Research

The research centers and institutes at the DeGroote School of Business rank among the world’s best, and our students — both graduate and undergraduate — reap the benefits of these first-class facilities while they learn from some of the country’s finest researchers and educators.

DeGroote faculty have studied extensively nationally and internationally, bringing their wide variety of experiences and backgrounds to the School of Business success story.

There is a need, and an opportunity, for rigorous and broad-based interdisciplinary research that investigates the creation of value in an enterprise. Such areas include traditional valuation metrics as well as new approaches to the valuation of the development of human capital, product development and innovation, brand development, reputation, customer development, societal and environmental impact, leadership, and crisis management. The Institute will provide future and, indeed, current business professionals with the techniques and expertise to understand and assess business strategies and the tangible and intangible assets that contribute to their value more fully.

The former AIC Institute for Strategic Business Studies in 2007 issued a call for proposals to faculty to conduct scholarly research into the content and process of defining, creating and measuring value in an enterprise. Perspectives and methodologies that go beyond traditional business valuation models and are not anchored in any one specific discipline were encouraged. Recent working papers by DeGroote School of Business faculty and PhD students along this line of research are provided below.

Working Paper Series in Strategic Business Valuation

Michael Lee-Chin & Family Institute for Strategic Business Studies Working Paper Series

This working paper series presents original contributions focused on the theme of creation and measurement of value in business enterprises and organizations.

2014 Working Papers

Technology Spillovers and Corporate Cash Holdings
Jiaping Qiu and Chi Wan | 2014-06 | Download the PDF

This study examines the effect of technology spillovers on firms’ cash holdings. It finds that firms facing greater technology spillovers hold higher cash balances. This effect is more pronounced among financially constrained firms and for firms that are likely to benefit more from diffused technology, e.g., those have newer patents, are more profitable, face better […]

Radical Innovation in Strategic Partnerships: A Framework for Analysis
Anna Sadovnikova, Ashish Pujari, and Andrey Mikhailitchenko | 2014-05 | Download the PDF

The study proposes a conceptual model of the phenomenon of a radical innovation partnership and examines particular partner attributes affecting its performance. Borrowing from the paradox perspective in organizational studies, the model argues that a radical innovation partnership features several paradoxes – the paradox of a partnership structure, the paradox of partnership resources, and the […]

Social Screens and Systematic Boycott Risk
Hao (Arthur) Luo and Ronald J. Balvers | 2014-04 | Download the PDF

We consider the pricing implications of screens imposed by Socially Responsible Investing funds. The model extends standard risk-based asset pricing models by deriving as an additional systematic risk factor a portfolio of stocks shunned by a subgroup of institutional investors. We reconcile the empirically observed risk-adjusted sin-stock abnormal return with a “boycott risk premium” which […]

A New Method to Measure the Performance of Leveraged Exchange-Traded Funds
Narat Charupat and Peter Miu | 2014-03 | Download the PDF

We examine the effects of daily return compounding, financing costs, and management factors on the performance of leveraged exchange-traded funds (LETFs) over various holding periods. We propose a new method to measure LETFs’ tracking errors that allows us to disentangle these effects. Our results show that the compounding effect generally has more influence on tracking […]

Financial Disclosure and Customer Satisfaction: Do Companies Talking the Talk Actually Walk the Walk?
Ronald J. Balvers, John F. Gaski, and Bill McDonald | 2014-02 | Download the PDF

Using the emerging technology of large-scale textual analysis, this study examines use of the term “customer satisfaction” and its variants in the principal annual financial reports issued by publicly-traded U.S. corporations and filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission as Form 10-K. We document the frequency of the term’s occurrence in 10-Ks over the 1995 […]

How Firm Strategies Impact Size of Partner-Based Retail Networks: Evidence from Franchising
Manish Kacker, Rajiv P. Dant, Jamie Emerson, and Anne T. Coughlan | 2014-01 | Download the PDF

How do firms’ partnering strategies impact the size of their partner-based retail networks? We draw on agency theory to address this question in the context of franchising. Our econometric analyses (based on nine years of longitudinal balanced panel data) include assessment of data nonstationarity and estimation of a dynamic panel data model that accounts for […]