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.

2016 Working Papers

The Relationship between Initial and Ongoing Fees in Franchising: A Meta-Analysis
Farhad Sadeh, Manish Kacker | 2017-05 [replaces 2016-03] | Download the PDF

Mechanisms and rationales for revenue sharing have been the subject of many theoretical and empirical studies on contracting. Franchisors typically derive economic profits (for the rights they grant to franchisees) through revenue sharing contracts. Franchising is a popular form of retailing in a wide range of product and service markets, plays a significant role in […]

Arbitrage Pricing Restrictions and the Predictability of Stock Returns by Statistical Factor Analysis
Ronald Balvers and Adam Stivers | 2016-04 | Download the PDF

In standard principal components estimation of the APT, the factors are obtained without employing the restrictions on mean returns implied by the APT. We modify the principal components methodology to allow mean returns to reflect the theoretical restrictions up to any level of accuracy and generate optimal constrained APT factors from the eigenvectors of a […]

Asset Valuation
Ronald J. Balvers | 2016-02 | Download the PDF

A survey discussing fundamental conceptual issues in valuation. Topics include differences in fundamental valuation, comparative valuation, and replacement-value based valuation; accounting approaches to valuation such as residual income as contrasted with discounted cash flows; the use of valuation ratios based on earnings, dividends, and return on investment; the roles of different types of real capital […]

Fire-Sale Channel of Industry Contagion: Evidence from the Pricing of Industry Recovery Rate
Yi-Ting Hsieh, Peter Miu, Wenchien Liu, and Yuanchen Chang | 2016-01 | Download the PDF

How does bankruptcy contagion propagate among industry peers? We study the fire-sale channel of industry contagion by examining whether the cost of debt of a company is affected by the observed recovery rates of its bankrupt industry peers. Our results show that lower industry recovery rates are associated with higher loan spreads but only when […]