Business Commons^™

Female Ceos And Investment Efficiency In The Vietnamese Market, Jun Myung Song, Chune Young Chung

Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics

This paper proposes female CEOs’ overconfidence and risky behavior stem from gender stereotype threats. Using two subsamples from Vietnam—firms in the Northern and Southern regions—we empirically show that female CEOs in the North, where there is less gender stereotyping, tend to overinvest relative to male CEOs. However, in the South, they are indifferent. Additional analysis reinforces the main finding that female CEOs in the North tend to take more risks even when dealing with market volatility and uncertainty (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic). Such risky behaviors do not deteriorate firm value but, instead, possibly improve firm performance.

Legal Risk And Insider Trading, Marcin Kacperczyk, Emiliano Sebastian Pagnotta

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Do illegal insiders internalize legal risk? We address this question with hand-collected data from 530 SEC (the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) investigations. Using two plausibly exogenous shocks to expected penalties, we show that insiders trade less aggressively and earlier and concentrate on tips of greater value when facing a higher risk. The results match the predictions of a model where an insider internalizes the impact of trades on prices and the likelihood of prosecution and anticipates penalties in proportion to trade profits. Our findings lend support to the effectiveness of U.S. regulations' deterrence and the long-standing hypothesis that insider …

Using Team Rewards And Individual Assessment To Incentivize Collaboration In Team Projects, Prasart Jongjaroenkamol

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Team projects are commonly used in higher education across different disciplines to promote cooperation among students. However, achieving this objective can be challenging. To address this issue, educators have explored various strategies, such as implementing peer evaluation or having periodic consultations with teams. In this paper, I present a novel approach to team assessment that combines team rewards with individual assessment. In this assessment, each team member independently takes a quiz, and the team's score is determined by the average performance of its members. Consequently, the team reward becomes intricately tied to the individual learning outcomes of all team members. …

Reproducibility In Management Science, MiloˇS Fišar, Ben Greiner, Christoph Huber, Elena Katok, Ali I. Ozkes, Hannah H. Chang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

With the help of more than 700 reviewers, we assess the reproducibility of nearly 500 articles published in the journal Management Science before and after the introduction of a new Data and Code Disclosure policy in 2019. When considering only articles for which data accessibility and hardware and software requirements were not an obstacle for reviewers, the results of more than 95% of articles under the new disclosure policy could be fully or largely computationally reproduced. However, for 29% of articles, at least part of the data set was not accessible to the reviewer. Considering all articles in our sample …

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 …

Effect Of The Announcement Of Human-To-Human Transmission On Teleconsultation Services In China During Covid-19, Mairehaba Maimaitiming, Jingui Xie, Zhichao Zheng, Yongjian Zhu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Objectives: Telemedicine enables patients to communicate with physicians effectively, especially during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. However, few studies have explored the use of online health care platforms for a comprehensive range of specialties during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aimed to investigate how telemedicine services were affected by the announcement of human-to-human transmission in China. Methods: Telemedicine data from haodf.com in China were collected. A difference-in-differences analysis compared the number of telemedicine use and the number of active online physicians for different specialties in 2020 with the numbers in 2019, before and after the announcement of human-to-human transmission. Results: …

The Persuasive Effect Of Ai-Synthesized Voices, Hannah H. Chang, Anirban Mukherjee

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology seeks to emulate humans. One aspect is AI-synthesized voices, used in voice assistants (such as Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, and Google Assistant) to assistive technologies (such as voiceover narration in product videos). For example, there are currently more than 3.25 billion voice assistants; a number that is expected to touch about 8 billion by next year (i.e., 2023) (Statista 2022). With the extensive availability and enhanced accuracy of AI-synthesized voices, consumer research is starting to examine the impact of AI-synthesized voices on consumer information processing and decision making. The extant literature, however, is relatively limited because …

Class Participation: Using Technology To Enhance Efficiency And Fairness, Benjamin Gan, Eng Lieh Ouh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Class participation can be considered as contribution to discussion, attendance, presentations, unsolicited responses, questions, comments, etc. What counts may vary across individual teachers. The more students participate, the less memorization they do, and the more they engage in higher levels of thinking, including interpretation, analysis, and synthesis. However, only a handful of students in many classrooms participate regularly, a phenomenon dubbed as "consolidation of responsibility". This study provides a literature review of inclass participation, as well as pedagogies and technologies that enhance participation. Pedagogies such as active learning, group learning, project-based learning and flipped classroom. Technologies to automate attendance taking, …

