Having trouble viewing this email? Click here
Robert B. Willumstad School of Business • Adelphi University, NY • Bold New Thinking
Spring 2022/Issue 5
Dear Friends and Colleagues,

I am delighted to share with you this fifth edition of the Adelphi Business Review, which features four stories that draw from the recent scholarly work of our faculty. Two of the articles focus on finance: one on seasoned equity offerings (SEO) and the other on the relationship between innovation and private loan contracts. The other two papers use data to study health outcomes: one looks at COVID-19 treatment efficiency and the other examines breast cancer outcomes. 

Enjoy!
MaryAnne Hyland, PhD
Interim Dean
Robert B. Willumstad School of Business
Timing Matters When Issuing New Shares of Stock
A seasoned equity offering (SEO), in which a publicly traded company issues new shares of stock, is one way for public firms to raise capital from the market. Huajing Hu, PhD, associate professor of finance, studies whether historical high prices play a special anchoring role and affect the timing of firms’ SEOs. Dr. Hu found that the ratio of the monthly high price to the 12-month historical high price positively affects the probability of an SEO. She further shows that investors may also be anchoring on historical high prices, providing a rational basis for managers to time SEOs to periods when their stock prices are close to or exceed their historical highs. Finally, Dr. Hu provides evidence that timing around equity market highs has a significant long-term effect on corporate leverage ratios, as firms do not appear to subsequently fully offset the deviations from target debt ratios induced by such market timing. You can read the full paper in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis.
Using Data for Better Cancer Treatment Decisions
According to the American Cancer Society, breast cancer is the most common type of cancer in women, with an incidence of 12.3 percent in 2018. In 2022, it is expected that about 287,850 new cases will be diagnosed in females in the United States and approximately 43,250 deaths will occur, as reported by Breastcancer.orgZahra Sedighi-Maman, PhD, assistant professor of decision sciences, and her team propose a two-stage data analytic framework for breast cancer survival prediction. In Stage I, they classify the survival and deceased statuses of females with breast cancer and in Stage II, they predict the number of survival months for deceased patients. They believe that the data-driven findings in this research may provide useful insights to assist physicians with better cancer treatment decision-making. You can read Dr. Sedighi-Maman’s research, published in the International Journal of Medical Informatics.
Funding for Innovation
What does a firm's innovation have to do with private loan contracts? Innovative firms have to fund their businesses from many sources. Thus, timely and sufficient financing for either their ongoing or new innovative projects is one of the main concerns for senior executives. Innovative firms have proprietary information that they release to the public in the form of patents. In this study, Jason Na, PhD, assistant professor of finance, explores how innovative firms can utilize their intellectual property—patents—to have better private loan contracts. Dr. Na found that the innovative firms with more patents have better loan structures than similar but non-innovative firms by paying less for the interest rate spreads. You can read Dr. Na’s paper in the International Journal of Managerial Finance.
Focus on COVID-19 in China: Exploring Treatment Efficiency
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a great impact on political, economic and social governance around the world. China, which was first to experience cases of COVID-19, achieved what many public health experts thought was impossible: containing the spread of a widely circulating respiratory virus. Zhimin Huang, PhD, professor of decision sciences and department chair, and his co-authors have used data envelopment analysis (DEA) and regression analysis to evaluate the trend of COVID-19 treatment efficiency in Chinese provinces. The results show that the focus of anti-epidemic efforts should be early detection and prevention rather than treatment. This study provides management implications and policy suggestions, with the goal of providing insights for other countries where COVID-19 appears. You can read the full paper in Advances in Business and Management Forecasting.
This e-newsletter is prepared by the Office of the Dean of the
Get social with us @AdelphiWSB