Research Focus

Director: Yameng Zhang

Director: Jia Zhai

Director: Yue Xu 

Director: Lujie Chen 

Director: Steven Dellaportas

Over the past seven years (2018-2024), IBSS academic staff have published a number of research papers in the following top-tier ABS4/ABDC-A* journals:

• Accounting Auditing and Accountability Journal
• American Journal of Agricultural Economics
• British Accounting Review
• British Journal of Management
• Decision Support Systems
• Energy Economics
• European Accounting Review
• European Economic Review
• European Journal of Operational Research
• Human Resource Management
• Industrial Marketing Management
• Information Systems Journal
• Information Systems Research
• International Journal of Information Management
• International Journal of Operations and Production Management
• Journal of Applied Psychology
• Journal of Banking and Finance
• Journal of Business Finance and Accounting
• Journal of Corporate Finance
• Journal of Econometrics
• Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
• Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control
• Journal of Financial Intermediation
• Journal of Financial Markets
• Journal of Health Economics
• Journal of Money, Credit and Banking
• Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology
• Journal of Operations Management
• Journal of Organizational Behavior
• Journal of Retailing
• Journal of Risk and Uncertainty
• Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
• Journal of the Association for Information Systems
• Journal of Travel Research
• Journal of Vocational Behavior
• Journal of World Business
• Management Science
• Manufacturing and Service Operations Management
• Organization Studies
• Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
• Production and Operations Management
• Research Policy
• Review of Finance
• The Economic History Review
• Tourism Management
• Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice
• Urban Studies

Over the past seven years (2018-2024), IBSS academic staff have presented their research at elite conferences, with these including but not limited to:

• Academy of International Business – UK and Ireland Chapter Annual Conference
• American Economic Association Annual Meeting
• American Marketing Association (AMA) Summer Academic Conference
• Annual conference of Academy of International Business (AIB)
• Annual conference of Academy of Management (AOM)
• Annual conference of Strategic Management Society (SMS)
• Asian Meeting of Econometric Society
• China Meeting of the Econometric Society
• Chinese Economists Society (CES) Annual Conference
• Econometric Society European Winter Meeting
• EURO Conference (The Association of European Operational Research)
• European Accounting Association Annual Congress
• European Economic Association (EEA) Meeting
• European Financial Management Association (EMFA) Annual Meeting
• North American Summer Meeting of the Econometric Society
• Production and Operations Management Society (POMS) Annual Conference
• Royal Economic Society Annual Conference
• The INFORMS Annual Meeting
• The INFORMS Marketing Science Conference
• The POMS International Conference
• The POMS-HK International Conference

Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University established the Operational and Supply Chain Excellence Institute (OSCE) in early 2017, in order to more actively provide technology and management services for economic and social development.

Research within the OSCE focuses on developing and testing innovative approaches that can be implemented in companies to meet these challenges and optimise how they operate to establish a competitive edge.

With its location, expertise and network of companies, the institute is well-placed to work with a wide range of industrial partners across the Suzhou SIP district, an area home to tens of thousands of cutting-edge firms. The aim is to generate approaches that can be tailored to assist businesses across a wide range of industry sectors and related services. The overall aim of the OSCE is to establish and cultivate the region as a hub of expertise and excellence that can be marketed to attract more enterprises.

The Society for the Advancement in Economic Studies (SAES) aims to become one of the leading economic studies research institutions in China, with its mission to provide an interdisciplinary research platform bringing together scholars, business community and policy makers to understand, debate and solve the practical problems related to economics.

Economics is a broad discipline with specialisation in various fields of microeconomics and macroeconomics. There is a growing consensus on the need to amalgamate various aspects of economic studies to better understand and solve problems within specific economies and the world as a whole. Moreover, in today’s integrated and interconnected world, other social science disciplines have applied ideas and methodologies found within economics and become crucial to effective and integrated economic policy formulation.

It is the goal of SAES to apply the economics toolbox both to overlapping internal fields and neighbouring disciplines, thereby taking advantage of synergies across the social sciences and stimulating the generation of new knowledge. The research activities and outcomes of the society are expected to contribute to policy creation, and to this end the society organises annual conferences inviting scholars from across the world to present papers on a wide variety of subject areas.