Are Bond Returns Predictable With Real-Time Macro Data?, Dashan Huang, Fuwei Jiang, Kunpeng Li, Guoshi Tong, Guofu Zhou

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We investigate the predictability of bond returns using real-time macro variables and consider the possibility of a nonlinear predictive relationship and the presence of weak factors. To address these issues, we propose a scaled sufficient forecasting (sSUFF) method and analyze its asymptotic properties. Using both the existing and the new method, we find empirically that real-time macro variables have significant forecasting power both in-sample and out-of-sample. Moreover, they generate sizable economic values, and their predictability is not spanned by the yield curve. We also observe that the forecasted bond returns are countercyclical, and the magnitude of predictability is stronger during …

Understanding The Impact Of Trade Policy Effect Uncertainty On Firm-Level Innovation Investment: A Deep Learning Approach, Daniel Chang, Nan Hu, Peng Liang, Morgan Swink

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Integrating the real options perspective and resource dependence theory, this study examines how firms adjust their innovation investments to trade policy effect uncertainty (TPEU), a less studied type of firm specific, perceived environmental uncertainty in which managers have difficulty predicting how potential policy changes will affect business operations. To develop a text-based, context-dependent, time-varying measure of firm-level perceived TPEU, we apply Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), a state-of-the-art deep learning approach. We apply BERT to analyze the texts of mandatory Management Discussion and Analysis (MD&A) sections of annual reports for a sample of 22,669 firm-year observations from 3,181 unique …

Partisanship In Loan Pricing, Ramona Dagostino, Janet Gao, Pengfei Ma

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Does partisanship influence the way investors price financial assets? Using voter registration data of bankers originating large corporate loans, we show that bankers whose party differs from that of the U.S. President charge 7% higher loan spreads than other bankers. This effect holds regardless of borrowers’ partisanship, and becomes stronger for politically active bankers and when partisan media exhibit greater disagreement. Bankers do not match disproportionately with co-partisan borrowers but they lead syndicates more frequently with co-partisan bankers. Our results are not driven by bank or borrower fundamentals, but suggest that investor optimism, driven by political alignment, shapes asset prices.

In Search Of Cryptocurrency Failure, Donglian Ma, Jun Tu, Zhaobo Zhu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper explores the determinants of cryptocurrency failure and the pricing of crypto failure risk. We document different significant market- and characteristic-based predictors for coin and token failures. The introduction of Bitcoin futures and the outbreak of COVID19 affect the importance of many predictors. Investors require extra return for bearing high failure risk of crypto assets. The return difference across high and low failure risk crypto assets is not explained by the market, size and momentum factors in the cryptocurrency market. Finally, investors benefit from diversifying into high failure risk crypto assets that is little correlated with the stock market.

How Commonality Persists? (Through Investors' Sentiment And Attention), Chyng Wen Tee, Raja Velu, Zhaoque Zhou

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Studies on commonality generally attribute the variation in asset returns to the variation in order flows. In this research study, we show that order flows do not predict asset returns, rather their relationship have been static over time. Thus we model both returns and the order flows as endogenous variables, and use investors' sentiment and attention as exogenous factors via a reduced-rank regression. We provide empirical evidence to demonstrate that cross-sectional commonality in attention (sentiment) is linearly (nonlinearly) associated with both returns and order flows at the intraday level, while the sentiment and attention measures themselvesexhibit a nonlinear mutual relationship, …

The Value Of Official Website Information In The Credit Risk Evaluation Of Smes, Cuiqing Jiang, Chang Yin, Qian Tang, Zhao Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The official websites of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) not only reflect the willingness of an enterprise to disclose information voluntarily, but also can provide information related to the enterprises’ historical operations and performance. This research investigates the value of official website information in the credit risk evaluation of SMEs. To study the effect of different kinds of website information on credit risk evaluation, we propose a framework to mine effective features from two kinds of information disclosed on the official website of a SME—design-based information and content-based information—in predicting its credit risk. We select the SMEs in the software …

