学术活动

2025年4月25日（周五） 

10:00-11:30

唐翌教授

香港大学

Scheduling is about arranging and organizing daily activities along a time continuum. This study examines CEOs’ scheduling styles and their implications for their firms’ strategic decisions in the social domain. Specifically, scheduling activities sequentially in event-time, rather than allocating each individual task a separate time slot in clock-time, involves viewing the arranged activities and their associated time slots as interrelated or connected rather than as separated or isolated, and subsequently activates a tendency for holistic thinking rather than narrow thinking. CEOs with an event-time (clock-time) scheduling style thus tend to consider more groups of stakeholders over a broader range (narrowly consider a smaller group of stakeholders), leading to greater (less) engagement with corporate social responsibility (CSR). We predict a positive (negative) relationship between CEOs’ event-time scheduling (clock-time scheduling) and CSR. We develop a novel measure of CEO scheduling styles using a named-entity recognition (NER) algorithm, and further validate the measures using human rating measures from a survey and measures from a supervised machine-learning categorizer (ML categorizer). Analyzing the language content of Q&A sessions given by 2,625 CEOs of U.S. publicly listed firms during quarterly earnings conference calls in the years 2009-2018, we find strong support for our predictions. A series of methods, including Bartik’s shift-share instrument variables (IVs), IVs based on historical political economy literature, difference-in-difference-in-differences (DDD) design, and correction for omitted confounding variables help establish robust identification. Additional analyses using survey and experiment provide convergent evidence.