Business Commons^™

Skbi Big 5 Survey 2022 February, Singapore Management University

Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics

The latest survey results on the largest five economies (Big5), based on submissions prior to the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict, imply a more intricate growth, inflation and policy dynamic.

Dual Agenda Innovation: How Firms Pursue Economic And Environmental Goals Simultaneously, Tianni Xie

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

With the increasing prevalence of UN SDG (Sustainable Development Goals) and ESG movement, more and more companies have started to include environmental performance as part of their strategic goals. From both risk management and value creation perspectives, not only is the positive environmental performance socially desirable, but it also can affect the economic performance. Companies strive to achieve superior environmental and economic performance (i.e.E2 performance), but few have succeeded.

In this dissertation research, the author proposed that firms are more likely to achieve superior E2 performance by engaging in dual agenda innovation that integrates environmental goal and economic goal in …

The Influence Of Corporate Income Taxes On Investment Location: Evidence From Corporate Headquarters Relocations, Travis Chow, Sterling Huang, Kenneth J. Klassen, Jeffrey Ng

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

This study examines the effects of jurisdictions’ corporate taxes and other policies on firms’ headquarters (HQ) location decisions. Using changes in state corporate income tax rates across time and states as the setting, we find that a one-percentage-point increase in the HQ state corporate income tax rate increases the likelihood of firms relocating their HQ out of the state by 16.8%, and an equivalent decrease in the HQ state rate decreases the likelihood of HQ relocations by 9.1%. Exploiting the unique tax policy features within the state apportionment system lends strong support to the interpretation that taxation drives this effect. …

Developing Socio-Ecological Scenarios: A Participatory Process For Engaging Stakeholders, Andrew Allan, Emily Barbour, Robert J. Nicholls, Craig Hutton, Michelle Mei Ling Lim, Mashfiqus Sale-Hin, Md. Munsur Rahman

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Deltas are experiencing profound demographic, economic and land use changes and human-induced catchment and climate change. Bangladesh exemplifies these difficulties through multiple climate risks including subsidence/sea-level rise, temperature rise, and changing precipitation patterns, as well as changing management of the Ganges and Brahmaputra catchments. There is a growing population and economy driving numerous more local changes, while dense rural population and poverty remain significant. Identifying appropriate policy and planning responses is extremely difficult in these circumstances. This paper adopts a participatory scenario development process incorporating both socio-economic and biophysical elements across multiple scales and sectors as part of an integrated …

Designing Persuasive Voiceover Narration In Crowdfunding Videos, Hannah H. Chang, Anirban Mukherjee, Amitava Chattopadhyay

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Across four studies (real-world datasets and controlled experiments), we find that consumers who heard a persuasive message voiced by multiple narrators (vs. one narrator) would be more receptive to the new product in crowdfunding videos and video ads.

Describing Rosé: An Embedding-Based Method For Measuring Preferences, Anirban Mukherjee, Hannah H. Chang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In this paper, we present a novel preference-measurement method for experiential products and develop a novel embedding-based utility model to value product attributes and attribute-levels from participant choices between products described in (unstructured) prose.

Transitioning To A Circular Economy: A Systematic Review Of Its Drivers And Barriers, Jovan Tan, Fabien Jianwei Tan, Seeram Ramakrishna

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Advancing societal's progress to achieve circularity is imperative as our linear (take, make, waste) economic model is highly unsustainable. It depletes our natural resources and substantially contributes to pollution and global greenhouse gas emissions. Our continued participation in the linear economy will also expose businesses to volatile resource prices and supply disruptions resulting from the scarcity of critical materials and geopolitical factors. Hence, there are compelling reasons for businesses to transit and participate in the circular economy. However, anecdotal evidence suggests limited practical implementations. Therefore, this systematic review aims to determine the most significant drivers and barriers that influence business …

Developing And Evidencing Attainment Of Graduate Learning Outcomes Through An Institution-Wide Feedback System, Magdeleine Duan Ning Lew, Lieven Demeester, Venky Shankararaman, Yuehan Zhuo

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This chapter reports on the systematic approach taken by the Singapore Management University (SMU) to use students’ course work to measure student outcomes beyond disciplinary attainment, culminating in feedback to help students grow in a spectrum of personal competencies such as critical thinking or collaboration. An action research study was conducted to analyse a proposed institution-wide assessment and feedback system that measures student attainment on a set of university-level Graduate Learning Outcomes and presents this information to students as feedback for their learning. The study indicated that students were generally appreciative of the insights gained regarding their attainment of the …

E-Commerce Governance: Back To Geneva?, Henry S. Gao

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The World Trade Organization (WTO) is no stranger to e-commerce governance. It launched its first initiative to regulate e-commerce1 at its second Ministerial Conference in May 1998, a few months before Google was founded. At the Ministerial Conference, WTO members adopted the Declaration on Global Electronic Commerce, 2 which recognized the “new opportunities for trade,” and directed the General Council to “establish a comprehensive work programme to examine all trade-related issues relating to global electronic commerce, including those issues identified by Members.”

