The School is proud to announce that two of our PhD students have been selected for scholar fundings with respect to their outstanding papers and excellent potential in their research field.
NTR-IACM Early Career Scholars 2023
Our PhD student CHOI Jungmin, of the Department of Management, was selected for the Negotiation and Team Resources (NTR)-International Association of Conflict Management (IACM) Early Career Scholars Program 2023, receiving a US$2,000 worth scholarship sponsored by NTR.
Co-authored with our Management Associate Professor Melody CHAO, Jungmin’s paper “The Fair AI: The Use of AI Mitigates Negative Reactions Toward Unfavorable Decisions” investigates how individuals perceive AI decision agents in terms of fairness and react to decisions made by the agent. She found that when an unfavorable decision is made by AI (vs. human), individuals’ perception of fairness is higher, which leads to a more positive reaction toward the decision.
Each year, only five scholars are selected for this Program based on the quality of their full paper submissions to IACM within the same year, and their potential to contribute to the IACM community. The Scholarship encourages early-stage scholars to conduct research on negotiation and conflict management, participate in, and become active, long-term members of IACM.
Young Scholars’ Fund Award for AMES 2023
Another graduate PhD student QIU Yancheng of the Department of Finance won the 2023 Asian Meeting of Econometric Society (AMES)’s Young Scholars’ Fund (YSF) Award with a cash prize of US$400. The winning research paper “His Pain Is Your Gain: Inter-Firm Linkages and Exchange Rate Exposure” is his solo-authored job market paper.
Yancheng presenting the job market paper at the AMES Conference 2023 in Singapore.
This paper studies how exchange rate shocks spread across the corporate sector, using novel multi-country firm-level data on foreign debt and production networks. As expected, the default risk of foreign debt borrowers increases in depreciation periods. However, their “untreated” rivals – those without foreign currency exposure – gain strategic competitive advantages and thus experience lower distress risk, higher stock prices, and higher profit margins.
The researcher further found that the financial vulnerability of foreign debt borrowers is the critical driver underlying such positive spillover effects. Overall, the paper introduced a new dimension to currency debt composition and product market competition to explain the muted response of economic activity to exchange rate shocks.