On 14 September 2022, Dean Adrian Cheung, Faculty of Finance of City University of Macau, conducted the first Finance Salon at the K. C. Wong Building, Taipa campus, delivering a seminar entitled “Hidden Cost of Organization Capital: Evidence from Trade Credit”. Guests attending this salon include all teachers, master’s and doctoral students of the Faculty of Finance.
To begin with, Dean Cheung introduced the focus of this salon with the view that key talents are an important capital of a company, and pointed out that the loss of key talents will have risks and multi-dimensional negative impacts on operations. Dean Cheung and his collaborators found that the reduction of trade credit was related to the outflow of key talents. When the mobility of employees is stronger or there are more employment opportunities outside the company, the relationship is more pronounced. The principal-agent theory in human capital can explain these findings. In addition, when the economy is in a downturn, such as after the financial crisis in 2008, companies with more key talents are favored by more suppliers. This view can be explained from the perspective of efficiency in human resources. At last, Dean Cheung demonstrated a variety of robustness tests, and the main results of the paper held up in the test.
In the Q&A session, Dean Cheung answered the questions raised by the participating postgraduate students and teachers on how to interpret the coefficients in the empirical evidence, the selection of fixed effects, the priority of theoretical basis and empirical results, and the drawbacks of the mediation effect model. Based on his own research experience, Dean Cheung made suggestions to the postgraduate students on how to get started more quickly in academic research, how to find important issues, and the aesthetics of journals.
Dean Cheung’s suggestion not only pointed out the direction for postgraduates who were confused in the initial stage of academic research, but also reminded all the students that the path of academic research is not easy, and it requires not only a solid theoretical foundation and strong academic interest, but also to keep up with the trend of the times and pay attention to the latest demand of the development of the times, so as to go further on the road of academic research. The salon was a complete success thanks to Dean Cheung.
The next academic salon of the Faculty of Finance will be held on October 12, and the speaker will be Assistant Professor Lin Deng. Dr Deng’s research interests are corporate finance, enterprise innovation, and capital structure. The salon topic will be “shareholder empowerment and corporate leases”.