Research Spotlight: The Impact of Carbon Pricing Policies in Reducing CO2 Emissions from Road Transportation

Research Spotlight’s eighth installment features a paper authored by Wharton sophomore Didrik Wiig-Andersen, a winner of one of Wharton’s 2023 Summer Program for Undergraduate Research (SPUR) awards. Published in ScholarlyCommons, Penn’s institutional repository, “The impact of carbon pricing policies in reducing CO2 emissions from road transportation: a meta-analysis of empirical studies,” conducts an exhaustive literature review to identify eighteen papers that are used to analyze a variety of pricing policies in a wide range of geographies and help draw conclusions about the combined effect of their implementation in reducing CO2 emissions in road transportation.

Wiig-Andersen used a combination of subject-specific literature databases available through the library in the process of gathering relevant papers, including ABI/Inform, EconLit, PAIS Index, and more. These resources provide access to scholarly works in the disciplines of business, economics, and social policy, connecting researchers with materials from a wealth of reputable sources.

For more information on subject databases, contact a Lippincott Librarian.

Research Spotlight: Gender Diversity and Performance in Venture Capital

The seventh installment of Datapoints’ Research Spotlight series features a paper co-authored by Wharton Real Estate faculty member Sophie Calder-Wang. Published in the Journal of Finance Economics 142, “And the children shall lead: Gender diversity and performance in venture capital” uses data related to the gender of venture capital partners’ children to analyze what promotes gender diversity in hiring and whether a diverse workforce leads to better firm performance and investment returns. 

The authors used Preqin to retrieve data on funds raised and fund returns for a portion of the firms in their sample. Preqin provides comprehensive coverage of the private equity industry, including information on various types of investments—buyouts, venture capital, distressed investing, mezzanine, etc.—as well as fund performance, fundraising, fund managers, and more. 

For more information on using Preqin, please contact a Lippincott Librarian. 

Research Spotlight: Do Risk Disclosures Matter When It Counts? Evidence from the Swiss Franc Shock

Datapoints’ Research Spotlight series returns to highlight a paper co-authored by Wharton Accounting faculty member Luzi Hail. Published in the Journal of Accounting Research 59 (1), “Do Risk Disclosures Matter When It Counts? Evidence from the Swiss Franc Shock” uses the 2015 decision by the Swiss National Bank to abandon the minimum euro-Swiss franc exchange rate to examine how the quality of previous risk disclosures enables investors to more knowledgably process and interpret new information. 

The authors used Bloomberg to extract minute-by-minute intraday spread data from 237 publicly traded firms with a primary listing in Switzerland. They were also able to narrow the list to firms that were constituents of the SSIP at the end of 2014. Bloomberg is the definitive source of information for security pricing, indicative and fundamental data, customized analytics and business news. 

For more information on using Bloomberg, please contact a Lippincott Librarian.  

Research Spotlight: Immigrants and Foreign Firm Performance

Welcome back to Research Spotlight, a Datapoints series highlighting research emerging from Wharton that has employed library resources. The fourth installment features an article co-authored by Management faculty member Exequiel Hernandez titled “Immigrants and Foreign Firm Performance,” published in Organization Science 31 (4).

Studies have indicated that foreign firms identify regions where immigrants from their home country reside and use that information to improve performance. The article argues that in order to properly measure the impact of immigrants on performance, there must be a distinguishment between how independent foreign firms and multinational corporations benefit from immigrant communities. To test their hypothesis, the authors obtained firm-level data on foreign firms in Russia from the Ruslana database, which is a part of Orbis, one of a collection of products from Bureau van Dijk (BvD). Orbis integrates data from all of the BvD suite, providing detailed information on over 400 million companies, including financials, M&A activity, risk analysis and more.

For more information on Orbis, please contact a Lippincott librarian.

Research Spotlight: Does Borrowing from Banks Cost More than Borrowing from the Market?

The third installment of Research Spotlight, a Datapoints series focusing on research emerging from Wharton that has made use of library resources, focuses on a paper authored by Wharton faculty member Michael Schwert. “Does Borrowing from Banks Cost More than Borrowing from the Market?” was published in The Journal of Finance 75 (2). 

