On October 27, 2020, Professor Wu Qiang of Lally School of Management, RPI was invited to deliver an academic lecture for teachers and students of SEM. Professor Wu Qiangobtained the master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University and the doctoral degree from RPI. He is now a professor of the Department of Accounting and Finance of RPI. His main research directions include corporate finance, corporate governance, financial accounting, corporate social responsibility, gender, and morality, etc. Many of his representative works have been published in renowned international journals, such asJournal of Financial Economics, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, The Accounting Review and Journal of Accounting Research. The total downloads of his papers are up to 16,527 times. He is now the Editor of China Accounting and Finance Review, and the Deputy Editor of Journal of Financial Stability and Advances in Accounting.
At 8: 00 p.m. on October 27, the lecture was held on Tencent conference and presided over by Professor Huang Xiaoxia, associate dean of the school. Over 160 teachers and master’s students of SEM attended the lecture.
At the beginning of the lecture, Professor Wu introduced several of his research directions, and then shared how he became interested in social capital and studied the issue of “Does Social Capital Mitigate Agency Problems? Evidence from chief executive officer (CEO) compensation.” The research on social capital first appeared in related researches of economics. Previous studies showed that social capital can influence group activities, but none of them had introduced it into corporate governance. Professor Wu thought it was an innovative subject and worth studying. In his paper, the main regression was conducted with fixed effect, which showed that social capital had a negative influence on CEO compensation level based on equity. Then, in order to prevent endogenous problems, the results were further discussed by using difference-in-difference (DID), instrumental variables and PSM method.
At the end of the lecture, Professor Wu had a heated discussion with the teachers and students for more than half an hour. Li Fan, a second-grade postgraduate majoring in finance, and Mr. Huang Qiubin as well as Mr. Liu Yingwen from the Department of Accounting and Finance of SEM discussed with Professor Wu details of this research and issues on the senior management team. Jiang Yanchen, a first-grade student of doctoral program of Management Science and Engineering, asked questions about PSM, DID and how to choose tool variables mentioned by Professor Wu. Students of the second year of finance asked questions about how to make the research meaningful in practical sense, and about data sufficiency and measurement method selection, etc. Teacher Huang Xiaoxia, who presided over the meeting, inspiredthe students to propose a series of questions and Professor Wu answered them one by one patiently.
The lecture is with active exchanges and communications, which greatly inspired and helped the research of the teachers and students, and solved some specific problems in their research process. Everyone wished to have more chances to learn from and communicate with Professor Wu and other academic experts in the future.
Edited by: Zhu Yuanyuan
Reviewed by: Huang Xiaoxia