Topic: Are Firms in “Boring” Industries Worth Less?
Speaker: Jia Chen, Assistant Professor of Finance, Guanghua School of Management, Peking
University
Date: May 8th (Fri.)
Time: 12:30pm-1:30pm
Location: Building
1, Room 501, Faculty Lounge
Language: English
Abstract:
Using
theories from the behavioral finance literature to predict that investors are
attracted to industries with more salient outcomes and that therefore firms in
such industries have higher valuations, we find that firms in industries that
have high industry-level dispersion of profitability have on average higher
marketto-book ratios than firms in low dispersion industries. This positive
relation between market-to-book ratios and industry profitability dispersion is
economically large and statistically significant and is robust to controlling
for variables used to explain firm-level valuation ratios in the literature.
Consistent with the mispricing explanation of this finding, we show that firms
in less boring industries have a lower implied cost of equity and lower
realized returns. We explore alternative explanations for our finding, but find
that these alternative explanations cannot explain our results.
About the speaker:
Jia
Chen is an assistant professor of finance at the Guanghua School of
Management., Peking University. He teaches Financial Risk Management,
International Financial Management, and Financial Markets and Institutions for
undergraduate students, Master of Finance students, and MBA students. His
primary research interest is empirical asset pricing. His current research also
covers financial institutions, financial crises, and international finance. Jia
earned a Ph.D. in finance and Master in physics from Ohio State University. He
joined Guanghua School of Management at Peking University in 2012. Before
joining Guanghua, he taught at the Fisher College of Business of the Ohio State
University.
