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Matthew Shaffer is a first-year assistant professor at the USC Marshall School of Business. He received his doctoral degree from Harvard Business School and his bachelor’s degree from Yale. His research centers on corporate governance, valuation, and the market for corporate control. His work has been published in the Journal of Financial Economics, and presented at leading conferences in accounting, finance, and law. This year, he is teaching the core undergraduate introductory accounting course, BUAD 280.
Areas of Expertise
RESEARCH + PUBLICATIONS
After decades of de-prioritizing shareholders’ economic interests and low corporate profitability, Japan introduced the JPX-Nikkei400 in 2014. The index highlighted the country’s “best-run” companies by annually selecting the 400 most profitable of its large and liquid firms. We find that managers competed for inclusion in the index by significantly increasing return on equity (ROE), and they did so at least in part due to their reputational or status concerns. The ROE increase was predominantly driven by improvements in margins, which were in turn partially driven by cutting research and development (R&D) intensity. Our findings suggest that indexes can affect managerial behavior through reputational or status incentives.