Professor Chia-Wei Huang Research Profile

Professor Chia-Wei Huang is a finance faculty member of our college, with a specialization in the study of the causes and consequences of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the financial crises. He has published in top-tier journals in finance, including the Journal of Financial Economics and Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. His research has been covered in the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation (June 2016) and electronic media such as Global Views Monthly.

In his article, The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Earnings Management, and Post-Buyback Performance of Open-Market Repurchasing Firms, which has published in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis in 2012, their results suggest that unlike prior pre-SOX studies, open-market repurchasers do not engage in pre-buyback downward accrual-based earnings management. Audit committee independence, reforms in corporate governance structures, and changes in executives’ equity holdings prompted by SOX may explain the findings. Post-SOX, the significant negative association between pre-repurchase abnormal accruals and post-repurchase performance disappears, the market reaction to repurchase announcements becomes significantly less favorable, and there is no evidence of any shift away from accrual-based to real earnings management.

In his another significant article, CEO Overconfidence and Financial Crisis: Evidence from Bank Lending and Leverage, which was recently published in the Journal of Financial Economics, they proposed a new perspective that manager overconfidence could explain the substantial heterogeneity in bank risk-taking behaviors during a boom, as well as the performance of these banks during the ensuing crisis years.