Guilhem Bascle, Professor at Louvain School of Management’s Strategy and Organization department, was awarded an Honorable Mention (runner-up) of the Strategic Management Society’s Best Conference Paper Prize at its annual meeting in Prague in October 2012. The jury selected his paper “Hocus-pocus: The shareholder-value effects of delusive payouts by specialized and diversified firms” as one of the five best papers out of more than 1,000 manuscripts submitted to the Strategic Management Society Annual International Conference. The paper develops a sociopolitical framework that examines how high business diversification, as a pre-existing sign of agency problems, can influence the reactions of shareholders to dividends and share buybacks.
