rivals exploiting product-market opportunities at the expense of errant firms. We apply the competitive dynamics literature to argue that non-errant rivals experience lower contagion effects when they have more available slack to engage in competitive actions. This effect is expected to strengthen when rival firms have previously deployed more resources for research and development and advertising investments or have higher prior market share …

In Customer Service, When Is A Full Refund Justified?, Hannah H. Chang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In a commentary, SMU Associate Professor of Marketing Hannah Chang discussed the challenges in achieving balance between making genuine amends for the specific incident and strategic reputation management when customers complain. She also noted the challenges in balancing between offering genuine redress and not setting precedents that encourage unreasonable demands. Assoc Prof Chang also shared how companies can take preventive measures by setting clear policies for refunds or compensation, and monitoring online sentiment to stay ahead of brewing issues, thus allowing businesses to address concerns in real time.

Commentary: Black Or White? Wrong Or Right? Don't Rush To Take Sides On Complex Issues Such As Israel-Hamas Conflict, Siow-Heng Ong, Benjamin Joshua Ong

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

While responses to the Israel-Hamas conflict have been bitterly divided, they showcase a common phenomenon of people viewing complex situations in black-and-white terms. But how did we get here?