3/14/2023 — In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, two large infrastructure-related bills have been enacted. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), signed into law in November 2021, provides funding for a wide range of activities including roads, rail, transit, broadband, water and electrical infrastructure.

3/10/2023 — Virginia’s rapid population growth over the past three decades has been uneven, creating demographic winners and losers, and masks several demographic headwinds that will constrain future growth and competitiveness if left unaddressed, including slowing rates of total and foreign-born population growth, white population decline, deaths of despair, and declining labor force participation among prime working age males and females in the state.

3/8/2023 — We quantify the immediate net effect of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) on the tax burden of corporate profits for public US corporations.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting
• global business

2/27/2023 — Food ordering and delivery platforms generate online demand for restaurants and deliver food to customers. In return, restaurants pay platforms a commission, typically a percentage of the order amount. Platforms offer partner restaurants the choice of a range of commission rates, rewarding higher commission payments with featured display slots and discounted delivery fees, both of which stimulate demand. Unfortunately, the current environment is grim: platforms scurry to cover delivery costs while restaurants gripe about excessive commissions.

• KEYWORD(S):
• operations

2/24/2023 — Ignoring consideration sets in modeling customer purchase decisions may lead to biased estimation of customer preferences, yet consideration sets are difficult to infer in brick-and-mortar contexts. We show that the challenge of estimating consideration set models in brick-and-mortar contexts can partially be overcome with an emerging source of data: “heatmap data” collected using in-store sensors.

• KEYWORD(S):
• operations

2/17/2023 — Despite encouraging signs, India’s retail market remains largely off-limits to large international retailers like Wal-Mart and Carrefour. Opposition to liberalizing FDI in this sector raises concerns about employment losses, unfair competition resulting in the large-scale exit of incumbent domestic retailers, and infant industry arguments to protect the organized domestic retail sector that is at a nascent stage. Based on international evidence, we suggest that allowing entry by large international retailers into the Indian market may help tackle inflation, especially in food prices.

• KEYWORD(S):
• economics
• finance
• global business
• inflation

2/15/2023 — We study price optimization under the mixture of boundary logit (MBL) model, which was recently introduced in Jagabathula et al. (2020) and Jagabathula and Venkataraman (2022). We show that the pricing problem under the MBL model is hard to solve in the most general case. However, we prove structural results for the general pricing problem and characterize the optimal solution for several special cases, including a setting in which all products are charged the same price, and a setting with two products.

• KEYWORD(S):
• operations

2/9/2023 — This study documents that big bath accounting following CEO turnovers is pervasive worldwide and shows that the extent to which CEOs engage in big bath accounting is associated with the degree of discretion they have available in their respective countries. Our analysis is based on a new country-level measure for managerial discretion derived from a questionnaire survey with more than 500 strategy consultants from 35 countries.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting
• global business

2/8/2023 — Sports organizations typically sell tickets for popular elimination style tournaments (e.g., NFL Super Bowl) well in advance of the final games. Fans hesitate to buy these tickets because they are unsure about whether their favorite team will play in those games. As the result the tickets are cornered by agents and scalpers and resold at exorbitant prices once the playing teams are clarified. We demonstrate how consumer forwards and options buffer consumers from uncertainty, enhance league and team profits, and help control scalping.

• KEYWORD(S):
• marketing

2/7/2023 — This paper investigates how bank supervisors’ enforcement decisions and orders (EDOs) influence the allocation of mortgage lending across demographic groups underlying a banks’ borrower base. Specifically, we investigate how banks’ mortgage lending to minority borrowers relative to white borrowers changes following the resolution of severe EDOs.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting
• inequality

2/6/2023 — Detaching from work is beneficial because it helps employees recover from work demands. However, we argue that detachment may be a trade-off for employees in organizations with higher (vs. lower) levels of performance pressure. Drawing on social self-preservation theory, we hypothesize that evening detachment leads employees working in higher (vs. lower) performance pressure work contexts to experience increased shame at work the next morning.

• KEYWORD(S):
• organizational behavior

2/5/2023 — Factor analysis is a widely used tool to summarize high dimensional panel data via a small dimensional set of latent factors. Applications, particularly in finance, are often focused on observable factors with an economic interpretation. The objective of this paper is to provide a formal test for the question whether the factor spaces of latent and observable (economic) factors are equal.

• KEYWORD(S):
• economics
• finance

2/2/2023 — Responsive to calls from lawmakers, the USPTO has recently announced a broad set of measures to increase the quality of drug patents ex ante, before they are granted, as a way of in the US. However, there is currently no way to tell which patent applications cover inventions that will lead to FDA-approved drugs, potentially compromising the efficiency and effectiveness of the agency’s efforts. We address these informational deficits predictively and descriptively through an analysis of patents issued in 2005-2015 that cover drugs as identified through their listing in the FDA’s “Orange Book.”

• KEYWORD(S):
• machine learning
• pharmaceutical
• strategy and entrepreneurship

1/26/2023 — We examine the validity of the underlying assumption that the tax system favors superstar firms, using both forward-looking and backward-looking measures of firms’ tax burdens. Across multiple specifications, we find little empirical support for the idea that superstar firms are tax advantaged.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting

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

1/12/2023 — Physicians spend more than 5 hours a day working on Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems and more than an hour doing EHR tasks after the end of the workday. In this paper, we investigate how physicians' workflow decisions on when to perform EHR tasks affect: (1) total time on EHR and (2) time spent after work.

• KEYWORD(S):
• healthcare
• operations

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

12/27/2022 — This study examines whether the disclosure of critical audit matters (CAMs) in the expanded audit report in China is associated with an increase in audited financial statement quality. Specifically, we predict and find that timeliness of goodwill impairment by Chinese listed firms increased after the disclosure of CAMs related to goodwill.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting
• financial reporting

12/25/2022 — In this paper, we develop new methods for analyzing high-dimensional tensor datasets. A tensor factor model describes a high-dimensional dataset as a sum of a low-rank component and an idiosyncratic noise, generalizing traditional factor models for panel data. We propose an estimation algorithm, called tensor principal component analysis (PCA), which generalizes the traditional PCA applicable to panel data.

• KEYWORD(S):
• economics
• finance

12/21/2022 — Fueled by the widespread adoption of algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI), the use of chatbots has become increasingly popular in various business contexts. In this paper, we study how to effectively and appropriately use chatbots in logistics, particularly in dispatching freights automatically.

• KEYWORD(S):
• ai
• innovation
• operations

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

12/11/2022 — We study competition and collaboration between a bank and a shadow bank that lend in the same market plagued by adverse selection. The bank has cheaper funding, whereas the shadow bank is endowed with a better screening technology. Our innovation is to allow the bank to lend to the shadow bank, i.e., to finance its competitors.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance
• innovation

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