主讲人Speaker: 张勇    副教授   香港理工大学

时间Date & Time: 2026年9月24日（周四），10:00--11:30

地点Venue:深圳大学粤海校区汇星楼565会议室

内容简介/ Abstract:

We examine whether public firms learn from employee ratings of their private industry peers when investing in innovation. While private firms often lead in innovation and possess information important to public firms’ investment decisions, publicly available information about them is scarce. We expect private peer employees’ ratings of their firms on  to provide valuable insights and find that public firms’ R&D investment is positively related to business outlook ratings posted by private peer employees, after controlling for various characteristics of the focal firm and its public peers, including outlook ratings posted by their own employees. This relation is robust to controlling for alternative channels through which information about private peers may be revealed. Furthermore, we find that this relation weakens after major IPOs in the industry, a shock that reduces the incremental informativeness of private peer outlook by initiating public information channels for newly public firms. The usefulness of private peer outlook varies predictably with the demand for and attributes of private peer outlook ratings. Overall, our findings are consistent with managers learning from social media postings of private peer employees when making R&D investment, suggesting a novel role of social media in revealing information unavailable from traditional sources.

主讲人介绍/Biography of the speaker：

Dr. Yong Zhang (张勇) has broad research interests including Corporate Governance, Financial Regulations, Executive Compensation, Insider Trading, and the role of media and social media in financial markets. His research has been published in leading research journals in both accounting and finance (Journal of Accounting and Economics, Journal of Accounting Research, Management Science, Contemporary Accounting Research, Review of Accounting Studies, Journal of Banking and Finance, Journal of Accounting Auditing and Finance, and Journal of Accounting and Public Policy).

His work has been featured in Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation and Columbia Law School's Blog on Corporations and the Capital Markets and presented in conferences such as NBER and AFA.