Time/时间：06月02日 10:00am – 11:30am
Venue/地点：Room 501, Jiageng Building 2/嘉庚二号楼501教室
Topic/题目： Competition Laws and Corporate Risk-taking Around the World
Speaker/报告人：Joseph Sowahfio Sowah
Facilitator/主持人： Shan Li
Online Conference ID/腾讯会议号：446-747-450
Abstract/摘要：Using a new dataset on international competition laws, we examine the relationship between the stringency of country-level competition laws and corporate risk-taking over the 1990-2010 period for 62 economies. We find strong evidence that corporate risk-taking declines with the stringency of competition laws, and this finding is robust to controlling for a wide range of firm- and country-level characteristics, using alternative measures of competition laws and risk-taking, and addressing potential endogeneity concerns. We also find that the negative relation between competition laws and corporate risk-taking is more pronounced for firms with high diversification and R&D expenditures, severe agency problems, and high information opacity, while less pronounced instead for firms in jurisdictions with better formal institutions and low societal trust. Further analysis shows that the negative competition laws-risk-taking effect induces firms to choose more conservative financial policies. Overall, our findings are consistent with the view that competition plays an important monitoring role in shaping corporate behaviors.
About the Speaker/报告人简介：Joseph Sowahfio Sowah is a third grade (2019) Ph.D. (Finance) candidate at the Institute for Financial and Accounting Studies at XMU. He is a trained teacher with a Bachelor’s in Education (Accounting and Management) from the University of Cape Coast, Ghana, and a Master’s in Business Administration (Finance) from XMU in 2019. His research interests broadly focus on Corporate Finance with special attention on Corporate Intangible Capital. He has co-authored a paper published in the Journal of International Financial Market, Institutions, & Money. He has also presented academic papers at conferences such as the Financial Management Association Annual Conference and the Cross-Country Perspectives in Finance Conference.