The Impact Of Single Versus Multiple Narrating Voices In Persuasive Videos, Hannah H. Chang, Anirban Mukherjee, Amitava Chattopadhyay

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Broadcast videos often visually depict a product with one or more narrators providing the voice-over to discuss its features and benefits. Examples of broadcast videos include product videos and video advertising, which have become increasingly prevalent and important in consumer decision making in today’s marketplace (Think with Google 2019). Despite the importance of sound and voice on people’s behavior, existing research has placed relatively little emphasis on understanding the influence of narrator’s voice in effective communications (cf. Dahl 2010).

To Buy Green Or Not To Buy Green: Do Structural Dependencies Block Ecological Responsiveness?, Simon J.D. Schillebeeckx, Teemu Kautonen, Henri Hakata

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Despite the significant increase in interest in sustainable business practices, decisions on switching to more environmentally friendly input materials are understudied. In a conjoint experiment, we presented 267 Finnish manufacturing firms with an opportunity to acquire an alternative, more ecological input material and investigated their willingness to switch to that material. We find that in general, firms are willing to substitute their current principal input with a more ecological alternative under conditions of functional parity. However, such willingness is contingent on the firm’s value creation structures. Specifically, if the products and processes driving the firm’s value creation rely more on …

Analysts' Site Visits And Corporate Innovation, Qiang Cheng, Yutao Wang, Holly I. Yang, Zheyuan Zhang

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

While prior studies examine whether analyst coverage affects corporate innovation, there is little research on the mechanism through which financial analysts affect corporate innovation. In this paper, we examine whether and how analysts’ questions about innovation affect corporate innovation activities and outcomes. Using a sample of corporate site visits in China, we find that when analysts ask questions about innovation during site visits, the firms invest more in research and development and file more patent applications in the future. This association is stronger when analysts have a greater information and monitoring role. In addition, consistent with knowledge diffusion between firms, …

Flight To Bitcoin, Gloria Yang Yu, Jinyuan Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper uncovers an overlooked motivation of Bitcoin investment: investors hold Bitcoin as an asset on which government authorities have limited influence. Consistent with this motivation, we document a flight-to-Bitcoin (FTB) phenomenon whereby local demand for Bitcoin increases with local economic policy uncertainties and Bitcoin ownership shifts from centralized exchanges to decentralized wallets amid such turbulence. FTB is driven by investors’ lack of confidence in government as FTB is stronger in countries where the confidence in government is low and corruption incidents surge. Finally, a comparison with safe-haven assets further differentiates FTB from flight-to-safety.

There Is A Time To Be Creative: The Alignment Between Chronotype And Time Of Day, Jana Kuehnel, Ronald Bledow, Markus Kiefer

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We examine the influence of chronobiological processes on creativity, specifically the influence of a person’s chronotype. Chronotype refers to the setting of a person’s biological clock that gives rise to a distinctive pattern of sleep habits and preferred diurnal activity. We propose a synchrony effect and predict that people are creative when the external clock is aligned with their internal, biological clock. According to our model, positive mood and creative self-efficacy act as affective and cognitive mechanisms of this synchrony effect. We present three studies that test our theorizing: A quasi-experimental field study with 260 employees, a day-reconstruction study with …

Weighting Admission Scores To Balance Predictiveness-Diversity: The Pareto-Optimization Approach, Filip Lievens, Paul R. Sackett, Wilfried De Corte

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Context: Although many medical schools seek to improve diversity, they grapple with the challenge of how to weight the scores of different admission methods to achieve a balance between obtaining high predictiveness and ensuring diversity in the selected student pool. Yet, in large-scale employment settings, substantial progress has been made on this front: Pareto-optimization has been introduced as an elegant statistical tool to assist decision makers in determining the weights assigned to selection methods in advance (before the selection has taken place) so that a selection system is designed to achieve an optimal balance as reflected by the trade-off that …

A Foot In The Door: Field-Experiments On Entrepreneurs’ Network Activation Strategies For Investor Referrals, Jared Nai, Yimin Lin, Reddi Kotha, Vissa Balagopal

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We investigate entrepreneurial network activation—the processes by which entrepreneurs select specific contacts from their existing personal network and persuade the selected contacts to provide referrals to access targeted early-stage investors (venture capitalists or angel-investors). We differentiate between selection of entrepreneur-centric contacts versus investor-centric contacts. We also distinguish between persuasion tactics that induce contacts' cooperation through promises of reciprocity versus offers of monetary incentives. We conducted two field-experiments in India and one in Singapore. Our primary field-experiment involved 42 Singapore-based entrepreneurs seeking referrals from 684 network contacts to reach a panel of four investors. Our evidence suggests that selecting investor-centric contacts …

