April 8 afternoon, the 8^th series of XMU-DBS cooperation program discipline frontiers lecture was held in B102, the multi-functional hall, Kunluan Building. Huang Juanjuan, associate professor from the School of Economics of Xiamen University shared her research and thinking on the topic “Innate Characteristics of Senior Executives and Corporate Finance”. The lecture was hosted by Cai Qingyun, a teacher of XMU-DBS cooperation program.

At present, the research on the characteristics of senior executives only focuses on the acquired factors such as personal life experience and work experience, and lacks the research on the innate characteristics. Huang Juanjuan’s research took the senior executives from the GEM companies in charge of promotion and presentation in the IPO online roadshow as the research object, and examined the impact of the appearance and voice of the senior executives on the IPO market. The research found that investors prefer companies with better-looking executives: Better–looking company executives brings low IPO subscription rate and low turnover rate on the first day. There is a "beauty premium" in the IPO market for executives' appearance, that is, companies with better-looking executives have lower IPO discount rate, while companies with poorer-looking executives have no significant conclusion. The "low voice preference" of IPO market to senior executives is as follows: the lower the voice of senior executives leads to the higher the IPO popularity and the lower the IPO discount rate; moreover, the company value is higher when executives with low voice. By comparison, it is found that the role of voice features is more stable than that of appearance features.  

The study uses machine learning methods to obtain objective data, expands the study of senior executive characteristics from the perspective of "nurture" to the field of "nature", and provides direct evidence for the relationship between innate characteristics and company finances.

Associate Professor Huang’s lecture presented a rigorous and solid academic research process from inspiration, topic selection, hypothesis, research design and testing to the conclusion of the research. She also answered the students’ questions on how to choose academic research topics and how to select variables and etc. and gave some practical and effective suggestions for undergraduates to participate in scientific research. This lecture not only brought students the latest achievements in the discipline frontiers, but also gave them great inspiration in research methods and thesis writing.

Profile

Juanjuan Huang, is an associate professor in the Department of Finance, School of Economics, Xiamen University, with bachelor degree of Computer and Information Engineering, Ph.D. in Management, and a visiting scholar in the Department of Finance at Cornell University in the United States and the Department of International Business at Furtwangen University in Germany. She published many papers and works in important academic journals such as "Journal of Corporate Finance", "Economic Research", "Management World", and "Accounting Research". The main research directions are corporate finance, financial management and capital markets.