1/12/2023 — A daunting tangle of problems defines the global energy space as 2022 winds down. On the one hand, the war in the Ukraine combined with curtailed Russian oil/gas supplies into Europe has reminded many that unfriendly energy suppliers can also deliver inflation and hardship to their customers. On another side, efforts to increase oil/gas supplies both in Europe and globally, face stout resistance to anything that might further entrench hydrocarbons into national economies. Inflation is prompting monetary policies to tighten even as fiscal indiscipline continues via historically high government deficit spending. Concerns over climate change remain an article of faith among leaders of many countries. Other voices decry the folly of calls to suppress oil/gas production when greener alternatives are not ready to replace them. Electorates seem both confused and restless. The risk that they vote in leaders less insistent on decarbonizing economies is palpable.

• KEYWORD(S):
• energy
• esg
• sustainability

1/7/2023 — Increased consumer demand for healthier product options and looming regulation have prompted many consumer goods brands to adjust the amount of sugar content in their product lines, including adding products with reduced sugar content or smaller package sizes. Even as brands adopt such practices, little guidance exists for how they should do so to protect or enhance their brand performance. This paper studies whether and when sugar reduction strategies affect sales.

• KEYWORD(S):
• marketing
• retail

1/1/2023 — Given that mask-wearing proved to be an important tool to slow the spread of infection during the COVID-19 pandemic, investigating the psychological and cultural factors that influence norms for mask wearing across cultures is exceptionally important. One factor that may influence mask wearing behavior is the degree to which people believe masks potentially impair emotion recognition.

• KEYWORD(S):
• covid-19
• organizational behavior

12/31/2022 — Leaders play a critical role in creating the ethics agenda in organizations. Their communications, decisions, and behaviors influence employees to act ethically or unethically to accomplish organizational goals. To be sure, various reviews within the behavioral ethics literature have highlighted the crucial role that ethical leadership plays in gearing organizations and employees ethically. Yet, numerous documented ethical failings in organizations have evidenced the impact of unethical leadership—where leaders’ unethical conduct or influence on employees promotes unethicality within organizations and generates harmful consequences.

• KEYWORD(S):
• ethics
• organizational behavior

12/27/2022 — Teams often need to adapt to planned discontinuous task change or fundamental alteration of tasks, tools, and work systems. Although team adaptation theories have made substantive progress in explaining how teams can respond to change, they have not adequately considered the unique impact that discontinuous task change can have on teams. Such change can render not only collective but also individual task capabilities obsolete and necessitate a multilevel task relearning process. Drawing on the team compilation model, we suggest that adaptation to discontinuous task change is akin to team (re)development.

• KEYWORD(S):
• equity
• organizational behavior

12/12/2022 — As major health systems continue to merge, one of the main questions for commentators and researchers concerns the somewhat vague idea of community benefit. The Atrium Health–Advocate merger is set to provide approximately $5 billion in annual community benefit, targeted to aid vulnerable communities and individuals. Community benefit can be understood as any action, investment or program provided by a tax-exempt hospital or health system that promotes the health and wellness of the community they serve. In addition to community benefit, Advocate Health described a $2 billion pledge to disrupt the root causes of health inequities across the rural and urban communities it serves.

• KEYWORD(S):
• DEI
• healthcare

12/1/2022 — We examine the effects of leader prevention focus on the leader’s own behavior, in the form of the harmful overruling of good ideas by their follower team, and on the team’s collective behaviors, processes, and performance. We argue that when leaders adopt a prevention mindset, it can have costly effects on team outcomes.

• KEYWORD(S):
• organizational behavior

11/22/2022 — assistance in the immediate aftermath of this extreme weather event, we document the role net migration played in recent population growth—a crucial issue in climate change policy deliberations—and outline creative strategies and investments Florida officials will have to leverage to both rebuild and create resilient communities with reputational equity that remain attractive to newcomers as well as long term residents moving forward.

• KEYWORD(S):
• demographics
• migration

11/22/2022 — Hurricane Ian destroyed property and disrupted livelihoods in some of Florida’s largest and most rapidly growing coastal and inland counties.

• KEYWORD(S):
• economic development policy

10/25/2022 — COVID hit North Carolina hard, with 3.1 million cases so far and over 26,000 deaths. Low-income communities in North Carolina were especially hard hit, with higher rates of COVID infections and deaths, sudden loss of jobs with little buffer, disruption of families and communities. In this paper, we conduct a quantitative assessment of COVID-19’s impact on low-income North Carolinians and specifically on a subset of lower income North Carolina counties that are served by the North Carolina Community Action Association (NCCAA).

