FBA SEMINAR SERIES
Responsible investing in the gaming industry
Prof. Maggie FU, Associate Professor in Finance, University of Macau
Date: 19 October 2022 (Wednesday)
Time: 3:00pm – 4:00pm
Venue: E22 – G013
Host: Prof. Endong YANG, Assistant Professor of Finance
Abstract
The changing face of responsible investing (RI) raises an important question concerning whether social responsibility influences the decision making of institutional investors in the “sin” industries. This study addresses this issue by investigating whether and how the implementation of various government initiatives concerning environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues affect the institutional ownership of casino firms in Macao, the world’s gaming capital. Employing structural equation modeling, this study further examines whether and how RI makes financial sense in this special industry. The results show that the implementation of all four ESG-improving government initiatives (including an anticorruption campaign, visa restriction, smoking bans, and responsible gambling) leads to a significant increase in the institutional ownership of casino firms in general, demonstrating the presence and mechanism of RI in the “sin” industries. Such RI is then found to be conducive to a lower equity risk of casino firms in general. The results also illustrate that these intuitional investors are not one homogeneous group. The norm-constrained institutions are the prominent responsible investors and can help strengthen the equity risk management of casino companies whereas the natural arbitrageurs do not undertake any significant role in this regard. The results are robust across various estimation techniques, model specifications and alternative measures of firm risk.
Speaker
Prof. Maggie FU is the Associate Professor in Finance at Faculty of Business Administration. She received her PhD in Finance from Cass Business School, City University (London, United Kingdom). Prof. FU’s research interests are FinTech, sustainable finance, banking, responsible innovation and corporate governance. Prof. FU’s paper “Responsible investing in the gaming industry” won the First Prize of Outstanding Achievement Awards for Macao Research in Humanities and Social Sciences in 2022. Prof. FU’s research has been published in journals such as Journal of Corporate Finance, Journal of World Business, Journal of Product Innovation Management as well as The British Accounting Review. In addition, Prof. FU is the associate editor of Journal of Chinese Economic and Business Studies (JCEBS) and editorial board member of several journals.
All are welcome!
