Speaker: Professor Jeff Jia, University of York, UK

Time: 15:00-17:00, March 23, 2023 (Thursday)

Location: 317, Main Building, Zhongguancun Campus

Brief introduction of the report:

This study investigates the impact of the Chinese government’s Level I emergency response policy on manufacturers’ stock market values. We empirically examine the roles of human resource dependence (labor intensity) and operational slack within the context of supply chain resilience. Through an event study of 1,357 Chinese manufacturing companies, we find that the government’s emergency response policy triggered statistically significant positive abnormal returns for manufacturers. However, we also find that there exists a negative impact on abnormal returns for manufacturers that are labor-intensive, giving rise to arguments based in resource dependence theory. In addition, the results indicate the positive role played by operational slack (e.g., financial and inventory slack) in helping manufacturers maintain operations and business continuity, effectively mitigating risks and adding to the manufacturers’ resilience. With these findings, we contribute to operations and supply chain management by calling attention to the importance of human resource redundancy while at the same time identifying financial slack and inventory as supply chain resilience strategies that were able to mitigate pandemic-related risks.

About the speaker:

Jeff Jia is Chair Professor of Supply Chain Management at the University of York (ranked 150th in the world) and an executive Committee member of the European Society of Operations Management. He has published more than 100 papers in UTD24, ABS4, ABS3 and other high-level international journals (including 72 first author or corresponding author papers), and his total number of citations has reached more than 5300 times, with an H-index of 40,3 first author papers have been included in ESI highly cited papers, and 6 English monographs have been written. He has led 17 international and domestic scientific research projects, including the World Wide Fund for Nature project, the British Natural Science Foundation, the Newton Foundation, the National Social Science Foundation general project, and the Ministry of Education Humanities and Social Science research project. He has won 8 research awards, including the second Best Paper in the Operations and Management category at the Annual Meeting of the International Academy of Management (AOM).

(Organized by: Department of Management Science and Logistics, Research and Academic Exchange Center)