• KEYWORD(S):
• covid-19
• demographics
• north carolina

10/20/2022 — Global risk and risk aversion shocks have distinct distributional impacts on emerging market capital flows and returns. In particular, we find salient consequences of these different global shocks for tail risk in emerging markets. Open-end mutual fund trading provides a key mechanism linking shocks facing global investors to extreme capital flow and return realizations.

• KEYWORD(S):
• emerging markets
• finance

10/17/2022 — Reliably detecting insider trading is a major impediment to both research and regulatory practice. Using account-level transaction data, we propose a novel approach. Specifically, after extracting several key empirical features of typical insider trading cases from existing regulatory actions, we then employ a machine learning methodology to identify suspicious insiders across our full sample.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance
• fintech
• machine learning

9/28/2022 — As a magnet for both population and employment growth, North Carolina has a propitious opportunity to create an inclusive and equitable entrepreneurial and small business ecosystem to support the state’s newfound prosperity.

• KEYWORD(S):
• DEI
• demographics
• minority and women owned businesses
• small business
• social entrepreneurship

9/28/2022 — The unprecedented increase in non-bank financial intermediation, particularly open-end mutual funds and ETFs, over the last two decades, accounts for nearly half of external financing flows to emerging markets exceeding cross-border lending by global banks.

• KEYWORD(S):
• emerging markets
• finance

9/21/2022 — First, we address the relationship between ownership and employees’ labor outcomes. Second, we present an overview of the literature studying the relationship between capital structure and labor markets, including the implications of financial distress. Third, we connect labor with the fast-growing literature on inequality within firms and investments in technology adoption.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance
• labor

9/16/2022 — Research suggests that women negotiators tend to obtain worse outcomes than men; however, we argue this finding does not apply to all women. Integrating research on social hierarchies, gender in negotiations, and intersectional stereotype content, we develop a theoretical framework that explains the interactive effect of race and gender on offers and outcomes received in distributive negotiations.

• KEYWORD(S):
• diversity
• gender

8/26/2022 — Nonwage benefits have become increasingly important and now represent 30% of total compensation (BLS, 2021). Using administrative data on health insurance, retirement, and leave benefits, we find dramatically lower within-firm variation in benefits than in wages. We also document sharply higher between-firm variation in nonwage benefits, compared to wages. We argue that this pattern can be a consequence of nondiscrimination regulations and the high administrative burden of managing too many or complex plans

8/24/2022 — We examine the relation between plant-level predictive analytics use and centralization of authority for more than 25,000 manufacturing plants using proprietary US Census data. We focus on headquarters authority over plants through delegation of decision-making and design of performance-based incentives.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting
• demographics

8/24/2022 — We quantify the causal effects of humorous banter among three rival fast-food brands on Twitter in the context of a new product launched by one of the rivals (viz, the focal or entrant brand). We argue that Twitter banter can cause a surge in online search that in turn leads to higher offline sales.

• KEYWORD(S):
• marketing
• retail

8/22/2022 — Healthcare. While H.B. 149 has gotten significant media coverage related to the Medicaid expansion component, the bill includes several significant changes that will impact state health policy and the business of health in North Carolina. H.B. 149 is composed of five sections: Medicaid expansion, work requirements for certain beneficiaries, certificate of need reform, modernization of nursing regulations, and health insurance reforms.

• KEYWORD(S):
• patient
• provider

8/19/2022 — Post 2020 Census population estimates covering the first fifteen months of the pandemic are analyzed. The results reveal COVID-19’s impact on the geo-demography of the state, highlight disturbing demographic trends, and raise pressing questions requiring immediate policy attention if North Carolina is to remain attractive as a place to live, work, play, and do business.

• KEYWORD(S):
• covid-19
• demographics
• disruptive demographics

8/8/2022 — Adverse events, such as product recalls, transcend business-to-business (B2B) secondary markets (i.e., used product markets). Yet, little, if any, is known about the impact of such adverse events on purchase responses of B2B buyers (i.e., channel intermediaries). The current study addresses this research gap in the empirical context of product recalls in the U.S. automobile secondary market.

• KEYWORD(S):
• marketing
• supply chain

8/4/2022 — We study the effect of government-subsidized childcare on women's career outcomes and firm performance using linked tax filing data. Exploiting a universal childcare reform in Quebec in 1997 and the variation in its timing relative to childbirth across cohorts of parents, we show that earlier access to childcare increases employment among new mothers, particularly among those previously unemployed.

• KEYWORD(S):
• gender
• inclusive development
• workforce development

8/1/2022 — The data-generating process of productivity growth includes both trend and business-cycle shocks, generating many counterfactuals for prices under full-information. In practice, agents cannot immediately distinguish between the two shocks, leading to "rational confusion": each shock inherits properties of its counterpart.

