| Asst Prof Tham Tze Minn
Assistant Professor
Division of Banking & Finance
College of Business (Nanyang Business School)
Email: ATMTHAM@ntu.edu.sg
Phone: (+65)6790 6049
Office: S3-B1A-34 |
| Education |
- PhD (BA) The University of Michigan 2008
- MA (Applied Economics) University of Michigan 2006
- MEng National University of Singapore 2002
- BEng(Hons) National University of Singapore 1999
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| Biography |
I graduated with a Ph.D in Business Administration (Finance) from the Ross School of Business (RSB) at the University of Michigan in September 2008. While there as a doctoral student, I won two Mitsui Life Awards for academic excellence (2004, 2005) from the Mitsui Financial Center. I was also a recipient of the Alumni-Alumnae Award in 2008 and received sponsorship from Prof Gunter Dufey in 2008. I was under the senior tutorship scheme from NTU while reading my doctoral degree.
Currently, I am an Assistant Professor at NTU. I teach investments at NTU to undergraduates. My research interests lie in mutual funds and product markets. In my free time, I like to read and play the piano. I am also an animal lover and have three dogs. |
| Research Interests |
My research areas are in (i) mutual funds and (ii) product market relationships between customers and suppliers. In my mutual fund research, I have studied religious funds as well as spillover effects in mutual fund companies. In my second research area, I have investigated (i) how management turnover at customer firms affect supplier firms, (ii) the implications on suppliers when their customers acquire technology firms such as venture capital-backed firms, and (iii) whether customer characteristics are priced into private loans and public debt by the lender.
One of my papers in mutual funds titled "Spillover effects in mutual fund companies" examines whether poor performance of the financial conglomerate, under which the mutual fund complex is a division, can affect money flows into the mutual fund segment. We find a strong positive relation between the performance of the parent company and the money flows into its mutual fund division, even after controlling for the mutual fund performance and other variables commonly known to affect flows. Our results suggest that there are spillover effects from the financial conglomerates to their mutual fund segments, even though the mutual fund assets stand alone from the assets of the parent companies. This paper is joint with Clemens Sialm at the University of Texas, Austin. It has won the TCW best paper award at the China International Conference in Finance 2011 in Wuhan.
Another paper of mine in product markets is joint with Siew-Hong Teoh at University of California, Irvine, and Wei-Chern Koh at NTU. We study whether private lenders take into account the borrower's dependency on major product market partners when pricing loan yield and including financial covenants. The literature has shown that equity market participants are inattentive to important economic linkages along the supply chain. If information along the supply chain is not immediately and accurately incorporated into stock prices of companies, then it becomes necessary for lenders to take into account both the borrower's risk characteristics as well as their major product market partners' risk characteristics in designing the loan contract. We ask whether lenders, being specialists in information production, price in the risks of the borrower's major customers. Our results strongly show that the loan yield and number of financial covenants increase with the risks of the borrower's major customers. |
| Research Grant |
- Academic Research Fund Tier 1 (2010-)
- RCC (2009-) [by School Research Fund]
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| Current Projects |
- CEO turnover or the medium of exchange in M&A and Value Effects on supplier
- Debt covenant violation and value effect on suppliers
- Issues in agency, incentives and contracting: Evidence from customer-supplier relationships.
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