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.

2019 Working Papers

Antecedents of Locus of Causality Attributions for Destructive Acts in Distribution Channels
Hadi Eslami, Manish Kacker, and Jonathan D. Hibbard | 2019-06 | Download the PDF

Destructive acts in distribution channels are actions by firms that have a significant adverse impact on the viability or functioning of channel members. Understanding an affected channel member’s locus of causality attributions for a destructive act can help the initiating firm determine when, where and how to proactively mitigate the adverse consequences of the act. […]

Welcome to the Gray Zone: Shades of Honesty and Earnings Management
Pascale Lapointe-Antunes, Kevin Veenstra, Kareen Brown, and Heather Li | 2019-05 | Download the PDF

We examine the influence of face-based judgments of CFO/CEO honesty on earnings management for the largest publicly traded companies in America. After controlling for incentives and opportunities to manage earnings, CFOs and CEOs perceived to be less honest engage in higher levels of both accruals and real earnings management. The beneficial impact of perceived honesty […]

Credit Risk Spillovers and Cash Holdings [update of 2018-06]
Jin Lei, Jiaping Qiu, Chi Wan, and Fan Yu | 2019-04 | Download the PDF

This paper examines how credit risk spillovers affect corporate financial flexibility. 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 greater CRC hold more […]

The Effect of Labor Cost on Innovation
Amrita Nain, Yan Wang | 2019-03 | Download the PDF

Using minimum wage changes as an exogenous shock to the cost of low-skill labor, we show that corporate innovative output declines after the shock, especially in industries dependent on unskilled labor. The substitutability between technology and unskilled labor plays a key role in the response of innovative output to minimum wage shocks. We identify technology […]

Gender and Beauty in the Financial Analyst Profession: Evidence from the U.S. and China [update of 2017-06]
Congcong Li, An-Ping Lin, Hai Lu, Kevin Veenstra | 2019-02 | Download the PDF

We examine how gender and beauty affect the likelihood of being voted as an All-Star in the financial analyst profession in both the U.S. and China. We find that female analysts are more likely to be voted as All-Star analysts in the U.S., but good-looking female U.S. analysts are less likely to be voted as […]

Beauty and Academic Career [update of 2018-01]
Yanju Liu, Hai Lu, Kevin Veenstra | 2019-01 | 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 […]