• KEYWORD(S):
• asset pricing
• finance

8/1/2022 — This paper examines how US immigration-induced labor mobility frictions affect entrepreneurship and firm monopsony. I exploit a natural experiment in the US immigration system that unexpectedly increased Green Card (GC) related job-switching frictions for Indian and Chinese immigrants in October 2005. Using matched employee-employer data from LinkedIn, I confirm that this shock reduced inter-firm employee mobility for Indian and Chinese employees.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance
• strategy and entrepreneurship

7/22/2022 — We study the relation between trade credit, asset prices, and production-network linkages. Empirically, firms extending more trade credit earn 7.6% p.a. lower risk premiums and maintain longer relationships with customers.

• KEYWORD(S):
• asset pricing
• finance

7/18/2022 — This paper evaluates the pros and cons of including private equity fund investments in defined contribution plans. Potential benefits include higher returns and improved diversification as well as a relatively safe method for accessing investments previously only available to institutions and the very wealthy. Despite these enticing benefits, they need to be weighed against potential challenges and costs that may arise from creating this broader access to private funds. The complicated structure and uncertainty around the mechanism to provide required liquidity backstops may bring increased fees or even disrupt the private fund model.

• KEYWORD(S):
• private equity

7/12/2022 — Employees often engage in collective grassroot efforts to bring about gender equity in the workplace. Such coalition-based advocacy is largely driven by women, which has led to debate about whether men’s involvement as allies can help. Integrating literatures on signaling and legitimacy, we propose that the demographic composition of a gender equity advocacy coalition matters: Men-only groups lack coalition legitimacy, or the perception that they are the “right” spokespersons for gender equity issues, whereas women-only groups struggle to convey issue legitimacy, or the perception that gender equity is of strategic importance within business organizations.

• KEYWORD(S):
• diversity
• operations
• organizational behavior

7/7/2022 — We coin the term credit market fluidity to describe the intensity of credit reallocation, whose properties and implications we study within the commercial loan market in France over the period 1998 through 2018. We base our analysis on credit register data and thus provide a more complete account of gross credit flows across and within bank loan portfolios.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance

6/30/2022 — “Mega-threats”—negative, identity-relevant societal events that receive significant media attention—are frequent occurrences in society, yet the influence of these events on employees remains unclear. We draw on the theory of racialized organizations to explain the process whereby exposure to mega-threats leads to heightened avoidant work behaviors for racial minority employees.

• KEYWORD(S):
• diversity
• organizational behavior

6/24/2022 — This study uses passage of the Dodd-Frank Act as a setting to examine whether changes in legal liability exposure faced by credit rating agencies affect the number of financial statement information signals required before rating changes. For upgrades, we predict and find that the greater legal exposure after the Act incentivized rating agencies to require more information signals, i.e., a greater number of prior quarters in which upgrades were implied by financial statement information.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance
• private credit

6/22/2022 — Why do firms offer non-wage compensation instead of the equivalent amount in financial compensation? We argue that firms use nonwage benefits, specifically female-friendly benefits, such as maternity leave, to increase gender diversity by efficiently attracting women.

• KEYWORD(S):
• gender
• inclusion
• inclusive development

6/3/2022 — Soda taxes are an increasingly popular policy tool, used to discourage purchases of sugar-sweetened beverages. This study analyzes how marketing conduct and its effectiveness might change after soda tax introductions. Prior studies on the effect of soda taxes focus on price increases but neglect other, managerially relevant marketing conduct tools, such as promotional frequency, promotional discount depth, and feature promotion frequency. This study documents how the marketing conduct and its effectiveness changed with the introduction of the tax across more than 200 retail stores in five markets.

• KEYWORD(S):
• marketing
• tax

6/1/2022 — This study finds that the requirement of ASC 842 for firms to capitalize operating leases in financial statements beginning in 2019 resulted in firms affected by the standard reducing existing debt amounts on average between 7% and 10% relative to unaffected firms. We also find that firms with greater operating lease capitalization as a result of implementation of ASC 842 are more likely to reduce their reliance on existing debt.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting

5/30/2022 — Employee spinouts, defined as startups founded by prior employees of an industry firm, play a critical role in firm creation and knowledge transfer. Their superior performance often arises from resources and knowledge accrued during employment in parent firms. An understudied question is whether prior employment in parent firms impacts an employee

• KEYWORD(S):
• organizational behavior
• strategy and entrepreneurship

5/19/2022 — Using a proprietary dataset from 2016 to 2019, we find that order flows from foreign investors, facilitated by regulatory liberalization through several channels, present strong predictive power for future stock returns in the Chinese market.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance
• global business

5/13/2022 — Retail stores are geographically dispersed as a part of a multiunit organization. In such a setting, store managers play an important role in driving store performance. To motivate them to exert effort, retailers have provided group incentives for store managers. Using data from 75 stores of a U.S.-based retail chain that changed its incentive plan for store managers from being purely dependent on store performance to being dependent upon both store and corporate performance, we investigate the effect of this change on store performance.

