Essays in empirical corporate finance
On Monday 15 May 2017 Yun Tang will hold a trial lecture on a prescribed topic and defend her thesis for the PhD degree at NHH.
Prescribed topic for the trial lecture:
Operational risk and corporate compensation policy
Trial lecture:
10:15 in Jebsen Centre, NHH
Title of the thesis:
Essays on Empirical Corporate Finance
Summary:
The thesis by Yun Tang examines issues in empirical corporate finance. It consists of three essays related to corporate governance, innovation (R&D), and home equity-based borrowing.
The first essay studies how firms’ business relationships with customers influence CEO compensation. Depending on a few customers for a large percentage of sales can be beneficial for the firm by improving operational efficiency. However, it can also be risky for the firm to have a concentrated customer base. Tang proposes two possible channels on how customer concentration can positively affect CEO compensation: customer risk and customer ties. Using a large sample of US firms, she provides evidence for the hypothesis.
In her second essay, Tang and co-authors study how reward-timing uncertainty affects R&D (research and development) investment. One of the key characteristics of R&D is uncertainty regarding future reward and this uncertainty has two dimensions: how much the reward is and when the reward will be materialized. The essay builds a model showing that the second dimension of uncertainty- reward-timing uncertainty can positively affect R&D investment. To provide empirical evidence to the model prediction, a special language structure inspired by Chen(2013)- weak future-time reference (FTR) is used to measure managers’ perceived reward-timing uncertainty. The empirical results are consistent with the model prediction.
The third essay examines how the ease of home equity-based borrowing affects corporate financing. In 2005, major Norwegian banks introduced “flexible credit” - a new type of credit line based on household home-equity, which significantly reduced the costs of home-equity borrowing. The essay hypothesizes that this release of financial constraints allows households to borrow and then inject the capital into their businesses, especially private firms with individual owners. Empirical evidence supports this prediction.
Defense:
12:15 in Jebsen Centre, NHH
Members of the evaluation committee:
Associate Professor Aksel Mjøs (leader of the committee), Department of Finance, NHH
Assistant Professor Daniel Chi, Lee Business School, University of Nevada
Assistant Professor Dong Yan, Stockholm School of Economics
Supervisors:
Associate Professor Xunhua Su (principal supervisor), Department of Finance, NHH
Associate Professor Francisco Santos, Department of Finance, NHH
Associate Professor Han Xia, UT Dallas
The trial lecture and thesis defence will be open to the public. Copies of the thesis will be available from presse@nhh.no.