While finance academics are aware of the vast potential for machine-learning (ML) models to test intriguing new research questions, they generally lack the computational resources and technical knowledge to apply ML models in an efficient manner that can also convince journal editors, referees and industry practitioners on the reliability of their ML model results. The CFTS acts as a platform to consolidate all FinTech-related research activities within the Department of Finance at IBSS. The CFTS has two objectives, the first of which is to gather together the school’s research on machine-learning applications in the core Finance research areas of Corporate Finance, Asset Pricing and Financial Markets. Secondly, the Centre was created to serve as a platform for interactions between academic staff and relevant stakeholders, specifically academics and industry practitioners in the field of Data Science. Fulfilling these two objectives enables the CFTS to enhance the efficiency of FinTech-related projects implemented at IBSS.

Building on a solid research foundation and wide network of academics and industry leaders, the Smart Mobility Analytics Centre (SMAC) was established at IBSS in May 2022. The vision of SMAC is to be a leading platform on smart mobility analytics that will synergise the insights and needs of academic research, industry and education. The SMAC’s strategic objectives are to (a) Promote interdisciplinary and cutting-edge academic research on smart mobility analytics, (b) Establish close collaborative relationships with companies in the mobility sector, and (c) Explore opportunities to contribute to the school’s executive education programmes, as well as undergraduate/postgraduate student projects in the domain of mobility and transport. The SMAC consists of more than 30 members, with these including IBSS faculty and postgraduate students, non-IBSS XJTLU faculty and students, international researchers from the Centre’s research network, and industry advisors. For more information on the SMAC, please visit the dedicated website here.

Experimental economics has become one of the most successful and fastest-growing fields of economics in the last several decades. It is a subfield of economics that uses experiments to explore human behavior, tests economic theories and suggests new models to better capture human behavior by providing more psychologically plausible foundations. At the IBSS Experimental Economics Lab, researchers are able to conduct a wide variety of experiments based on their individual research interests. Through participation in lab experiments, students are able to change economic factors within a specifically designed economic environment and achieve specific monetary outcomes related to their choices. With respect to teaching, classroom lab experiments are especially useful and helpful when learning about complex concepts such as individual decision-making, corporate strategy and game theory. Consistent with research-led teaching, students may further develop their research interests by running lab experiments for their dissertations.

Experimental economics has become one of the most successful and fastest-growing fields of economics in the last several decades. It is a subfield of economics that uses experiments to explore human behavior, tests economic theories and suggests new models to better capture human behavior by providing more psychologically plausible foundations. At the IBSS Experimental Economics Lab, researchers are able to conduct a wide variety of experiments based on their individual research interests. Through participation in lab experiments, students are able to change economic factors within a specifically designed economic environment and achieve specific monetary outcomes related to their choices. With respect to teaching, classroom lab experiments are especially useful and helpful when learning about complex concepts such as individual decision-making, corporate strategy and game theory. Consistent with research-led teaching, students may further develop their research interests by running lab experiments for their dissertations.

The Digital Accounting Lab (DALab) aims to strengthen research and innovate teaching methods in accounting. Its main focus is on the use of digital technologies such as machine learning and natural language processing to support accounting research and teaching. The DALab will develop a series of projects to apply the latest digital technologies to accounting research and teaching.

Three high-performance workstations with GPU provide computing power for the machine learning models and natural language process (NLP) models. DALab provides computing support for IBSS researchers with GPU computing requests for their machine learning, deep learning, or NLP models.

Computational Economics and Finance Lab is built to provide significant computational power for teaching and research within IBSS. It located in BS429 with four Dell OptiPlex 7000 Desktops. Three of them have 32GB DDR4 and one 128GB DDR4. These machines can complete the small-scale but already computational expensive tasks locally in IBSS with no need to apply for the centralized computation power. Faculty members can access to the lab by staff card and log in terminals by university credentials. In addition, our PhD students, master students, SURF and FYP students can access this lab too wither permission from their supervisors.