The second session of BizTalks invited Associate Professor Allen HUANG from the Department of Accounting and Associate Professor Abhiroop MUKHERJEE from the Department of Finance to share their insights on the theme “Language and Infrastructure Matter”.
In 2005, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) mandated that firms disclose risk factors to provide useful information about firm risk. Prof. Huang found that the mandate improves firms’ information environment not only directly but also indirectly by prompting more disclosure of positive forward looking statements, illustrating an unintended benefit. Learn more about his research study here.
Does financing respond to changes in productive opportunities, even for the world's poor? Prof. Mukherjee answers this question by examining the response of private bank financing to a rural infrastructure program in India, which brought road access to unconnected villages. Revisit the insightful sharing here.
As for the last session, Professor YU Man of Operations Management and Assistant Professor Kohei KAWAGUCHI of Economics presented their works on “Recent Advances in Retailing”.
Prof. Yu examines an innovative return policy – return insurance – emerging on various shopping platforms such as Taobao.com and JD.com. She shows that return insurance can be an effective signal of high quality. When consumers have little confidence about high quality and expect a significant gap between high and low qualities, a high-quality retailer can be differentiated from a low-quality retailer solely through its adoption of return insurance. Find out more details from this link.
Prof. Kawaguchi develops a new algorithm for increasing the revenue in a dynamic product assortment problem. Then he identifies the challenges faced by managers in practice and discusses the conditions under which workers follow the algorithm. Click here for more about his research.