Since the appointment of new leadership and the implementation of additional incentives to empower faculty members to engage in quality research at SBUS, a new set of research fundings is available to both professorial and teaching tracks to conduct research. In this section, we share our research achievements through selective publications, research implications of our projects, and meaningful activities that create societal impacts.
UTD Publications (2026 Q1)
Publishing academic research in top journals is an extremely challenging task which demands proper recognition. One commonly used journal list to recognise top research performance is the curated list of 24 top-tier academic journals in business disciplines prepared by The University of Texas at Dallas (i.e., UTD24). While no research criterion is perfect, the UTD24 is often used as a main benchmark for top universities, including all the UGC funded universities in Hong Kong, to measure the research performance of their business school faculty members.
We want to point out that the UTD paper by Dr. Morgan Xin Yang, Dr. Kwok Yuen Fan, and Dr. Kevin Jing Zeng is the result of cross-departmental collaboration of young colleagues within SBUS. This achievement clearly contradicts the common belief that, due to the heavy teaching load at HSU, young scholars working at SBUS have no time to publish quality papers at top journals. This publication sends a clear signal that SBUS has an adequate research environment for home-grown researchers to achieve research excellence.
Dr. Sophia Chi Young CHEONG (EAF)
Paper Title: Mutual Fund Flows and the Supply of Capital in Municipal Financing
Journal name: Review of Financial Studies (UTD)
Co-authors: Manuel Adelino, Sophia Chiyoung Cheong, Jaewon Choi, Ji Yeol Jimmy Oh
Summary:
This paper investigates how capital supply from mutual funds affects municipal bond financing, making three key contributions. First, we introduce an identification strategy using the rule-based update of Morningstar ratings for 5-year-old funds, isolating supply-side effects from fund and issuer fundamentals. Results indicate that exogenous fund flows increase bond issuance probability and decrease yields. Second, these fund flows lead to more issuances when funds and issuers are connected through underwriters, highlighting relationship lending in municipal bond financing. Third, municipal issuers leverage favorable financing conditions for new issuance of revenue bonds, which translates into higher local house prices.
Paper Title: Digital Dampening and Internationalization of Digital Firms
Journal name: Journal of International Business Studies (UTD)
Co-authors: Siddharth Natarajan, Qingwei Li, Sam Seung Ho Park
Summary:
We introduce the concept of “digital dampening”, which refers to the extent to which non-digital elements are integrated into a digital firm. We argue that digital dampening inhibits internationalization. Our methodology leverages generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in conjunction with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). Overall, the study finds that non-digital complementarities in the business model can hinder internationalization, particularly in those firms facing a weak domestic competitive position.
Dr. Qingwei LI (MGT)
Paper Title: Acting to Know: Extending Vorholzer and Brattström’s Theory of Moral Ambiguity in Entrepreneurial Action through Externalized Moral Resolution
Journal name: Academy of Management Review (UTD)
Co-authors: Morgan Xin Yang, Kwok Yuen Fan, Kevin Jing Zeng
Summary:
This research advances entrepreneurial action theory by proposing externalized moral resolution to address the inaction caused by moral ambiguity. Under radical uncertainty, entrepreneurs often cannot resolve moral ambiguity through internal deliberation alone; instead, they act to resolve ambiguity through disciplined, bounded, and socially embedded processes. This is achieved through two interrelated mechanisms we theorize: moral prototyping, through which small-scale experiments generate information about possible harms to reduce attributional ambiguity, and distributed moral sensemaking, through which founding teams negotiate conflicting values to resolve motivational ambiguity, reaching provisional agreements that enable action. Overall, this research shifts the theoretical account of entrepreneurial ethics from prior cognitive resolution to an enactment-based view in which moral judgment is shaped through experimentation, stakeholder feedback, and collective sensemaking.
Dr. Morgan Xin YANG
(MKT)
Dr. Terry Kwok Yuen FAN (EAF)
Dr. Kevin Jing ZENG
(MKT)