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.

2020 Working Papers

Organizational Memory and Bank Accounting Conservatism
Justin Yiqiang Jin, Yi Liu, S.M. Khalid Nainar | 2020-09 | Download the PDF

This paper is the first to investigate the impact of banks’ organizational memory of past history on the conservatism of accounting policy. Specifically, we investigate two types of bad time history: banks’ undercapitalization and the failures of other banks during financial crises. Using a large sample of U.S. banks over the period 1997-2013, we find […]

On the Meanings of Presenteeism: A Conceptual and Theoretical Extension
Nosheen Sarwat, Vishwanath V. Baba | 2020-08 | Download the PDF

In this study, we explore the meanings of presenteeism and extend the literature on presenteeism to its full conceptual potential. In addition to the value loss usually associated with presenteeism, we explore potential value gain in terms of creativity and innovation. We offer a theoretical model of presenteeism that separates negative presenteeism from positive presenteeism […]

The Bright Side of Financial Fragility
Massimo Massa, David Schumacher, Yan Wang | 2020-07 | Download the PDF

We highlight an important but overlooked characteristic of financial fragility: “fragile” stocks are more liquid because they are sensitive to non-fundamental liquidity shocks. This makes them less sensitive to corporate actions with price impact and therefore affects firms’ incentives to engage in those actions. We show that fragile firms have lower share repurchases but invest […]

Productivity Gaps and Global Systematic Risk Exposure: Pricing Country-Industry Portfolios
Punit Anand, Ronald J. Balvers | 2020-06 | Download the PDF

Shocks transmitted from productivity leaders to lagging economies are systematic sources of risk. Global technology and knowledge diffusion leads to predictable patterns in productivity dynamics across countries and industries. Technology gaps determine the level of exposure to the systematic productivity shocks. Firms in a country-industry with larger technology gaps relative to the world leader are […]

Labor-Capital Substitution and Capital Structure: Evidence from Automation
Jiaping Qiu, Chi Wan, Yan Wang | 2020-05 | Download the PDF

This paper presents evidence that the exposure to automation technologies has a positive impact on a firm’s financial leverage. The effects are more pronounced in firms with greater labor costs, routine task intensity, firing costs, and union coverage. The results are robust when we instrument a firm’s exposure to automation technologies using the robotics adoption […]

Conflict and Performance in Channels: A Meta-Analysis
Kamran Eshghi, Sourav Ray | 2020-04 | Download the PDF

Channel conflict is a critical business concern and has long been of great interest to researchers. In this paper, we report a comprehensive meta-analysis of the empirical literature spread over more than five decades between 1960 and 2020, with “channel conflict” as the focal construct and investigate the conflict- performance link. We find, in the […]

Wage Rigidity and Debt Financing: Evidence From Labor Contract Renewal During the Financial Crisis
Jiaping Qiu, Yue Zhang | 2020-03 | Download the PDF

This paper studies the differential impacts of the 2008 financial crisis on the financing policies and real activities of firms with flexible labor contracts and those with binding labor contracts. We find that flexible-contract firms significantly reduced their labor costs during the crisis, while binding-contract firms lacked such flexibility. Compared to flexible-contract firms, binding-contract firms […]

Performance Implications of Using Signaling and Screening for Expanding Interfirm Business Networks: Evidence from Franchising
Farhad Sadeh, Manish Kacker | 2020-02 | Download the PDF

Entrepreneurial business firms such as franchisors can enhance their network performance by attracting high-quality partners and preventing low-quality partners from joining the network. We draw on agency and transaction cost theories and the substantive literature on voluntary information disclosure to develop a theoretical framework that examines the consequences of using signaling and screening mechanisms for […]

Determinants and Consequences of Intellectual Capital Efficiency in the U.S. Banking Industry
Justin Y. Jin and Wenting Wang | 2020-01 | Download the PDF

This study investigates the determinants and consequences of intellectual capital efficiency in the U.S. banking industry. We find that banks’ individual institutional memory of bad times reduces their intellectual capital efficiency. We also find that intellectual capital efficiency restricts banks’ risk-taking behaviors and enhances their accounting conservatism. Finally, we find that intellectual capital efficiency helps […]