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.

2024 Working Papers

Beta Uncertainty as a Barrier to Arbitrage and the Impact on Anomaly Returns
Ronald Balvers, Yufeng Han, Ou Hu, and Zhaodan Huang | 2024-06 | Download the PDF

Beta uncertainty creates unavoidable risk in exploiting anomalies, suggesting an unexplored barrier to arbitrage. We measure beta uncertainty from parameter dynamics and estimation risk, decoupling it from idiosyncratic risk in a Bayesian market model accommodating separate processes for beta and idiosyncratic volatility. Anomalies with higher beta uncertainty generate substantially higher returns. For individual stocks, beta […]

Does Firms’ Corporate Social Responsibility Reduce Crime?
Chenwei Sun, Justin Jin, Khalid Nainar and Gerald Lobo | 2024-05 | Download the PDF

This study examines the impact of firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) on state crime rates in the U.S. from 2004 to 2020. Our research bolsters the expanding work under the Law and Political Economy Project out of Yale University and Economics of Crime Working Group of National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Our empirical results […]

Cyclicality in the Prices of Risk: What More Can We Learn from Explainable AI?
Amir Akbari and Francesca Carrieri | 2024-04 | Download the PDF

We uncover the temporal patterns of the prices of risk through industry portfolios with varying sensitivities to the economic and financial cycles. Conditioning on the highs and lows of the cycles is key for statistical significance of the intertemporal component. Unlike market risk, its price decreases during an economic downturn but increases under tight funding […]

Owner Culture and Pay Inequality within Firms
Jan Bena, Guangli Lu, and Iris Wang | 2024-03 | Download the PDF

Using a comprehensive dataset of employee-employer-firm owner immigration records in 2001-2017, we examine the impact of immigrant owners’ national culture on within-firm pay inequality. Firms owned by immigrants from more individualistic countries exhibit higher pay dispersion among employees. This result is robust across various empirical methods, including difference-in-differences analysis of ownership changes. Owners’ individualism is […]

Information Supporting Investor Valuations: Evidence from a Comparative Content Analysis of Analyst Reports and Form 10-K
Mary E. Barth, Ken Li, and Charles G. McClure | 2024-02 | Download the PDF

We address whether financial reports include information supporting investor valuations. We view analyst reports (AR) as reflecting this information and employ topic modeling to compare the contents of AR and Form 10-K. Our main findings follow. (i) Form 10-K focuses heavily on financial reporting, whereas AR focuses most on performance, followed by analysis, and business. […]

Social Capital and Equity Prices
Anand Jha , Amanjot Singh, and Qian Yang | 2024-01 | Download the PDF

Social capital refers to “networks, norms, and trust that facilitate action and cooperation for mutual benefit” (Putnam, 1995). We propose a novel firm-level time-varying social capital measure based on firms’ 10-K filings that captures the firm’s operational exposure to social capital and examine its impact on equity prices. This measure is positively and significantly correlated […]