The private-sector impact of public transparency

Monash Business School PhD candidate Jia Feng.

27 November 2025

Monash Business School PhD candidate Jia Feng is mining US government contract data to reveal how government spending disclosures can tip the balance in the high-stakes world of mergers and acquisitions.

When former US President Barack Obama issued the Open Government Directive in December 2009, his aim was to make government more transparent, efficient and accessible.

The directive required federal agencies to publish high-value data, including information about how government dollars were being spent.

For our Department of Banking and Finance PhD researcher Jia Feng, it also created a rare opportunity: a quasi-natural experiment with billion-dollar implications.

“We often think of the government as a regulator, but it is also one of the largest and most significant customers for thousands of firms,” Ms Feng said.

Her research explores what happens when those commercial relationships are made visible.

Closing the information gap

To answer this question, Ms Feng analysed thousands of mergers and acquisitions, comparing firms with government contracts to those without, before and after the policy took effect.

“The primary aim was to determine whether a sudden increase in publicly available information about a firm's government contracts makes it more or less likely to be acquired, and how this transparency affects the price paid in an acquisition,” she said.

Her findings suggest that making contract data public reduced what economists call ‘information asymmetry’ — the imbalance of knowledge between buyer and seller.

“This work demonstrates a powerful link between public policy and private markets,” she said.

“It shows that government actions aimed at improving accountability can have the unintended, yet beneficial, effect of making our markets more efficient.”

Lessons for leaders and legislators

Ms Feng said her research has implications for the boardroom and the legislative chamber.

For business leaders, the findings offer a clearer understanding of the strategies involved in operating with greater transparency.
For policymakers, they demonstrate that reforms can have unexpected economic impacts.

Her supervisor, Professor Neal Galpin, said the research breaks new ground by showing how a single piece of information can influence mergers and acquisition outcomes differently depending on whether a firm is public or private.

“Jia's work is important for policy and practice because mergers and acquisitions help move assets from less productive uses to more productive uses,” he said.

“What Jia did differently is show how a similar piece of information affects takeovers differently in public and private firms.”

Exploring new frontiers

Ms Feng is already planning the next stage of her research.

“I want to investigate whether these transparency effects extend to other areas, such as a firm’s cost of capital or its investment efficiency,” she said.

Her long-term ambition is to inform decision-making at the intersection of business and policy.“I aspire to produce work that is not only academically rigorous but also relevant to real-world policy and business decisions,” she said.

At Monash Business School, she has found the right environment to pursue that ambition.“The rigorous training and collaborative atmosphere have been instrumental in shaping my development as a researcher,” she said.

“It's the challenge of starting with a complex question, gathering the evidence, and piecing together the puzzle to arrive at a clear and meaningful conclusion that drives my work.”

Learn more about our PhD research and how it’s making an impact