Corporate Governance

In the last decade, reforms have been implemented worldwide to improve gender diversity in corporate boardrooms. “Boardroom diversity is a key social performance issue, and boardroom reforms represent major social and governance policy initiatives,” say HKUST’s Mingyi Hung and Emily Jing Wang, working with colleagues. Their forward-thinking study sheds light ... Read More

The “short-termism” induced by executive pay schemes is a major problem for firms and investors. Allen H. Huang of HKUST, together with overseas colleagues, provides important new insights into the negative consequences of executive myopia. The researchers examined the share repurchasing and mergers-and-acquisitions (M&A) behavior of firms whose CEOs have ... Read More

Informal institutions—society’s unwritten codes of conduct—influence all aspects of international business, but they have received surprisingly little attention in the literature to date. Helping to fill this gap, HKUST’s Jiatao Li and co-researchers build a novel typology and framework for examining neglected aspects of informal institutions, as well as the ... Read More

Over the past few decades, a substantial body of work has developed from the study of international issues relating to top management teams, particularly in relation to how firms formulate international strategies, how and where firms tend to grow their international businesses, and the performance outcomes of the choices made by them. This review provides a ... Read More

Gone are the days of small-scale investment - the rise of institutional investors has changed the game completely. In 1950, only 6% of publicly traded US companies were owned by institutional investors, but fast forward to 2017 and that number has skyrocketed to 65%. The "Big Three" - BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street Global Investors - hold a ... Read More

Social media posts about potential mergers and acquisitions (M&As) can significantly predict the likelihood of M&A success, say HKUST researcher Charles Hsu and colleagues. Social media message boards give China’s 50 million small investors a voice, which they are using to express their opinions on acquisition activity. This study establishes an influential ... Read More

Overconfidence among top managers may be “instrumental” to firm innovation, according to a pioneering new study of more than 6,000 U.S. and Chinese companies. Given the crucial role played by executives in every aspect of business operations, it is little wonder that their personalities affect firms’ decisions and performance. However, researchers have ... Read More

The real economic effects of financial reporting can be understood by looking into the joint effect of managerial overconfidence and accounting conservatism, specifically regarding the quality of corporate decisions. For instance, under what conditions does accounting conservatism improve corporate performance? Within the context of a firm, a chief executive ... Read More

Non-compete clauses in employment contracts are widely used in countries like the US to forbid certain employees, such as CEOs and specialised technicians, from working with the competition when their contract is terminated. The aim is to safeguard employers’ proprietary information and investment in human capital. But research by Tai-Yuan Chen, Guochang ... Read More