On 12 October 2022, Dr Lin Deng, Assistant Professor of Faculty of Finance, City University of Macau, conducted the second Finance Salon, delivering a seminar entitled “Shareholder Empowerment and Corporate Leases”. Dr Deng’s explored the impact of shareholder empowerment on corporate leasing strategies. Specifically, the majority voting method in the United States has enhanced the voting weight of shareholders in the election of company directors. This study uses the staggered impact of the act as a quasi experiment, and finds that shareholder empowerment reduces corporate leasing. At the same time, this finding shows that the shareholder debt contradiction has intensified after the introduction of the bill. In the aspect of heterogeneity analysis, this paper expounds that this kind of debt contradiction appears less in enterprises with a larger share ratio of institutional investors and strong creditor protection. The mechanism analysis of the paper finds that after the majority voting law is passed, the geographical agglomeration of companies becomes higher than before. Further onwards, the results of the paper show that after the bill takes effect, the probability of borrowers charging higher interest and demanding mortgage assets has increased.

Assistant Professor Di Li discussed and fully affirmed the topic selection and detailed research design of Dr Deng’s paper, and pointed out that there is room for further improvement in the writing, logical self-consistency and story structure of this paper. Dean Adrian Cheung and Course Coordinator Yonghong Zhou spoke highly of Dr Deng’s research, and pointed out the direction and ideas for the problems in paper positioning, empirical strategies, and mechanism testing. Assistant Professor Lifei Xue and Assistant Professor Lamont Yu provided targeted suggestions on the policy background and interpretation of the results of spatial agglomeration of the paper.

This academic salon has built a platform for exchange and research between the graduate students and teachers of the Faculty. At the salon, students have a strong interest in learning and the atmosphere is compact and efficient. The sharing of Dr Deng benefited the participating teachers and students greatly, promoted the high-quality development of the scientific research activities of the Faculty of Finance, and also received warm praise from the participating teachers and students.

The third academic salon of the Faculty of Finance will be held at 4:00 p.m. on October 19 in S403 of Taipa campus. The speakers will be Assistant Professor Lu Liu and Assistant Professor Lifei Xue and the discussants for the papers will be Associate Professor Yinggui Wang and Dr Zucheng Zhao (online).