Explorelah: Personalised And Smart Trip Planner For Mobile Tourism, Aldy Gunawan, Siu Loon Hoe, Xun Yi Lim, Linh Chi Tran, Dang Viet Anh Nguyen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Various recommender systems for mobile tourism have been developed over the years. However, most of these recommender systems tend to overwhelm users with too much information and may not be personalised to user preferences. In this paper, we introduce ExploreLah, a personalised and smart trip planner for exploring Point of Interests (POIs) in Singapore. The user preferences are categorised into five groups: shopping, art & culture, outdoor activity, adventure, and nightlife. The problem is considered as the Team Orienteering Problem with Time Windows. The algorithm is developed to generate itineraries. Simulated experiments using test cases were performed to evaluate and …

The Interpersonal Effects Of Emotional Expressions With Both And Single Valences On Work-Related Satisfaction: An Examination Of Emotions And Perceived Openness As Mediators, Ming-Hong Tsai

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Work-related satisfaction has critical benefits. To predict work-related satisfaction, we investigated how a counterpart’s expressions of emotional complexity (both positive and negative emotions), positive emotions, and negative emotions influenced a perceiver’s work-related satisfaction during discussions over different work-relevant ideas. We conducted a three-wave coworker survey (N = 529) and an experiment with a confederate as a task partner (N = 378). The results consistently showed significant positive impacts of a counterpart’s emotional complexity and positive emotion expressions on a perceiver’s work-related satisfaction by enhancing the perceiver’s positive emotions and evaluation of the counterpart’s openness. Conversely, a counterpart’s negative emotion expression …

The Economics Of Financial Scams: Evidence From Initial Coin Offerings, Kenny Phua, Bo Sang, Chi Shen Wei, Yang Yu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We examine the economics of financial scams by analyzing the market for initial coin offerings (ICOs). Using data snapshots of 5,873 ICOs, we find that irregularities in ICO characteristics across listing websites predict higher scam risk and are likely intentional. These patterns are consistent with a model where malicious issuers maximize profits by using irregularities to screen for naïve investors. Almost half of the ICOs in our sample may be scams, amounting to more than U.S. $6 billion in losses. Our results draw attention to the frequent use of screening mechanisms in financial scams.

Is Anti-Herding Always A Smart Choice? Evidence From Mutual Funds, John Byong-Tek Lee, Jun Ma, Dimitris Margaritis, Wanyi Yang

Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics

Recent empirical studies document a negative relation between herding behaviour and the skill of mutual fund managers. We explore this relationship further by focusing on fund managers' contrarian buy and sell behaviour against the market. Our study reveals an asymmetry in the performance of mutual funds with contrarian buy behaviour and contrarian sell behaviour. The contrarian-buy behaviour reflects skill by positively predicting the cross-section of next period's mutual fund returns, while the contrarian-sell behaviour reflects a lack of skill associated with a negative prediction. These findings are robust to various risk-adjusted performance measures. Contrarian-buy funds outperform momentum-buy funds by 3% …

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 …

Novus Ex Machina: Realise Your Organisation’S Creative Potential With Ai, Adam Tatarynowicz, Utz Claassen

Asian Management Insights

Innovation managers must learn how to harness AI’s transformative potential.

Increasing The Acceptance Of Cultivated Meat, Mark Chong

Asian Management Insights

Factors to consider when designing communication strategies for diverse nations.

Exploring The Operationalization Of Market Sensing In A Higher Education Organization, Ashish Bhardwaj

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Market sensing is a dynamic capability of an organization that enables management to understand the market environment and develop strategic plans that best position the organization to continue to be relevant to the marketplace and sustain an advantaged competitive position. Extant research has explored the difference between ordinary and dynamic capabilities and proposed the role of dynamic capabilities as enabling the configuration and reconfiguration of the organization’s assets in response to or in anticipation of a rapidly evolving market environment, to maintain competitive advantage.

Market sensing dynamic capability has been hypothesized to consist of three key organizational processes – sensing, …

Informativeness Of Key Audit Matters: Evidence From China, Beng Wee Goh, Kiat Bee Jimmy Lee, Dan Li, Muzhi Wang

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

This study examines whether the key audit matters (KAMs) disclosed in expanded audit reports as a part of recent regulatory reforms are informative for investors in an emerging economy setting. Using the recent adoption of expanded audit reports for firms listed exclusively in Mainland China, we find robust evidence that the abnormal trading volume and earnings response coefficients (ERCs) are higher and that stock price synchronicity is lower during the postadoption than preadoption period. In additional tests, we find evidence that KAMs are more informative for non-state-owned enterprises (non-SOEs), smaller firms, and firms with a smaller analyst following. Finally, we …

