Ep.134 – Benjamin Ho on Corporate Apologies

Benjamin Ho, associate professor of economics at Vassar College, joins the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss his paper Do Investors Care about Corporate Apologies? Evidence from Chemical Disasters, which he co-authored with Sijia Fan, Qi Ge, and Lirong Ma. In this paper, Ho and his co-authors study impacts on stock prices when companies apologize after chemical disasters. They find that although admissions of error might help restore trust with the public and regulators, those apologies can also reduce investors’ perceptions of firm competence, leading to drops in stock price. This episode is hosted by Andrew Jennings, assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School, with editing by Daniel Hamilton, a third-year student at Brooklyn Law School.