Procurement Management In Agricultural Commodity Processing, Onur Boyabatli, Bin Li

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This chapter provides insights on the optimal procurement decisions of a commodity processing firm that sources a primary input from a quantity flexibility contract (which is characterized by a unit reservation price and a unit exercise price), to produce two outputs in fixed proportions. The firm faces uncertainties in input spot price and output demands. Our objective is twofold. First, in a single-contract setting, we investigate the role of demand correlation in the presence of fixed proportions technology and show that the firm benefits from a higher demand correlation. Second, we investigate the firm’s optimal contract selection strategy between the …

Impact Measurement And Standards, Angeline Chua, Hao Liang, Wanyi Yang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Despite rapid economic growth and increasing interest in impact investment worldwide, less attention has been paid to the question of whether this growth is sustainable for people and the planet. In an ideal scenario, growth would happen within planetary and social boundaries. However, current financial value is often prioritised and achieved at cost to society and the environment. For example, small farmers in Indonesia have long practised slash-and-burn agriculture, and in recent decades large companies have industrialised the practice. The peatland blazes in Indonesia release smoke and large amounts of greenhouse gases, which impact both Indonesia itself, and neighbouring countries …

Impact Assessment And Measurement With Sustainable Development Goals, Hao Liang, David Fernandez, Mikkel Larsen

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

With the rapid growth of sustainable and responsible investment and widespread adoption of the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting and integration by organizations, how to assess and measure ESG impact has become a critical issue. Although the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a useful framework for investors and organizations globally to align their standards, the SDGs are vague on how to implement them at an organizational or activity level. Current practice relies heavily on third-party ESG rating providers, whose scores mostly apply to public equities only. They also suffer from biases, inconsistencies, and a lack of sufficient disclosure. …

Conflicting Institutional Logics As A Safe Space For Collaboration: Action Research In A Reforestation Ngo, Simon J.D. Schillebeeckx, Ryan K. Merrill

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Climate change is the defining issue of our time. Taking urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts (Sustainable Development Goal 13) is one of the most wicked problems governments, companies, and civil society have ever had to solve (Reinecke & Ansari, 2016). The path to solving the climate crisis is reasonably well defined but the road ahead is treacherous. We need to decarbonize the economy so that we can decouple growth from carbon emissions. This requires massive investments in clean energy, a radical rethink of the food production system, and innovations in aviation and primary extractive industries to …

Smart Cities: A Review Of Managerial Challenges And A Framework For Future Research, Thomas Menkhoff

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The term 'Smart City' (SC) is often defined in relation to how well a city uses digital technology to improve the efficiency of urban services and to create sustainable, liveable communities. Building such a city where people are co-creators of SC policies is a contested endeavour. Its successful management is enormously complex due to numerous challenges such as implementation problems that may arise at the governance and administration level when roles, responsibilities and success criteria are poorly defined; in terms of budgeting and funding constraints; and/or at the level of collaborative stakeholder management to get buy-in from citizens, private sector …

A Constraint Programming Approach To Load Capacity Planning In Container Vessels, Byung Kwon Lee, Joyce M. W. Low

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

A container vessel carries containers of various characteristics, in terms of size, weight, and contents. The cargo load of a container vessel, being subjected to a set of operational conditions and restrictions regarding ship stability and safety, is a fundamental element in decision-making when a shipping line provides logistics services to clients. This study presents a constraint programming-based model for the capacity planning of a container vessel under various operational conditions. The proposed model generates base solutions and is complemented with a rich scenario-based analysis that utilizes real-life ship data of a container vessel operated by a liner shipping company …

Race And Hedge Funds, Yan Lu, Narayan Y. Naik, Melvyn Teo

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We find that minority operated funds deliver higher alphas, Sharpe ratios, and information ratios than do non-minority operated funds. Moreover, minority fund managers attended more selective schools, worked at higher status investment banks, and are more likely to hold post-graduate degrees. Yet, minority managers raise less start-up capital and attract lower investor flows. Racial homophily fuels investors' appetite for non-minority funds. To address endogeneity, we leverage on an event study of minority manager fund transitions and an instrumental variable analysis that exploits racial imprinting during childhood. The results suggest that minorities face significant barriers to entry in the hedge fund …

Decentralizing Money: Bitcoin Prices And Blockchain Security, Emiliano Sebastian Pagnotta

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We address the determination of bitcoin prices and decentralized security. Users forecast the transactional and resale values of holdings, pricing the risk of systemic attacks. Miners contribute resources to protect against attackers and compete for block rewards. Bitcoin's design leads to multiple equilibria: the same blockchain technology is consistent with sharply different price and security levels. Bitcoin's monetary policy can lead to welfare losses and deviations from quantity theory. Price-security feedback amplifies fundamental shocks' volatility impact and leads to boom and busts unconnected to fundamentals. We characterize how viability versus fiat currency depends on bitcoin's relative acceptability and inflation protection.

