Faculty/Staff ProfileTitle

Books

Refereed Journal Articles

Research Report

Chen, D. MSB Faculty Research Dialogue, "From 'How' to 'Why': Using AI to Foster Conceptual Understanding and Improve Student Performance," Merrick School of Business, MSB. (2026).

Chen, D. UB RED Talks, "From 'How' to 'Why': Using AI to Foster Conceptual Understanding and Improve Student Performance," University of Baltimore, University of Baltimore. (2026).

Chen, D. SoTL Commons Conference 2026, "From “How” to “Why”: Using AI Chatbot to Foster Conceptual Understanding and Improve Student Performance," Savannah, GA. (2026).

Chen, D. BoodleBox Workshop, "Use of BoodleBox in a Finance Course," CELTT, Online. (2026).

Chen, D., & Zheng, Y. 2nd Boca Finance and Real Estate Conference, "Board Gender Diversity and CEO Pay Ratio," Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL. (2025).

Chen, D. 2025 Teaching & Learning Day, "SoTL Research as a TSiR (Teaching Scholar in Residence)," CELTT, University of Baltimore, RLB Library, University of Baltimore. (2025).

Chen, Dong (Principal), Xu, Weifeng (Co-Principal), "Will Sustainability Reports Be Valuable for Investors to Assess Cyber Risks" Sponsored by Merrick School of Business, The University of Baltimore, $10000. (2025).

Zhang, Ting , Xiu, Lin , Chen, Dong , Guo, Ge Claire(Supporting), "Maryland Family and Medical Leave Insurance (FAMLI) Program—Phase II: Analysis of Expected Program Claims and Administration Experience." Sponsored by Maryland Department of Labor, State, (2023 - 2024).

Zhang, Ting , Xiu, Lin , Chen, Dong , Guo, Ge Claire, "Maryland Family and Medical Leave Insurance (FAMLI) Program: Phase II Cost Analysis" Sponsored by Maryland Department of Labor, State, (2022 - 2023).

Zhang, Ting , Xiu, Lin , Chen, Dong , Guo, Ge Claire(Supporting), "Maryland Family and Medical Leave Insurance (FAMLI): Five Independent and Inter-related Analytical Studies" Sponsored by Maryland Department of Labor, State, (2022).

The CLS Blue Sky Blog: Invited by the editor of the Columbia Law School Blue Sky Blog to contribute an original post summarizing the findings of our research paper, "Board Gender Diversity and CEO Pay Ratio." The piece explores the impact of board gender diversity and regulatory mandates (like California’s SB 826) on curbing executive pay disparity, reaching a specialized audience of legal scholars, regulators, and corporate governance practitioners. The blog is at: https://clsbluesky.law.columbia.edu/author/dong-chen-and-yudan-zheng/. (2025).

"Extreme Weather and Corporate Carbon Emissions" (On-Going)
Using the disclosed carbon emissions by large emitters in the United States as required by EPA based on the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP), I analyze the impact of extreme weather events (EWEs) at the headquarters of the firms in the U.S. on their carbon emissions.

"Majority Voting and Bondholder Wealth" (On-Going)
We examine the impact of majority voting on abnormal bond returns by utilizing the regression discontinuity design (RDD) on the passage/failure of shareholder proposals on majority voting. The fundamental idea is that if majority voting helps align the interest of shareholders with the board of directors, it may not be viewed favorably by bondholders especially if the default risk of the firm is high, due to the agency cost of debt.

"The Advisory and Monitoring Functions of Corporate Boards" (On-Going)
We examine the advisory function of independent executives (IEs), independent directors who are also serving as executives of other public firms in the BoardEx database, on the receiver firms' corporate policies, by testing the potential "convergence" of these corporate policies between the receiver and the sender firms after these executives have joined the receiver firms to become independent directors. To examine the potential conflict of the advisory and monitoring roles served by independent directors, we track the committee service roles of these IEs, based on the notion that if such a conflict exists, IEs could either refrain from serving at traditionally monitoring-focused committees including compensation and nomination/governance committees or, if they do serve on these committees, may not serve as diligent a role in disciplining underperforming CEOs as in the case of not serving on these committees.

"Will Sustainability Reports Be Valuable for Investors to Assess Cyber Risks" (On-Going)
This study examines whether ESG/sustainability reports provide incremental value for investors in assessing firms’ cybersecurity risk beyond mandatory SEC filings. Motivated by growing cyber threats and concerns over selective or boilerplate ESG disclosure, the project asks whether cyber-related ESG disclosures improve prediction of future data breaches and whether their usefulness is stronger in industries where SASB identifies cyber risk as financially material. The study will construct a dataset from ESG reports, SEC filings, SASB materiality maps, and breach data. It will use two complementary empirical approaches: an NLP-based cyber risk measure that incorporates both SEC and ESG text, and knowledge graph/graph neural network models that capture cybersecurity-related entities and relationships across disclosures. Predictive performance will be compared between models using SEC filings alone and models that also incorporate ESG reports. By evaluating whether voluntary ESG disclosures reveal meaningful cyber risk information or merely reflect greenwashing, the study contributes to research on cyber risk disclosure, ESG informativeness, materiality, and AI-based analysis of unstructured financial text.