Category: Recent Seminars

Date: 4 February 2026, Wednesday Time: 10.30 – 11.30 Place: MA-330 "The Pricing and Economic Impact of Legal Risk" by Dean Ryu Saïd Business School – Oxford Abstract  Legal risk is an inherent feature of markets, rooted in the institutions that enable economic activity, yet it remains difficult to measure across firms. This paper constructs a text-based measure of firm-level legal risk (LRISK) using earnings call transcripts. LRISK predicts class action lawsuits and spikes during periods of heightened legal incidents. A one standard deviation increase predicts a 3–7% decline in future investment and lowers firms’ reliance on debt, consistent with precautionary motives. Legal risk is positively priced, particularly after 2010, and varies across legal origins, reflecting institutional differences. Bio Dean Ryu is a Finance Ph.D. Candidate at Said Business School,…

Date: 30 January 2026, Friday Time: 13.30 – 14.30 Place: MA-330 "Breaching the Chinese Wall: Cross-Market Information Flow Following Financial Institution Mergers" by Ehsan Mahdikhani Stockholm School of Economics Abstract  How does access to private loan information affect institutional investors' equity returns? Exploiting mergers between asset managers and lenders as a plausibly exogenous shock to loan-side information access, we find that after gaining access institutional investors earn higher abnormal equity returns: within institutions, managers earn 3.1 pp higher annualized returns on stocks for which they have loan-side access than on their other holdings without such access, and across institutions trading the same stock, informed managers outperform equity-only peers by 1.7 pp annualized, consistent with debt positions conferring information unavailable to pure shareholders. Mechanism tests show larger gains when financial-reporting covenants…

Date: 28 January 2026, Wednesday Time: 10.30 – 11.30 Place: MA-330 "Why Do I Do What I Do? How Searching for Meaning at Work Can Facilitate the Spread of Unethical Conduct Through Organizations" by Marius Van Dijke RSM Abstract  Existing work has explained the trickling down of unethical leader behavior through organizations in terms of social learning or social exchange processes. We identify a key limitation of these explanations and propose a novel process to explain the trickling down of unethical leader behavior. We build on Baumeister’s (1991) account of meaning, which depicts it as a system of mental connections between objects and events. We propose that strongly (vs. weakly) searching for meaning at work strengthens trickle-down effects of unethical leadership from higher-level managers, via lower-level managers to employees. We…