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.

2021 Working Papers

Chilling Effects of Patent Trolls
Feng Chen, Yu Hou, Jiaping Qiu, and Gordon Richardson | 2021-11 | Download the PDF

We find that, when a firm is sued by non-practicing entities (NPEs), the likelihood of its technology peers being sued increases in the subsequent year. Defendants’ technology peers experience significant market value losses around the lawsuit filing date. Moreover, defendants’ technology peers respond to NPE litigation risk by increasing R&D investments to develop workaround technologies. […]

Channel Governance through Brand Equity: How Brand Equity Shapes Distribution Channel Structure
Mohammad B. Kayed, Manish Kacker, Ruhai Wu, and Farhad Sadeh | 2021-10 | Download the PDF

The relationship between brand equity and channel governance is recognized in practice and is of particular interest to senior managers. However, research in marketing on this topic is limited and practitioners and scholars seem divided on the nature of this relationship. To guide practice and enrich scholarship on this issue, we investigate the causal impact […]

Evidence Management System: Toward a design theory for research practice communication platform
Bellray Eapen and Vishwanath V. Baba | 2021-09 | Download the PDF

The ultimate purpose is to promote evidence-based management. The immediate purpose is to capture, maintain, and deliver evidence that comes out of both management research and management practice. To do so, we offer an evidence management system design that is versatile to include humans and intelligent systems as its potential users. Our design theory proposes […]

Marketing Executives’ Turnover and Firm Performance
Sash Vaid, Michael Ahearne, and Ryan Krause | 2021-08 | Download the PDF

This research takes a disruption-adaptation perspective to understand influence of marketing executives’ turnover (MET) on firm performance. The authors draw on marketing (and sales) executive exits at U.S. public firms between 2004 and 2016. MET measures presence (or absence) of annual turnover of one or more executives, accounting for changes (due to exits) to marketing […]

Retail Pricing Format and Rigidity of Regular Prices
Sourav Ray, Avichai Snir, and Daniel Levy | 2021-07 | Download the PDF

We study different notions of sale and regular prices, and their variability with store pricing-formats. We use data from three large stores with different pricing-formats (EDLP/Hi-Lo/Hybrid) that are located within 1-km radius. Importantly, the data contain both the actual transaction prices and the actual regular prices as displayed on the store shelves. We combine these […]

Two Faces of Product Market Competition and Tax Avoidance
Rui Li, Jiaping Qiu, Chi Wan, Mengying Wang, and Yan Wang | 2021-06 | Download the PDF

This paper investigates the effect of product market competition on a firm’s tax avoidance behavior. We develop a theoretical model showing that a greater product market competition could increase the managerial incentive of tax avoidance due to a “threat-of-punishment” effect but decrease shareholders’ incentive of tax avoidance due to a “value-of-tax-saving” effect, resulting in an […]

Does Ownership Concentration Affect Corporate Bond Volatility?
Yan Wang and Ying Wang | 2021-05 | Download the PDF

This paper analyzes the relation between ownership concentration and corporate bond volatility. We show that more concentrated mutual fund ownership is associated with higher volatility of corporate bonds. This relation is stronger among more illiquid bonds, during periods of heightened bond market illiquidity, and among bonds held by corporate bond funds that invest in more […]

Does Citizens’ Financial Literacy Relate to Bank Financial Reporting Transparency?
Justin Jin, Kiridaran Kanagaretnam, Yi Liu, and Maoyong Cheng | 2021-04 | Download the PDF

In this study, we examine the relationship between financial literacy and bank financial reporting transparency for a sample of banks from the U.S. Following prior literature, we employ discretionary loan loss provisions (DLLP) as our primary measure of bank reporting transparency. We argue that the financial literacy of their customers can influence bank managers’ behaviors […]

Determinants and Predictability of Commodity Producer Returns
Qiao Wang and Ronald Balvers | 2021-03 | Download the PDF

We derive stock returns for firms producing nonrenewable commodities employing the investment-based asset pricing approach. By identifying the appropriate time-varying discount rate the investment-based approach allows an alternative test of the Hotelling Valuation Principle. The empirical results support the principle and enable predicting returns from sorting firms into quintiles by expected return, producing a 16-20 […]

Banks’ Loan Charge-Offs and Macro-Level Risk
Justin Y. Jin, Mary L. Z. Ma, Victor Song, and Mengyang Guo | 2021-02 | Download the PDF

Prior studies document that delayed loan loss provisions can worsen financial stability by triggering a capital inadequacy concern. We extend prior literature and investigate how the treatment of loan charge-offs (LCOs) in financial statements is tied to macro-level risk in the U.S. banking industry. We hypothesize and find that nondiscretionary LCOs are positively linked to […]

Non-Traditional Banking Activities and Bank Financial Reporting Quality
Mengyang Guo, Justin Jin, Yi Liu, and S.M. Khalid Nainar | 2021-01 | Download the PDF

We examine whether and how non-traditional banking activities affect the quality of banks’ financial reporting. We find that a bank’s ratio of non-interest income (derived from nontraditional activities) to total operating income is positively and significantly associated with the magnitude of discretionary loan loss provisions, our proxy for financial reporting quality.