• KEYWORD(S):
• operations
• organizational behavior

5/8/2022 — In this article, we investigate the effects of leader subjective ambivalence on team performance. Integrating the ambivalence literature and social learning theory, we propose a multi-level model of whether, when, and why team leaders’ subjective ambivalence enhances team performance outcomes.

• KEYWORD(S):
• organizational behavior

5/3/2022 — We examine the effect of pay transparency on gender pay gap and firm outcomes. This paper exploits a 2006 legislation change in Denmark that requires firms to provide gender disaggregated wage statistics. Using detailed employee-employer administrative data and a difference-in-differences and difference-in-discontinuities designs, we find the law reduces the gender pay gap, primarily by slowing the wage growth for male employees.

• KEYWORD(S):
• gender
• operations

5/1/2022 — We analyze the impact of the introduction of credit default swaps (CDSs) on real decision-making within the firm. Our structural model predicts that CDS introduction increases debt capacity more when uncertainty about the credit events that trigger CDS payment is lower.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance
• global business
• investments
• risk management

5/1/2022 — Financial intermediaries often provide guarantees resembling out-of-the-money put options, exposing them to undiversifiable tail risk. We present a model in the context of the U.S. life insurance industry in which the regulatory framework incentivizes value-maximizing insurers to hedge variable annuity (VA) guarantees, though imperfectly, and shift risks into high-risk and illiquid bonds. We calibrate the model to insurer-level data and identify the VA-induced changes in insurers' risk exposures.

• KEYWORD(S):
• insurance
• strategy and entrepreneurship

5/1/2022 — We study the interaction of flexible capital utilization and depreciation for expected returns and investment of firms. Empirically, an investment strategy that buys (sells) equities with low (high) utilization rates earns 5% p.a.

• KEYWORD(S):
• asset pricing

5/1/2022 — We integrated theories of social exchange and emotional ambivalence to explain how ambivalent relationships influence interpersonally directed helping and harming behaviors. Using multiple methodologies, including a study of student teams, an experiment, and a quasifield study of retail employees, we compared ambivalent relationships with positive and negative relationships. Our three studies provide convergent evidence that ambivalent relationships with coworkers are positively related to both helping and harming behaviors.

• KEYWORD(S):
• organizational behavior
• workforce

4/29/2022 — We examine the links between human capital and endowment investing. Harnessing detailed information on university endowments, we find that higher asset allocations to alternative assets accompany higher levels of human capital in the endowment’s investment process. Moreover, high levels of human capital are linked to larger returns, even on a risk-adjusted basis.

• KEYWORD(S):
• investments
• private capital

4/11/2022 — Faced with demand uncertainty and heterogeneity in a nascent industry, entrants often consider how many customer segments to serve by tailoring the usage breadth of their product portfolios. Portfolio usage breadth is the extent to which products in a portfolio collectively span distinct customer segments. We suggest that when entrants have use experience in contexts that are potential users of the new product, their portfolios exhibit low usage breadth, due to demand-oriented cognition and knowledge.

• KEYWORD(S):
• strategy and entrepreneurship
• technology

4/1/2022 — How leaders can recast innovation's toughest trade-offs—efficiency vs. flexibility, consistency vs. change, product vs purpose—as productive tensions.

• KEYWORD(S):
• innovation
• operations
• organizational behavior
• strategy and entrepreneurship

3/1/2022 — As we return to a new normal post-pandemic, organizational and individual work arrangements will have to be designed to take into account that employees will range from not wanting to give up their autonomy of working from home to those who will want to come rushing back to the physical office. However, a large swath of the workforce will be somewhere in the middle. They would like to mix and match the benefits of working remotely and the advantages of coming to physical offices.

• KEYWORD(S):
• innovation
• strategy and entrepreneurship

2/26/2022 — Standard private labels (PLs) have been the topic of multiple prior reviews. Having been leapfrogged by business practice, the marketing literature has only recently witnessed a surge in interest in multi-tier PL offerings. These typically include a budget and/or premium tier in addition to the omnipresent standard PL tier. This study offers a systematic review of recent empirical findings on budget and premium PLs.

• KEYWORD(S):
• global business
• marketing

2/16/2022 — As of 2019, salary history bans were enacted by 17 states and Puerto Rico with the stated purpose of reducing the gender pay gap. We argue that salary history bans may negatively affect wages as employers lose an informative signal of worker productivity. We empirically evaluate these laws using a large panel dataset of disaggregated wages covering all public-sector employees in 36 states and find, on average, that salary history bans lead to a 3% decrease in new-hire wages.

• KEYWORD(S):
• organizational behavior
• strategy and entrepreneurship