Thursday, 26 October 2023 FEB UGM Master of Science and Doctoral Program held a Guest Lecture activity by inviting Prof. S. Ghon Rhee, a leading professor in International Banking and Finance at the Shidler College of Business, University of Hawai’I, and founder and editor of Pacific -Journal of Basin Finance. He will share his experience as a researcher and editor of a leading journal so that students will gain a better understanding of managing academic publications.
The first material presented by Prof. S. Ghon Rhee was about academic journals and potential research topics. Based on the Thomson Reuters Journal Impact Factor Scores (2023), there are four journals with the highest ranking currently, namely the Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Finance, and Journal of Financial and Qualitative Analysis. Then, the Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, which he founded in 1993, has now become one of the journals considered in the field of international finance. He built this journal by observing conditions in the field that information and references regarding markets in Asia were very few and limited. Apart from that, he understands that the Asian market is very different from the market in the United States, so journals that focus on the Asian market are very necessary. To date, Pacific-Basin Finance Journal is one of the journals in the financial sector indexed by Scopus Q1 (2021) and has a high citation rate. Furthermore, Prof. S. Ghon Rhee also said that there are several research topics that currently have the potential to be carried out, namely dual class stocks, share pledging which aims to finance individual consumption, corporate investment financing and share buybacks, as well as corporate innovation which can also be associated with trust. When they want to publish, students are required to have a target journal they want to go to, be able to demonstrate well-written articles at leading conferences, carry out co-authorship, believe in their own abilities, and have references to articles with good citations.
Next, Prof. S. Ghon Rhee explained the article he wrote entitled “The Feedback Effect: Evidence from Bank Loan Pricing”, which was written together with Huu Nhan Duong (Monash University) and Van Hoang Vu (National Bank of Australia). In this article, Prof. S. Ghon Rhee examines the feedback effect, which is the relationship between stock prices and cash holdings (Fresard, 2012, ROF) with bank loan data and short-term stock sales activity (shortselling) in America. . From this research, it can be seen that the financial market has meaningful information for bank lenders, namely that when the shortselling activity ratio is higher, the cost of borrowing will be higher too. Then, market regulations must be directed at reducing information asymmetry between lending banks and lenders.
Discussions between Prof. S. Ghon Rhee and students from both master’s and doctoral programs were very active. Many questions were asked by students both in terms of writing and publishing academic articles and matters related to articles written by Prof. S. Ghon Rhee which were very interesting.