As the article title implies, the study analyzes the pricing of private bank loans compared to capital market debt. Professor Schwert used S&P Capital IQ to obtain recent data on the capital structures of the sample firms used in the study. Capital IQ is a leading provider of financial information for both public and private companies with additional coverage of market and industry information, M&A transactions and more. 

For more information on Capital IQ, please contact a Lippincott librarian. 

FT.com is now available at Penn

The Penn Libraries are pleased to announce that access to FT.com is now available to Penn students, faculty and staff. This subscription includes access to the online version of the Financial Times back to 2004, including the daily editions of the ePaper, as well as content exclusive to its online publication. To get started, use this link to set up an account with FT.com using your Penn email address. 

FT.com expands access to FT content previously unavailable through library subscriptions to include data graphics, videos, newsletters, podcasts and more. The “Today’s Newspaper (ePaper)” feature enables users to read a digitized version of the daily print publication, including its many international iterations, with options for both on- and off-line use. 

Users can also make use of the “myFT” feature via this subscription, which provides options for curating a feed of topics of interest for quick access to relevant articles, saving articles for later use, and subscribing to newsletters from a user-friendly dashboard. 

Once you’ve registered, be sure to download the Financial Times app on your iOS or Android device. Login with your email address and password to access all of the same features for when you are on the go. 

To read more about how to access the Financial Times through the Penn Libraries, please see our Business FAQ. 

Research Spotlight: Foreign competition for shares and the pricing of information asymmetry

The second installment of Research Spotlight, a Datapoints series focusing on research emerging from Wharton that has made use of library resources, highlights a paper co-authored by Wharton faculty member Robert E. Verrecchia. “Foreign competition for shares and the pricing of information asymmetry: Evidence from equity market liberalization” was published in the Journal of Accounting and Economics 67. 

By using the equity market liberalization of several emerging market countries within a ten-year period, this study examines how the degree of competition for a firm’s shares affects the pricing of information asymmetry. Among other resources, the authors used Bloomberg and Datastream to obtain accounting variables as part of their analysis, as well as additional macroeconomic data from Datastream. Bloomberg is the definitive source of information for security pricing, indicative and fundamental data, customized analytics and business news. And, as noted in an earlier post, Datastream is a historical financial database that covers equities, bonds, commodities, exchange rates, company fundamentals and more. 

For more information on these resources, please contact a Lippincott librarian. 

Research Spotlight: Foreign Experience and CEO Compensation

Welcome to the first installment of Research Spotlight, a series of posts highlighting research emerging from Wharton that have made use of data available through library resources. The inaugural feature will look at an article by Martin Conyon et al., “Foreign experience and CEO compensation,” published in the Journal of Corporate Finance 57. 

In this article, the authors examine the correlation between a CEO’s foreign experience and CEO compensation. This examination included peripheral analyses of whether CEOs with foreign experience have a positive impact on a firm’s performance, as well as if foreign experience affects acquisition performance. Discovering these secondary correlations required the use of stock returns and accounting data derived from Datastream and data on foreign acquisitions from SDC Platinum. Both Thomson products, Datastream is a historical financial database that covers equities, bonds, commodities, exchange rates, company fundamentals and more, while SDC Platinum provides transaction- or deal-level details on IPOs, mergers and acquisitions, and VentureXpert private equity/venture capital investments.

For more information on these resources, please see a Lippincott librarian. 

Survey Says: Explore Consumer Behavior with Statista

When you see the name “Statista,” you probably draw some immediate (and accurate) conclusions about the kind of information this database provides. What you may not know, however, is that in addition to providing market- and consumer-related statistics, Statista has also developed a feature called the Global Survey. This intuitive tool enables users to research and manipulate data on a wide variety of consumer behavior topics. Included in this survey is the ability to cross-tabulate data allowing further insight into consumer behavior. You are able to explore relationships between demographics and consumer activity. The following shows you how to use Statista’s Global Survey to create a crosstab aimed at discovering consumers’ grocery shopping habits.