Going Beyond The Call Of Duty Under Conditions Of Economic Threat: Integrating Life History And Temporal Dilemma Perspectives, Nina Sirola

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Under conditions of economic threat, such as during economic downturns, organizations can benefit from employees’ willingness to go beyond the call of duty and engage in organization-directed citizenship behavior (OCBO). Yet, such behavior is discretionary and competes for time with employees’ other interests and priorities. I integrate life history theory with the temporal dilemma perspective on organizational citizenship behavior to propose that childhood environments sensitize individuals to prioritize different goals in response to economic threat later in life. Consistent with strategies for responding to threat that are functional in their childhood environments, employees from wealthier backgrounds respond to economic threat …

Tail Risk Hedging: The Search For Cheap Options, Poh Ling Neo, Chyng Wen Tee

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The authors find that a simple heuristic of sorting liquid equity options by dollar price to construct a portfolio of cheap put options leads to a surprisingly robust hedge for tail risk – the superior performance holds even when compared against more advanced empirical strategies. Further investigation reveals the asymmetry in market correlation under different market conditions as the mechanism of this robust hedging performance. The cheap options selected by the heuristic comprises of stocks with diverse firm characteristics. The correlation spike accompanying tail risk events leads to the majority of these put options moving into-the-money (ITM), thus compensating the …

On The Trajectory Of Discrimination: A Meta-Analysis And Forecasting Survey Capturing 44 Years Of Field Experiments On Gender And Hiring Decisions, Michael Schaerer, Christilene Du Plessis, My Hoang Nguyen, Robbie C. M. Van Aert, Leo Tiokkin, Daniel Lakens, Elena G. Clemente, Thomas Pfeiffer, Anna Dreber, Magnus Johannesson, Cory J. Clark

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

A preregistered meta-analysis, including 244 effect sizes from 85 field audits and 361,645 individual job applications, tested for gender bias in hiring practices in female-stereotypical and gender-balanced as well as male-stereotypical jobs from 1976 to 2020. A “red team” of independent experts was recruited to increase the rigor and robustness of our meta-analytic approach. A forecasting survey further examined whether laypeople (n = 499 nationally representative adults) and scientists (n = 312) could predict the results. Forecasters correctly anticipated reductions in discrimination against female candidates over time. However, both scientists and laypeople overestimated the continuation of bias against female candidates. …

Money Changers Have Their Own Fintech Disruption To Grapple With, Aurobindo Ghosh

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In a commentary, SMU Assistant Professor of Finance (Education) and Director of the Citi Foundation-SMU Financial Literacy Programme for Young Adults Aurobindo Ghosh discussed the outlook for money changers in a world of multi-currency apps. He however noted money changers still have a role to play, and shared his views on how money changers can respond to technological disruption.

Within-Development Density And Housing Prices In Singapore, Eric Fesselmeyer, Haoming Liu, Louisa Poco

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

This paper measures how much more households pay for less density in their immediate surroundings. Using transaction and administrative data and exploiting the introduction of a regulation that restricted the number of housing units for certain land lots, we find that households discount density: a 10% increase in within-development density decreases the price per square meter by 5%. Further, the mean price per square meter of the average development increased by 1%–3% after the regulation was introduced, while the amount of built-up space remained constant. The increase in total revenue suggests developers may underestimate the externality caused by density.

From Mindset To Action: Accountants As Stewards For Sustainability, Yvonne Chan

Asian Management Insights

They need to start preparing for this new role now.

"Just Beat It" Do Firms Reclassify Costs To Avoid The Base Erosion And Anti-Abuse Tax (Beat) Of The Tcja?, Stacie O. Laplante, Christina M. Lewellen, Daniel P. Pynch, Daniel M. P. Samuel

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

This study examines whether multinational corporations (MNCs) reclassify related-party payments to avoid the new base erosion and anti-abuse tax (BEAT). The Tax Cuts & Jobs Act of 2017 included the BEAT to combat income shifting from the U.S. to foreign entities. An exclusion in the tax law provides MNCs an incentive to reclassify related-party payments as cost of goods sold. We use a triple-difference design that leverages the BEAT filing threshold of $500 million in revenue and the parent company’s location to document increases in the unconsolidated sales of foreign subsidiaries of MNCs subject to BEAT relative foreign subsidiaries of …