At 14:30 pm of November 1st, Dr Liang Han was invited by the Institute of Economics and Finance (IEF) to give a talk. The topic of the talk is “How local is local? Evidence from bank competition and corporation innovation in U.S.” Dr Han is currently an Associate Professor in Accounting and Financial Management at Henley Business School, University of Reading in UK. He has wide research interests in banking market, corporate finance, small business, biomedical science and human behavior.
Dr Han started his talk with introducing the banking market reform in the U.S., and also discussed the role of local banking market competition in firm innovation. His research aims to fill in a research gap in the effects of bank competition on corporate innovation. In addition to the evidence on the favorable effects of bank competition on corporate innovation, his research shows novel evidence on the substitution effects of bank competition in a wider region and neighbor-state to local bank competition in financing corporate innovation activities. He explained this as local bank have an information advantage over distant banks in financing local businesses and informational opaque corporate innovation activities. Therefore, improved competition in distant banking markets may have limited ability to substitute the favorable effects of local bank competition in facilitating corporate innovation activities.
Dr Han’s talk lasts one and a half hours. After the talk, our research staff put forward their suggestions on this research topic, including how to measure the cost of loans for different firms, how to chose instrument variables, etc.
