Articles

Dr. S. Abraham Ravid, professor of finance and chair of the finance department, and Dr. Shu Han, associate professor of management information systems, both at Sy Syms School of Business, co-published a paper in the Management Science, considered a top journal in all business disciplines. The paper looked at actor replacements in long-running theater shows. Unlike replacements of employees in top positions in other organizations, in theater, the replacement is a clean experiment since all other conditions (the play, the lines, other actors, the physical theater) remain the same—in short, an excellent measure of the economic value of human capital. The authors found that actors who won prestigious theater awards, as opposed to movie stars or celebrities, drive the value of the show. [“Star Turnover and the Value of Human Capital- Evidence from Broadway Shows,” Management Science, 66, #2, February 2020, 958-978]

Dr. Ravid along with Drs. Suman Basuroy, Richard Gretz and B.J. Allen from the University of Texas considered the question of whether professional critics are still relevant in an era of omnipresent user reviews in a paper published in the Journal of Cultural Economics. They found that professional reviewers matter much more to the success of motion pictures than users’ posts, suggesting that consumers still view reviews from unknown users with some suspicion. [“Is Everybody an Expert? An investigation into the Impact of Professional vs. User Reviews in the Internet Age,” Journal of Cultural Economics March 2020, volume 44, 57–96]

Dr. Ravid and Dr. Naciye Sekerci, assistant professor of finance at the University of Utrecht, published a paper based on Swedish data that shows that investors who hold a significant amount of company shares in their own portfolio work harder to improve firm value. (This study cannot be done in the United States since data on portfolios are not available.) [“Large Investors’ Portfolios and Firm Value,” Journal of Corporate Finance, volume 41, April 2020, Article 101404.]

Dr. Ravid and Dr. Gabriela Coiculescu, assistant professor of finance at Sy Syms, and Dr. Yehuda Izhakian, assistant professor of economics and finance at Baruch College, co-authored a paper presented by Dr. Ravid at the 47th Annual Meeting of the European Finance Association (virtual from Helsinki) in late August and WEFI, an international entrepreneurship conference, in December. The paper shows that ambiguity is important to investments in innovation.

Commentary/Interviews

• “No Easy Answers to Coronavirus Disruptions: Economic development is tied to health outcomes, and a recession usually leads to adverse health consequences,” Wall Street Journal (March 19, 2020 )
• “Lockdowns aren’t working if we’re laying off healthcare workers,” Los Angeles Times (May 5, 2020)
• “COVID-19 pushes business bankruptcies higher in an already tough year,” NPR Marketplace (June 19,2020)
• “Quarterly earnings will show how Disney is weathering the pandemic economy,” NPR Marketplace (Aug. 3, 2020)
• “Mulling Joe Biden’s Capital-Gains Tax Hike,” Wall Street Journal (Aug. 18,2020)
• “School’s Out, But It’s Not About the Children: The decision to close schools in New York is far from a ‘data-driven, science-driven’ decision,” Wall Street Journal (Nov. 30,2020)
• “On Joe Biden’s economic policy,” Galei Zahal (Israeli national radio network) (Nov. 2020)

Presidential Address

Dr. Ravid ended his term as President of the Midwest Finance Association (MFA) and delivers a presidential address at the MFA annual conference (postponed from March and presented in August 2020 as a virtual conference). The conference attracted 1,000 registrations. In his presidential address, Dr. Ravid discussed his work on human capital in the context of the entertainment and media industries, including valuation of human capital, discrimination and technological change. The papers discussed were with Dr.Han and Dr. Filippo Mezzanotti, assistant professor of finance at Northwestern University, Kellogg School of Management.