Neeraj Gupta, assistant professor of finance, has had a busy year on the research front. In the past few months, three of his academic research papers were published in high-quality peer-reviewed journals.
A paper titled “Do Investors Use Customer Metrics to Value High Growth and Service Firms?,” co-authored with Joseph Golec, associate professor of finance at The University of Connecticut, considers whether investors use customer data to value high-growth companies. Using a unique hand-collected data set, the study finds that customer metrics are incrementally informative to traditional financial performance measures, particularly when valuing high-growth service firms. The paper appeared in the International Journal of Business and Finance Research, Volume 6(2), 1-19.
Another paper, “Sustainability and Competitive Advantage: An Empirical Study of Value Creation,” co-authored with Christina Benson, assistant professor of business law, was a study of the competitiveness of firms regarded as leaders in environment sustainability. This paper fills a gap in existing literature by testing whether sustainable companies are able to compete effectively in terms of financial performance and attractiveness to investors. The empirical results, of a sample consisting of firms appearing in the Innovest ‘Global 100’ rankings released annually at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, indicate that sustainable companies do not significantly underperform on the stock market as a whole, and are viewed as highly competitive within their industries. This paper appeared in Competition Forum, Volume 9(1), 121-136.
A sole-authored research paper, “Financial Valuation Using CLV Metrics: A Study of Online Brokers,” considers a unique method of valuing online brokers. High growth service firms, such as online brokerage firms, are difficult to value because traditional financial metrics such as net income or cash-flow are expected to be negative for a considerable period of time. To better value firms based on current and prospective customers, the study examines how customer retention and acquisition rates relate to firms’ spending on these activities. This paper appeared in The Business Review, Volume 19(1), 1-7.
Gupta has also had a paper, coauthored with Robert Pavlik, associate professor of finance, and Wonhi Synn, professor of finance, accepted for publication in Financial Services Review. The paper elaborates on a novel method to increase the life of investor portfolios in retirement.