Venue: 723, Building A, School of Management, Zijingang CampusSpeaker: Liao Zhenyu, Assistant Professor, Northeastern UniversityAbstract: This paper proposes that speakers of languages with strong honorific rules are more deferential to existing ideas and are less likely to initiate new ideas. Some languages require systemic grammatical encodings of social status (i.e., honorific rules) to express deference to the addresses or referents (e.g., Japanese, Korean), while others do not (e.g., English, Hebrew). We suggest that languages with strong honorific rules induce speakers to defer to existing ideas, thereby restraining them from engaging in new ideas. To empirically test this proposition, we first analyzed responses of more than 140 thousand individuals who spoke 166 distinct languages in the World Values Survey, finding that speakers of strong honorific languages were less likely to engage in new ideas. We then conducted a venture idea generation experiment with Korean speakers and found that using the same language, participants who adopted honorific expressions, as compared with those who adopted non-honorific expressions, were less likely to take initiatives to propose new venture ideas. This decreased the degree of novelty and business value of new venture ideas generated by them. Our findings cast light on how linguistic rules shape our social interactions and knowledge production.Speaker's Profile: Zhenyu Liao is the Joseph G. Riesman Assistant Professor and Thomas E. Moore Fellow at the D’Amore-McKim School of Business, Northeastern University. He earned his Ph.D. from the National University of Singapore and completed his post-doctoral fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis. He studies leadership, ethics, inequality, and entrepreneurship. He serves on the editorial boards of Academy of Management Journal and Journal of Applied Psychology and has reviewed for many other leading management journals.

Speaker: Dr. Han Yu, King Abdullah University of Science & TechnologyInviter: Dr. Chen Zhijie, ZJU100 Young Professor, Zhejiang UniversityVenue: C100, Haina Court, Zijingang CampusSpeaker's Profile: Dr. Han is a materials chemist and his research focuses on nanoporous and nanostructured materials for novel applications in gas adsorption/separation, heterogeneous catalysis, and nanophotonics. Dr. Han is also known for his contributions to the development of ultralo-dose electron microscopy methods, which, for the first time, achieved atomic-resolution imaging of extremely sensitive materials including MOFs, COFs, supramolecular structures and hybrid perovskites. Dr. Han has published > 300 articles in prestigious journals including Science, Nature, Nature Materials, Nature Chemistry, Nature Catalysis, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Communications, JACS, and these papers have been cited over 40,000 times with h-index of 100 (google scholar, as of April 2023). His achievements have garnered international recognition. In 2004, he was named as a TR100 Young lnnovator by the MIT's magazine of innovation, Technology Review. In 2006, he was awarded the Young Scientist Award by the Singapore National Academy of Science. In 2016, he got the Cheung Kong Scholar award, the highest academic award issued to an individual by the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China. In 2021, he received the Humboldt research award. He is the Fellow of Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) and designated by Clarivate as a Highly Cited Researcher in 2019-2022.

Speaker: LI Ye, Assistant Professor of Finance and William W. Alberts Endowed Professor at the University of WashingtonVenue: School of Economics Room 426, Zijingang CampusTime: July 3rd, 10:00-11:30

Speaker: CHEN Yuhang (Ohio State University)Venue: Room 202, Building 2, Haina Court, Zijingang CampusAbstract:

Speaker: Lian Yanlu (School of Mathematics, Hangzhou Normal University)Venue: Room 203, Building 2, Haina Court, Zijingang CampusAbstract: In 1957, Hadwiger made a conjecture that every n-dimensional convex body can be covered by 2^n translations of its interior. The Hadwiger's covering functional is the smallest positive number r such that K can be covered by m translations of rK. Due to Zong's program, we study the Hadwiger's covering functional for the simplex and the cross-polytope. In this paper, we give upper bounds for the Hadwiger's covering functional of the simplex and the cross-polytope.

Speaker: QIAN Wenlan, Director of the NUS Institute of Real Estate and Urban Studies (IREUS)Venue: School of Economics, Room 530, Zijingang CampusTime: June 22nd, 14:00-15:30Abstract: We exploit a policy reform that exogenously deteriorates mothers’ job prospects. China switched from a one-child policy to two-child in 2016, which increased female workers’childbearing and caring responsibilities. Using a leading peer-to-peer lending platform targeting college students in China, we find that loan applications from female college students decrease by 15.6% relative to male students after the reform. The drop sug[1]gests that female students can anticipate the poorer future job prospects; they reduce their expenditure and invest less in human capital accordingly. Applications for long[1]term and large-amount loans and loans for human capital investment purpose experi[1]ence the largest decline. We also find that loan applications decrease after provincial governments’ staggered extension of maternity leaves and that the decrease is more prominent when the expected motherhood penalty is greater. The results are unlikely driven by credit supply channels.

Speaker: ZHU Yihang, University of MarylandVenue: Lecture Hall, School of Mathematical SciencesTime: June 21st, 16:00-17:00Abstract: I will first recall the general expectations of Shimura, Langlands, and Kottwtiz on the shape of the zeta function of a Shimura variety, or more generally its etale cohomology. I will then report on some recent progress which partially fulfills these expectations, for Shimura varieties of unitary groups and special orthogonal groups. Finally, I will give a preview of some foreseeable developments in the near future.

Speaker:SHAN Yuan, Associate Professor, UWA Business School, Accounting and FinanceVenue: School of Management, A423, Zijingang CampusTime: June 21st, 9:30-12:30Abstract: This study examines the relationship between abnormal tone and project performance of reward-based crowdfunding (RBC) using the Kickstarter data from 2009 to 2020. We document a negative relationship between abnormal tone in the RBC campaign section (Story) and project performance, but a positive relationship between abnormal tone in the section of Risks and Challenges (Risk) and funding success. We find that common-law jurisdiction has strong moderation in elevating the success of project with abnormal tone in Risk section, compared to civil-law jurisdiction does. Using the US SEC equity crowdfunding legislation, we find that the exogenous shock reduces the effect of abnormal tone in both Story and Risk sections. Further investigation of the concurrent effect of abnormal tone in the two sections shows that the increase in the discretionary tone given that it is overly optimistic has a negative effect on funding performance. Last, based on a machine learning Sent-latent Dirichlet Allocation model, we explore up to 70 specific risk categories embedded in Kickstarter projects, and we find that eight of them, namely downstream risk, international risk, product introduction risk, cost risk, funding risk, product quality risk, stakeholder risk, and human resource risk, are strongly and negatively associated with project success.

Speaker: Patrick BoltonVisiting Professor of Finance at Imperial College LondonPast president of the American Finance AssociationFellow of American Finance AssociationFellow of American Academy of Arts and SciencesFellow of Econometric SocietyVenue: Lecture Hall 120, School of Economics, Zijingang CampusTime: 9:00-11:00 on 19th, June