Robert B. Willumstad School of Business • Adelphi University, New York
Bold New Thinking

Fall 2024/Issue 8

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

This eighth edition of the Adelphi Business Review features five journal articles that were recognized by the Robert B. Willumstad School of Business through the Bender Award program, named in honor of the first dean of the School, James F. Bender, PhD. We are especially excited to include the winning paper from the new “Corporate Social Responsibility Outstanding Paper” award category as we deepen our focus on developing socially responsible leaders. Professor Susan Li, PhD, and her co-authors studied the urban logistics industry in China with the goal of improving environmental efficiency. Read more about her study, along with our other four Bender Award-winning papers below.  

The push for a green economy and high-quality economic development has raised the bar for the urban logistics industry. To guide its future direction, it’s essential to assess the current environmental efficiency of this industry. Professor Susan Li, PhD, and her co-authors have introduced a new evaluation method called information entropy-based cross efficiency. This method measures the environmental efficiency of the urban logistics industry by considering both its economic contributions and environmental impacts. It also integrates the strengths of various evaluation models from different perspectives. The researchers applied this method to assess the environmental efficiency of the urban logistics industry in Anhui, China.

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Abstract: Firms from emerging markets often use mergers and acquisitions (M&As) to achieve faster development. This is particularly true for the high-tech M&As designed to gain “high-end, world-class technology, upgrade capabilities and augment ownership of technology.” Chinese acquirers have legitimacy concerns resulting from their late-comer status and technology liability. To explore whether and how these legitimacy concerns affect the completion of high-tech M&As, Monica Yang, PhD, professor and chair of the management department, and her co-author took a multilevel approach (i.e., knowledge distance at the country level, industry attractiveness at the industry level and government involvement at the firm level). Based on a sample of 797 high-tech M&As by Chinese firms from 1991 to 2018, they found that the likelihood of completion increases when the knowledge distance between China and the host country decreases and in the presence of a high attractiveness of the Chinese high-tech industry involved. They did not find the influence of government involvement in the acquiring firms but found that the likelihood of completion decreases in the presence of government involvement in the target firm.

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Merger arbitrage is an event-driven investment strategy which aims to generate profits from the difference between the target stock price and the value of the consideration. Among the different risks investors face, the risk of consummation failure is of the greatest concern as it leads to most significant losses. In “The application of feed forward neural networks to merger arbitrage: A return-based analysis,” Yue Han, PhD, associate professor of decision sciences, and her coauthors examine the performance of feed forward neural networks (FFNNs) in making arbitrage investment decisions. An FFNN model is constructed with recent data and an expansive set of input variables, and the resulting failure probabilities are utilized by a simulated hedge fund in evaluating merger arbitrage opportunities. The findings reveal the power of FFNNs in takeover failure prediction and the use of machine learning can increase risk-standardized deal returns on average.

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Turkish women are faced with the intricacies of managing gender-based pressures as their identity and visibility are tightly linked to the notion of a ‘proper woman’ and the image of an ‘ideal worker.’ Murat Sakir Erogul, PhD, associate dean of the Robert B. Willumstad School of Business, asks how Turkish female soldiers (TFS) manage their (in)visibility within the Turkish Armed Forces (TAF). Due to the instrumentalization of women’s rights and the transformation of the gender rights regime in the context of democratic backsliding in Turkey, the visibility of women in political and social contexts continues to be a problem. The TAF is a highly male-dominated work setting, where women’s visibility is challenged due to strong social and organizational values. Dr. Erogul and his coauthors study the social, biological, ideological and cultural inflictions embedded in the Turkish military that control and marginalize TFS and their visibility, while investigating the ways in which they manage the challenges they encounter. The findings show that TFS comply with certain mechanisms of control, while simultaneously strategically resisting and recommending legislative policies that set the tone for increasing women’s status and activity within the military and the wider social context.

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A night of poor-quality sleep followed by a sunny day … Behavioral finance literature posits that poor-quality sleep negatively impacts stock market returns, while it counters that lower cloud coverage has a positive impact on market return. It contends that poor sleep quality induces greater investor risk aversion, but at the same time it argues that lower cloud coverage decreases risk aversion. What is the net impact? Is it positive or negative? Cem Karatas, DBA, clinical associate professor, co-authored an article that examined what occurs when physiological and psychological factors exert opposing effects. Examining them in isolation and making judgments based on separate models is insufficient, given the intricate interplay between human psychology and physiology. The effects of sleep deprivation due to work should differ from those resulting from late-night game enjoyment. In this paper, the authors explore whether physiological or psychological factors dominate investment decision-making. This is the first paper to directly compare the impacts of physiology and psychology on economic decision-making within the same model. The findings indicate that psychology has a greater impact than physiology on investors’ decisions.

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