Browsing by Author "Zhang, Yan Anthea"

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    Corporate Leaders and Firm Acquisitions
    (2016-03-31) Shi, Wei; Hoskisson, Robert E; Zhang, Yan Anthea
    This dissertation examines the influence of CEOs’ social peers on their acquisition decisions and consists of three empirical essays. Findings from the first essay indicate that CEOs undertake fewer acquisitions after they witness an independent director’s death, implying that an independent director’s death may heighten mortality awareness among CEOs, attenuating the importance of extrinsic goals in driving CEO acquisition decisions. Findings from the second essay suggest that after witnessing a dramatic increase in a CEO’s social status through winning a certification contest (i.e., a superstar CEO), competitors of the superstar CEO may be inspired to engage in intensive acquisition activities to increase their social status. Findings from the third essay indicate that CEOs undertake more acquisitions but such acquisitions tend to be value destructive when CFOs exhibit a high level of language style matching with CEOs. I posit that high CEO-CFO language style matching reflects that the CFO may try to ingratiate the CEO and is less likely play the role of a “naysayer”. This dissertation can contribute to strategic leadership research by highlighting the importance of CEOs’ social peers in shaping firm acquisition decisions and acquisition decision quality.
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    Corporate Sexual Scandals: Examining the Reactions of Wrongdoers, Peers, and Bystanders
    (2024-04-18) Chung, Sung Hun; Zhang, Yan Anthea
    This dissertation explores organizational and investor responses to sexual scandals in U.S. firms from 1999 to 2019. The first essay investigates how competitors of scandal-stricken firms react, analyzing two types of responses: pro-women claims and female director appointments. It finds that firms increase both responses post-scandal, influenced by competitors' size similarity with the scandal firm, their ESG reputation, analyst coverage, and community liberalism. The second essay delves into the effects of internal versus external stakeholder pressures on these responses from the perspective of the scandalized firms. It reveals that internal pressures often lead to symbolic changes, such as pro-women claims, while external pressures are more likely to result in substantive changes, like female director appointments. The third essay examines investor reactions to female director appointments, showing that investors favor substantive appointments but respond negatively to appointments perceived as tokenistic or superficial. This research contributes to our understanding of how firms manage reputation and stakeholder expectations post-scandal and how these strategies are perceived by investors, enriching the literature on strategic management and organizational theory in scandal contexts.
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    Who do you take to tango? Examining pairing mechanisms between underwriters and initial public offering firms in a nascent stock market
    (Wiley, 2022) Zhang, Yan Anthea; Chen, Jin; Li, Haiyang; Jin, Jing
    Previous studies on initial public offerings (IPOs) in mature stock markets have documented that high-reputation underwriters primarily work with high-quality firms and vice versa—that is, they are paired through a quality-matching mechanism. We propose that in a nascent stock market, a pricing mechanism may also play a role, through which pricing (the underwriting fee) sets the pairing. We examine these two mechanisms in the context of China's ChiNext stock exchange, which was launched in 2009 and experienced dramatic regulatory improvements in 2012–2013. With data on IPOs in 2009–2017, we find evidence to support the pricing mechanism's effect before the regulatory improvements and the quality-matching mechanism's effect after the improvements. We contribute to the literature by developing an evolutionary view on the pairing mechanisms between important capital market participants. Managerial Summary In a mature stock market, underwriter reputation signals the underlying quality of initial public offering (IPO) firms to external investors because high-reputation underwriters primarily work with high-quality IPO firms and vice versa. We find that in a nascent stock market before the market experiences regulatory improvements, underwriters and IPO firms are paired through a pricing mechanism. That is, underwriters with higher reputation charge higher underwriting fees, and IPO firms with lower quality pay higher fees. Since the pricing mechanism rather than the quality-matching mechanism sets the pairing, underwriter reputation does not have a signaling effect. Instead, we find that higher underwriting fees signal lower quality of IPO firms. Our findings shed important insights on how market participants are paired in other nascent markets, nascent technology fields and industries.