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Publications in corporate governance
1. Executive Market Segmentation: How Local Density Affects Incentive and Performance, Journal of Corporate Finance (2018) [link]
U.S. executive markets are locally segmented rather than nationally integrated.
In denser labor markets, executives face stronger dismissal threats as well as better outside opportunities.
These incentives result in higher firm performance, especially when executives have longer career horizons.
Local labor market density works as an external incentive alignment mechanism.
2. “Passing the Baton”: How Relay Affects Firm Performance and Volatility (with Ran Tao), Corporate Governance: An International Review (2019) (Awarded Runner-up CGIR Best Paper Award in 2019) [link]
Heirs apparent are estimated based on non-CEO executives' promotion likelihood.
Firms with longer relay (incoming CEO being heir apparent) attain higher post-turnover accounting performance, higher long-term stock returns, and lower volatility.
These results suggest the important role of relay in smoothing CEO transitions.
3. Independent Executive Directors: How Distraction Affects Their Advisory and Monitoring Roles (with Luke Stein), Journal of Corporate Finance (2019) [link]
Independent executive directors may be distracted when their own firm's performance is poor.
We find that firms with distracted independent executive directors have lower performance and value, higher CEO compensation, reduced CEO turnover-performance sensitivity, lower earnings quality, and lower M&A performance.
These adverse effects are mainly driven by distracted directors who sit on relevant committees, and are stronger for small boards.
4. Gender Equality’s Impact on Female Directors’ Efficacy: A Multi-Country Study (with Samia Belaounia and Ran Tao), International Business Review (2020) [link]
Gender equality is an important moderator in the relation between female board representation and firm outcomes.
Higher female board representation exhibit higher overall performance, less earnings management, and less excessive risk taking.
All three relations are stronger in countries with greater gender equality.
5. Network connections within committees and board governance effectiveness, Corporate Governance: An International Review (2022) [link]
Firms with more connections among compensation committee members exhibit less CEO excess compensation.
Firms with more connections among audit committee members exhibit less earnings management.
These positive effects are more pronounced when a committee has shorter joint tenure, when the firm's information is more opaque, when the firm's CEO is more powerful, or when external governance is weaker.
Director network connections can be valuable to firms.
6. Director Foreign Experience: Geographic Specificity and Value Implication (with Samia Belaounia and Ran Tao), International Review of Financial Analysis (2024) [link]
We exploit country-level data on firm internationalization and board foreignness.
Firms with more foreign subsidiaries in a region tend to hire more independent directors with foreign work experience in that region.
Foreign experienced directors contribute to better firm performance, but only when their foreign experience is geographically matched with their firms' foreign operations.
This contribution is more pronounced if host countries have longer institutional distance to the firm's home country.
Publications in CSR
7. Do Corporate Customers Prefer Socially Responsible Suppliers? (with Ran Tao and Jian Wu) , Journal of Business Ethics (2023) [link]
Corporate customers prefer socially responsible suppliers.
The effect is more prominent when the supplier industry is more competitive, the customer's own CSR performance is better, or the supplier and the customer have more similar CSR focuses.
Firms' CSR attracts not only final customers, but corporate customers alike.
8. The Effect of Supplier CSR on Customer-Supplier Relationship (with Tri Trinh), Journal of Business Research (2024) [link]
We study how corporate social responsibility (CSR) helps suppliers mitigate customer concentration risk.
Suppliers with greater CSR performance have a stronger relationship with their major customers, in terms of higher sales and lower termination likelihood.
Following disruptive events at major customers, suppliers with weak CSR performance experience sales loss, termination likelihood increase, and negative market reactions.
The positive impact of supplier CSR on customer relationship is more pronounced when the supplier has less bargaining power in the relationship.
9. Interfirm Spread of Corporate Social Responsibility: The Role of Overlapping Directors (with Ran Tao and Jian Wu), Corporate Governance (2025) [link]
A firm's CSR performance is positively affected by that of other firms with which it shares directors.
The spread of CSR is stronger when overlapping directors tend to enhance CSR than to decline it, and when they hold influential roles at the focal firm or the linked firms.
The result helps understand CSR's overall external impact on the society.
Publications in other topics
10. Crime Rate, Housing Price, and Value of A Statistical Case of Homicide (with Ran Tao), Economic Bulletin (2019) [link]
We use the fixed effects property hedonic approach with MSA level data to study the impact of the plunge in crime rates in 1990s on local housing price.
We find a significantly negative relation between crime rate and housing price.
We obtain a value of a statistical case of homicide of 1.9 million in 1999 dollars.
11. Management Team Cultural Alignment and Mergers and Acquisitions, Finance Research Letters (2022) [link]
We trace managers’ cultural origins based on their family names.
Firms with culturally aligned management teams are more likely to form merger-pairs.
Cultural alignment improves acquires' M&A performance and the integration of targets’ top executives.