About

Ciao-Wei Chen is an Associate Professor of Accountancy at the Gies College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a PwC Faculty Fellow. He holds a Ph.D. in Accounting from the University of Iowa, earned in 2015, along with a Master of Accountancy from the same university and a B.B.A. in Accounting from National Taiwan University. His research focuses on capital markets, financial reporting, corporate investments, mergers and acquisitions, and disclosures. Chen has contributed to the understanding of financial statement analysis, the disciplinary role of financial statements, and the effects of tax-motivated income shifting on information asymmetry. He has published extensively in reputable journals and presented his research at various conferences. Chen has received multiple awards, including the PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP Faculty Fellowship and recognition as a Teacher Ranked as Excellent by students for several years. His current courses include advanced financial reporting and financial statement analysis for MBAs, emphasizing the application of authoritative accounting standards and the analysis of financial information for decision-making.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Business
• Psychology
• Economics
• Political Science
• Finance
• Microeconomics
• Actuarial science
• Accounting
• Social psychology
• Econometrics
• Public economics
• Demographic economics
• Monetary economics

Selected publications

• Customer Data and Cost Structure: Evidence from Data Privacy Regulation

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Coordination Incentive Design and Cross-Functional Information Exchange: Evidence from the Field

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Environmental and Social Targets in CEO Bonus Contracts

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Power of Sharing Failures: The Effects of Failure Disclosure on Exploration Performance

  The Accounting Review · 2025-01-31 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT Creativity-dependent companies often implement failure disclosure programs to encourage employees to publicly disclose failures encountered in exploration activities with a focus on learning. We examine the effects of failure disclosure on employees’ exploration performance using an experiment in which participants perform a letter-search task by counting the search letters in each question (i.e., exploitation) or identifying an embedded shortcut that applies to all questions (i.e., exploration). We manipulate two factors: (1) whether participants are encouraged to disclose their failed attempts at finding the shortcut to future participants and (2) whether they are evaluated for their task-related skills. We predict and find failure disclosure increases the likelihood of shortcut identification in the presence of evaluation, and this effect is mitigated in the absence of evaluation. Because evaluation is typically present in natural work settings, our theory and results suggest failure disclosure is an effective mechanism to increase employees’ exploration performance.

  PublisherDOI

• Can second‐chance provisions increase the effectiveness of penalty contracts? Evidence from a quasi field experiment

  Contemporary Accounting Research · 2024-06-08

  articleOpen access1st author

  Abstract Penalty contracts are commonly utilized in developing countries. Such contracts may be perceived as unfair, potentially reducing employee motivation and performance. We predict that adding a second‐chance provision , an opportunity to reverse a penalty for poor performance if subsequent performance improves, could improve the effectiveness of penalty contracts. In a quasi field experiment at a company with two manufacturing facilities in Taiwan, we treated one facility with a traditional‐penalty contract without a second‐chance provision and the other with a penalty contract with a second‐chance provision. We observe a significant difference in the two treatment effects, with employee performance decreasing significantly after the traditional‐penalty treatment but showing no decrease when a second‐chance provision was included. Further analysis reveals that this difference is mediated by employees' fairness perceptions. These results provide valuable insights to governments, nongovernmental organizations, and multinationals as they work together to improve the fairness of global compensation practices.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Board Gender Diversity and Investment Efficiency: Global Evidence from 83 Country-Level Interventions

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Supplier-Base Concentration and Cost Structure

  Journal of Management Accounting Research · 2023-06-28 · 10 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT In the past three years, companies across the globe have witnessed significant supply chain disruptions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which highlights the importance of managing supply risk. Supply risk has increased in the last three decades due to an increasing prevalence of concentrated supplier bases. We predict that firms with high supplier-base concentration will choose a more elastic cost structure in response to the increased supply risk. Using a unique dataset of 4,530 firm-year observations hand-collected from supplier information disclosed by Chinese-listed firms, we document a positive association between supplier-base concentration and cost elasticity. Furthermore, results from five cross-sectional tests are consistent with supply risk driving the association between supplier-base concentration and cost elasticity. Our study provides important practical implications to managers. To the extent that supplier-base concentration poses a supply risk, our study suggests that managers can respond by making the cost structure more flexible. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text. JEL Classifications: L23; M41.

  PublisherDOI

• Labor Market Participants’ Reactions to Salary Range Disclosures

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Board Gender Diversity and Investment Efficiency: Global Evidence from 83 Country-Level Interventions

  The Accounting Review · 2023 · 66 citations

  • Political Science
  • Demographic economics
  • Economics

  ABSTRACT We investigate the effect of board gender diversity (BGD) on investment outcomes. We identify variation in BGD by compiling, for the first time, a global catalog of 83 BGD interventions implemented in 59 countries between 1999 and 2021. Using a staggered difference-in-differences research design, we document that BGD interventions improve investment outcomes. We find that treated firms reduce inefficient investment by 0.6 percent of total assets or 6.5 percent of total investment and are 4 percentage points more likely to have above-median investment efficiency. Cross-sectional tests reveal more pronounced results when BGD interventions are mandatory, are strongly enforced, and result in larger BGD increases. Event-time, stacked panel, and a wide variety of endogeneity-mitigating robustness tests corroborate. Our plausibly causal inferences have important implications for both research and practice. JEL Classifications: F52; G34; G38; K22; M41; K38.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Power of Sharing Failures: The Effects of Failure Disclosure on Exploration Performance

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Flora H. Zhou

  Bentley University

  10 shared

• Jae Yong Shin

  Seoul National University

  9 shared

• Steve Wu

  Western University

  5 shared

• Tatiana Sandino

  5 shared

• Jeremy B. Lill

  University of Kansas

  4 shared

• Theodore Sougiannis

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  4 shared

• Laura W. Wang

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  4 shared

• Michael G. Williamson

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  3 shared

Education

• PhD, Leventhal School of Accounting

  University of Southern California

  2006

Awards & honors

• PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP Faculty Fellowship, University of…
• List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by their Students, Univ…