Page 8 - GS Newsletter

PhD Candidate Receives U21 Graduate Collaborative Research Award for Cross-cultural Research on Children’s Dependency Behaviours
Weiyi Xie, a PhD student from the Faculty of Education under the supervision of Dr Xiao Zhang, has won the Universitas 21 (U21) Graduate Collaborative Research Award 2019. The awarded project, ‘The Role of Parental Attitudes on Young Children’s Dependency Behaviours and Psychosocial Adjustment: A Cross- cultural Study’, aims to explore the role of cultural contexts on the relation between dependency behaviours and psychosocial adjustment, and examine potential cross-cultural differences in parental attitudes
towards children’s dependency on them.
It is unknown whether dependency behaviours have different adaptive meanings across cultures. To address
this knowledge gap, this research plans to explore whether children’s dependency behaviours and their psychosocial adjustment meanings vary across cultural groups, and, if so, how parental attitudes towards dependency behaviours contribute to such a cross- cultural difference. China and the United Kingdom are selected to represent collectivistic and individualistic cultural contexts respectively. Findings will contribute to our understanding of children’s dependency behaviours and the developmental consequences of such behaviours from a cross-cultural perspective. They will also highlight the importance of parenting and help to understand the adaptive meanings of dependency.
The project team consists of three doctoral candidates from U21 member universities, namely HKU, the University of Edinburgh and Fudan University.
Price and Prejudice – Analysts’ Stock Recommendations are Coloured by Their Cultural Biases
Congratulations to Vesa Petri Pursiainen, a final-year PhD student in the Faculty of Business and Economics, for being featured by The Economist for his research regarding the effect of cultural biases on equity analysis.
Vesa’s research finds that cultural biases have a significant effect on equity analysts’ stock recommendations and they have a larger effect during bad economic times. The rise of nationalism also increases the cultural biases. In other words, equity analysts are less likely to recommend stocks from countries their nation is biased against. The bias effect varies over time and, on top of that, significant political events can induce new cultural biases – for example, a negative North-South bias emerging during the European debt crisis, a UK-Europe divergence amid Brexit, and a Franco-British bias during the Iraq war – which are strong enough to affect stock recommendations.
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