Investing In Low-Trust Countries: On The Role Of Social Trust In The Global Mutual Fund Industry, Massimo Massa, Chengwei Wang, Hong Zhang, Jian Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We hypothesize that social trust, in mitigating contracting incompleteness, may have an important effect on the activeness and effectiveness of delegated portfolio management. Using a complete sample of worldwide open-end mutual funds, we find that trust is positively associated with the activeness of funds and that trust-related active share delivers superior performance (e.g., approximately 2% per year for cross-border investments). Moreover, "trust in the market" and "trust in managers" play important yet different roles for different types of cross-border delegated portfolio management. Our results suggest that trust acts as a fundamental building block for delegated portfolio management.

Applying Coleman’S Boat In Management Research: Opportunities And Challenges In Bridging Macro And Micro Theory, Amanda Cowen, Floor Rink, Ilya R. P. Cuypers, Denis Gregoire, Ingo Weller

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Over the years, ongoing conversations in Academy of Management Journal—and the broader management literature—have emphasized the value of research that bridges the macro and micro domains (Hitt, Beamish, Jackson, & Mathieu, 2007; Molloy, Ployhart, & Wright, 2011; Morgeson & Hofmann, 1999; Paruchuri, Perry-Smith, Chattopadhyay, & Shaw, 2018). Calls for cross-boundary work typically argue that bridging these two domains is required to understand and solve the complex management issues that societies face (George, Howard-Grenville, Joshi, & Tihanyi, 2016; House, Rousseau, & Thomas-Hunt, 1995; Kozlowski & Klein, 2000). Responses to the organizational challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, or to societal problems …

Delegated Gender Diversity, Hao Liang, Cara Vansteenkiste

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We revisit the value implications of female representation on boards by exploiting the board diversity campaign announcement by Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM)—the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund. In February 2021, NBIM required its portfolio firms to have at least 30% female directors. Using NBIM’s announcement as a shock to investor expectations about female board representation, we document significantly positive returns for firms with a female director shortfall, concentrated in firms with low institutional ownership. Consistent with an investor demand view of board gender diversity, we find that these firms experienced a greater increase in ownership by socially responsible institutional …

Short Selling Etfs, Frank Weikai Li, Qifei Zhu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We provide novel evidence that arbitrageurs use exchange-traded funds (ETFs) as an avenue to circumvent short-sale constraints at the stock level. Using a large sample of U.S. equity ETF holdings, we document that shorting activity on ETFs rises with the difficulty of shorting underlying stocks. Stocks heavily shorted via their holding ETFs underperform those that are lightly shorted. The return predictability of ETF shorting is distinct from stock-level shorting measures and is concentrated among stocks that face severe arbitrage constraints. These findings suggest that ETFs allow arbitrageurs to target overpriced stocks that are otherwise difficult to short.

Why, How, And When Divergent Perceptions Become Dysfunctional In Organizations: A Motivated Cognition Perspective, Zhanna Lyubykh, Laurie J. Barclay, Marion Fortin, Michael R. Bashshur, Malika Khakhar

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Decades of research has demonstrated that people can arrive at starkly different perceptions in the same social situations. Divergent perceptions are not inherently dysfunctional. However, if divergent perceptions are not managed effectively, they can have deleterious effects that can undermine functioning in the workplace. Drawing on a motivated cognition perspective, we outline why divergent perceptions may emerge as well as overview the benefits and drawbacks of divergent perceptions in organizational contexts. Next, we highlight the complexities associated with divergent perceptions in the workplace, including why, how, and when divergent perceptions may become dysfunctional. We also showcase theoretical insights from a …

Introduction To The Business Of Sustainability: An Organizing Framework For Theory, Practice And Impact, Gerard George, Martine R. Haas, Havovi Heerjee Joshi, Anita M. Mcgahan, Paul Tracey

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Human activity needs to become sustainable, and businesses have a massive role to play in it. Important progress has occurred. The Coronavirus pandemic has reinforced the importance of sustainability and resilience. Businesses have become champions of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), both by integrating them into their core activities and by developing strategies and metrics to achieve them. Despite this progress, more must be done to achieve sustainability targets on a timetable that is relevant. While the narratives of businesses are often exciting, their follow-through with implementation remains limited. So too is information on successful practices, conceptual knowledge …