- Title
- An empirical examination of the effects of professional credentials on personal financial planning practitioners’ income in Hong Kong
- Creator
- Lam, Chung
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2013
- Description
- Professional Doctorate - Doctor of Business Administration
- Description
- The objective of this dissertation is to empirically investigate the effect of professional credentials on personal financial planning practitioner’s income in Hong Kong. Financial planning in Hong Kong is relatively new among financial services, dating back only to the early 2000s. The financial planning industry in Hong Kong is largely unregulated, and professional certification is not required to act as a financial planner. Regardless, many individuals working in the financial planning field choose to undertake one or more professional certifications, such as a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNERCM (the most common and most highly regarded) and others. There are currently over 66,000 CFPcertified financial planners in Hong Kong, along with an unknown number of other certifications. This study seeks to investigate why individuals undergo certification in the absence of external regulatory requirements. We employ human capital and inequality theories to describe the process of certification as a voluntary investment in knowledge and skill building, and then posit that this would only be justified if there were an expected financial return in the form of higher income. Utilising data from a sample of 5,019 financial planning professionals from a single Hong Kong insurance firm, we examine the relationship between earnings and certification, human capital factors (education and experience), and demographic factors (age and sex). The empirical results indicate that certification, level of education, experience, gender and age do impact on the earnings of financial planners in Hong Kong. The results also reveal that a cluster of certifications do impact on earnings of financial practitioners with four certifications (CFP, LUTCF, FCHCP, and RFC) all of which are highly associated with higher incomes, while only one, the RFP, was not. The RFP was also the least popular certification among financial planners. These findings, taken together, have two implications. First, certification is a path to increased income. Second, certifications do have different market values, thus offering an insight into why individuals choose one form of certification over another. Finally, company policy makers as well as regulators should take cognizance of the rewards associated with certification in order to determine whether it is worthwhile to mandate professional certification of financial planners in the financial services industry in Hong Kong.
- Subject
- financial planning professionals; Hong Kong; financial planning certification
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1036455
- Identifier
- uon:13291
- Rights
- Copyright 2013 Chung Lam
- Language
- eng
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
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| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Abstract | 81 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Thesis | 977 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |