Management Performance

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

A rule designed to protect investors may encourage managerial short-termism, to the detriment of firms. This sobering finding comes from a study led by HKUST’s Yan Xiong. According to Xiong and a U.S. colleague, the American government is tying firms’ hands with the requirement to disclose managers’ pay offers. The paper shows how managers become more myopic ... Read More

A rule designed to protect investors may encourage managerial short-termism, to the detriment of firms. This sobering finding comes from a study led by HKUST’s Yan Xiong. According to Xiong and a U.S. colleague, the American government is tying firms’ hands with the requirement to disclose managers’ pay offers. The paper shows how managers become more myopic ... Read More

A more diverse workforce can provide an organization with a broader talent base and a wider range of knowledge and perspectives. Recent trends of increasing globalization, migration, and aging have enhanced workplace diversity in terms of age, gender, and region of origin to an unprecedented degree. Thus, argue HKUST researcher Yaping Gong and colleagues, it ... Read More

Research by Xuan Wang of HKUST reveals how large manufacturers can benefit from flexible production systems. In collaboration with US-based scholars, Wang shows that the right kind of flexibility design allows firms with multiple plants and products to adapt to demand uncertainties. By using the methods presented in the paper, such firms can dodge the traps ... Read More

Multinational enterprises (NMEs) operate in vastly different international environments. The intellectual property (IP) held by their foreign subsidiaries is thus at risk of appropriation by outsiders—sometimes even more at risk than the IP of the parent company. While legal and other external measures are obviously important to reduce such risk, Jiatao Li ... Read More

Financial analysts are crucial information intermediaries in capital markets. Their consensus earnings estimates are widely used to assess firm performance. Given the market influence of financial analysts, managers have an incentive to issue earnings guidance to help analysts update their earnings expectations. Firms commonly issue earnings guidance at the ... Read More

“Fair value” is a gold standard in valuation, but there is no consensus on its usefulness in other areas, such as evaluating management performance. HKUST’s Mingyi Hung and her colleagues settle this dispute in important new work, contending that fair value accounting may actually be unhelpful when it comes to contracting. This finding is particularly ... Read More