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.

2018 Working Papers

Banks’ Funding Structure and Earnings Quality
Justin Yiqiang Jin, Kiridaran Kanagaretnam, and Yi Liu | 2018-07 | Download the PDF

Using a sample of U.S. public and private banks, we examine the implications of banks’ funding strategies for banks’ earnings quality. We find that the ratio of core deposits to total liabilities (CDL), our proxy for bank reliance on retail deposits over wholesale funds, is negatively and significantly associated with the magnitude of earnings management […]

Credit Risk Spillovers and Cash Holdings
Jin Lei, Jiaping Qiu, Chi Wan, and Fan Yu | 2018-06 | Download the PDF

This paper examines how credit risk spillovers affect corporate Financial Flexibility and bank loan contracting. We construct separate empirical proxies to disentangle the two channels of credit risk spillovers — credit risk contagion (CRC), which increases industry peers’ distress likelihood; and product market rivalry (PMR), which strengthens rivals’ competitive position. We show that firms facing […]

Technology and Return Predictability
Jiaping Qiu, Jin Wang, and Yi Zhou | 2018-05 | Download the PDF

This paper finds significant predictability in stock returns across technology-linked firms. Using patent-holding information to identify firms’ technological linkage, we show that a long–short equity trading strategy sorted on lagged returns of technology-linked firms yields monthly alphas of around 105 basis points. The findings are robust to a number of specifications and are not driven […]

A Theory of Actionability: Complementing Rigour and Relevance in Management Research
Farimah HakemZadeh and Vishwanath V. Baba | 2018-04 | Download the PDF

Our purpose is to contribute to the debate on how to close the gap between management research and practice and to offer a solution. We analyze the literature investigating the research-practice gap including evidence-based management, mode 1 and 2 knowledge generation, design science approaches, and action research. We argue that in order to narrow the […]

Home Capital Group – The High Cost of Dishonesty
Kareen Brown, Kevin Veenstra | 2018-03 | Download the PDF

This instructional case presents the problems that began in the summer of 2015 when Home Capital Group (HCG) announced it had cut ties with 45 mortgage brokers for falsifying figures on mortgage applications regarding the earnings of prospective home purchasers in Canada. The case details the subsequent investigation by the Ontario Securities Commission in 2017 […]

Simulation and Big Data: In Search of Causality in Big Data-Related Managial Decision Making
Maggie M. Cheng, Chenxing Li, Rick D. Hackett | 2018-02 | Download the PDF

The unprecedented availability of digitized human behavioral data offers new research opportunities for discovering hidden patterns in Big Data that may not be apparent in smaller samples. At the same time, there are potential pitfalls associated with Big Data analytics in the absence of also working to identify causal relationships among the constructs thought to […]

Beauty and Academic Career
Yanju Liu, Hai Lu, Kevin Veenstra | 2018-01 | Download the PDF

We examine the impact of beauty on the academic career success of tenure-track accounting professors at top business schools in America, and show that beauty plays a significant role. Specifically, after controlling for gender, ethnicity, publication history, work experience, and quality of alma mater, more attractive professors obtain better first school placements post-PhD and are […]