First Lecture

Title: The Role of Foreign Institutional Investors in Facilitating Knowledge Diffusion across Geographic Boundaries: Evidence from Cross-Border Patent Citations

Speaker: Ray Zhang, Associate Professor and Ph.D. Supervisor at Beedie School of Business, Simon Fraser University (Canada). He received his Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia. His research areas include climate reputation, securities regulation and enforcement, bank loan contracts, and executive personality assessment. He has published over ten papers in journals such as Journal of Financial & Quantitative Analysis, Review of Accounting Studies, Journal of Business Ethics, and Journal of Business Finance & Accounting. He has received multiple external grants: SSHRC Insight Development Grant ($74,805), SSHRC Insight Grant ($74,950), and CPABCEF Research Grant ($10,000).

Abstract: This paper explores the influence of foreign institutional investors on knowledge diffusion across national borders. The empirical analyses provide robust evidence on a significant and positive relationship between foreign institutional ownership and the frequency of investee firms citing patents from the home country of the foreign institutional investors. These citations represent cross-border diffusion of innovative knowledge originating from the home countries of foreign institutional investors. Thus, the findings provide compelling evidence that foreign institutional investors facilitate global knowledge diffusion. Furthermore, the findings reveal that the influence of foreign institutional investors on knowledge dissemination is more pronounced when these investors are from countries with greater geographic, linguistic, or cultural distances from countries where the investee firms are located. In addition, this paper finds long-term oriented foreign institutional investors or those focusing on high-tech investment have greater influence on the spread of innovative knowledge.

Second Lecture

Title: Do Expressions of National Sentiments Secure Firms’ Government Procurements?

Speaker: Donghui Li, Professor of Accounting and Finance and Ph.D. Supervisor at the School of Economics, Shenzhen University. He received his Ph.D. in Finance from the University of New South Wales, and worked at the same university for 15 years. His research areas include corporate finance and capital markets. He has published papers in international journals such as Journal of Finance, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Journal of Corporate Finance (8 articles), and Journal of Banking and Finance (6 articles). His research policy recommendations have been accepted by the "Chinese National Government" (7 times). He serves as an Associate Editor for Accounting & Finance and a guest editor for journals including Pacific-Basin Finance Journal and British Accounting Review. He was nominated as a "Highly Cited Chinese Scholar" by "Elsevier, Scopus" in 2021 and 2023.

Abstract: Based on a bag-of-words textual analysis, we find a positive association between firms’ expressions of national sentiment and their successes in securing government procurements. This effect is stronger for competitive contracts, non-local procurements, and procurements from lower government levels, particularly post-2020. An alternative genuine corporate nationalism measure generated by a multidimensional AI technique confirms our results. Lower likelihood of regulatory sanctions and increased fiscal support are identified as two potential mechanisms. Our main findings remain valid after considering various robustness checks and endogeneity issues.

Date & time: 6 March 2025, 15:15

Venue: B423, Zhixin Building, Central Campus, Shandong University