Latest Research Publications

We investigate the impact of corporate governance on customers' trust using a dynamic model of experience‐goods firm. In the optimal equilibrium, customers' trust in the firm is linked to its behavior in the market for corporate control, so that the controlling shareholder has incentives to ensure high product quality while noncontrolling shareholders' interests are protected. Following a trust‐damaging event, turnover of the controlling share block restores customers' trust and enhances total shareholder value. Our analysis identifies an endogenous cost of corporate control, offers implications for the control premium, and provides a novel rationale for the separation of ownership and control.

How will a chief sustainability officer (CSO) influence corporate social performance? Building upon the upper echelons perspective and the attention‐based view, this study argues that while a CSO helps channel managerial attention to a firm's social domain, managerial attention is more likely to be directed to negative issues than to positive issues. In addition, such relationships are contingent on the focal firm's governance design and its industry culpability. Analysis of a sample of S&P 500 firms for the period of 2005–2014 largely renders support to our predictions.

The green bond market has been growing rapidly worldwide since its debut in 2007. We present the first empirical study on the announcement returns and real effects of green bond issuance by firms in 28 countries during 2007–2017. After compiling a comprehensive international green bond dataset, we document that stock prices positively respond to green bond issuance. However, we do not find a consistently significant premium for green bonds, suggesting that the positive stock returns around green bond announcements are not fully driven by the lower cost of debt. Nevertheless, we show that institutional ownership, especially from domestic institutions, increases after the firm issues green bonds. Moreover, stock liquidity significantly improves upon the issuance of green bonds. Overall, our findings suggest that the firm's issuance of green bonds is beneficial to its existing shareholders.

Ownership structure plays a critical role in the incentives and behaviors of business organizations. The literature has focused on the effects of firm ownership dispersion across managers and investors. We extend the literature by examining the roles of ownership structure within a controlling family. Specifically, we focus on the family trust structure, which is a popular vehicle for holding family ownership around the world. The trust structure typically locks controlling ownership within a family for a very long period. Although it ensures family control, the share transfer restriction may induce family shirking problems, make family conflicts difficult to resolve, and distort firm decisions. Based on a sample of publicly traded family firms in Hong Kong, we report that trust-controlled firms that are more susceptible to these problems tend to pay higher dividends, invest less in the long term, and experience worse performance. The costs of using a trust structure are more significant when the family stakes have been locked inside the trust for a longer period and when a larger amount of family ownership is held by the trust.

Do cross-country differences in labor regulations shape (1) acquiring firms’ announcement returns and post-acquisition profits, costs, and revenues from cross-border deals, (2) the selection of cross-border targets, or (3) the success rates of cross-border offers? We discover that acquiring firms enjoy smaller abnormal returns and post-deal performance gains with targets in stronger labor protection countries; acquirers are more likely to purchase labor-dependent targets in weak labor regulation countries and more likely to use cross-border acquisitions to enter new markets when targets are in stronger labor regulation countries; and offer success rates fall when targets are in stronger labor regulation countries.

Despite the importance of customer participation in new product development in business-to-business markets, its specific challenges and potential downsides are under-examined. Drawing on the boundary theory perspective, this study integrates conflict into the customer participation literature and proposes that whereas customer participation as the information provider (CPI) mitigates customer-developer conflict, customer participation as the codeveloper (CPC) increases it. Furthermore, the nature of new products moderates such effects. Market newness attenuates the role of CPI in mitigating conflict and reduces the positive effect of CPC on conflict; by contrast, technology newness increases the influence of CPC on conflict. The empirical results from a sample of 181 high-tech firms in China largely support these propositions, which offer important implications for customer participation research and practices.

We study the effects of institutionalization on fund manager compensation and asset prices. Institutionalization raises the performance-sensitive component of the equilibrium contract, which makes institutional investors effectively more risk averse. Institutionalization affects market outcomes through two opposing effects. The direct effect is to bring in more informed capital, and the indirect effect is to make each institutional investor trade less aggressively on information through affecting the equilibrium contract. When there are many institutions and little noise trading in the market, the indirect contracting effect dominates the direct informed capital effect in determining market variables such as the cost of capital, return volatility, price volatility, and market liquidity. Otherwise, the direct informed capital effect dominates.

This paper develops a quantitative model of multinational production (MP) with non-neutral technologies incorporating two stylized facts observed in a global firm-level data: first, larger firms on average use more capital-intensive technologies; second, among firms producing in the same industry and country, those from more capital-abundant home countries use more capital-intensive technologies. I quantify the model using both firm-level and aggregate moments for 37 countries. I found that the reduction in MP costs accounts for 56% of the average decline in labor shares from 1996 to 2011, and the model also replicates a negative relationship between the change in a country's labor share and the change in the foreign affiliates' output share as observed in the data.

It is well known in the credence‐good literature that in an expert‐client relationship, under the Liability assumptions, clients have to reject the expert’s serious‐treatment recommendations with a positive probability to ensure that the expert honestly recommends treatments. Inefficiency arises because some socially efficient treatments are not provided. We show that the expert can enhance clients’ trust, or acceptance rate of the serious treatment, by providing intrinsically socially inefficient customer service upon recommending the serious treatment. Enhanced clients’ trust leads to higher efficiency and higher profit for the expert. However, trust cannot be enhanced by providing customer service with different timing.