School of Business Professor, Dr. Anh Ngo, Professor of Finance, has been awarded the Best Paper Award at the Phenikaa University Business and Economics Conference (PUBEC), co-hosted by Phenikaa University, the University of West Bristol, and Trier University, on July 18, 2025.
Dr. Ngo’s paper, Is Firm-Level Political Risk Priced in Seasoned Equity Offers?, examines how political risk at the firm level influences the pricing of seasoned equity offerings (SEOs).
The abstract appears below:
“We investigate the extent to which firm-level political risk is incorporated into the pricing of seasoned equity offerings (SEOs). Utilizing two proxies for firm-level political risk developed by Hassan et al. (2019), which leverage computational linguistics and textual analysis of firms' quarterly earnings conference calls, we find that specific firm-level political risk—distinct from generic political risk—serves as a significant determinant of SEO discounting. Our results provide evidence that issuers discount their offering prices to incentivize investor participation in new issues. This study contributes to the literature on SEO pricing by demonstrating that SEO discounts reflect the costs associated with issue placement and the information-gathering processes of both issuers and underwriters when firms are exposed to specific firm-level political risks.”