2/1/2015 — In this study, we use hourly data on store traffic, sales, and labor from 41 stores of a large retail chain to identify the extent of understaffing in retail stores and quantify its impact on sales and profitability. Using an empirical model motivated from queueing theory, we calculate the benchmark staffing level for each store, and establish the presence of systematic understaffing during peak hours.

• KEYWORD(S):
• management
• operations

1/27/2015 — In this discussion, I use Holzhacker, Krishnan, and Mahlendorf (this issue), hereafter HKM, as a point of departure from which to discuss the current state of the two research areas to which they contribute. I will present some big-picture thoughts on research opportunities in their source literatures — the literature on financial management in health care and the literature on cost stickiness — and speculate as to where these literatures might go in the future.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting
• economic development
• healthcare
• private equity
• risk management

1/19/2015 — We empirically investigate one form of illegal investor‐level tax evasion and its effect on foreign portfolio investment. In particular, we examine a form of round‐tripping tax evasion in which U.S. individuals hide funds in entities located in offshore tax havens and then invest those funds in U.S. securities markets. Employing Becker's () economic theory of crime, we identify the tax evasion component by examining how foreign portfolio investment varies with changes in the incentives to evade and the risks of detection. To our knowledge, this is the first empirical evidence of investor‐level tax evasion affecting cross‐border equity and debt investment.

• KEYWORD(S):
• international tax

1/19/2015 — We analyze why firms use non-intermediated short-term debt by studying the commercial paper (CP) market. Using a comprehensive database of CP issuers and issuance activity, we show that firms use CP to provide start-up financing for capital investment.

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

1/17/2015 — We document differences in human capital deployment between diversified and focused firms. We find that diversified firms have higher labor productivity and that they redeploy labor to industries with better prospects in response to changing opportunities. The opportunities and incentives provided in internal labor markets in turn affect the development of workers' human capital. We find that workers more frequently transition to other industries in which their diversified firms operate and with smaller wage losses than workers in the open market, even when they leave their original firms. Overall, internal labor markets provide a bright side to corporate diversification.

• KEYWORD(S):
• economic development
• finance
• organizational behavior

1/1/2015 — We examine the role of general counsel (GC) in firms' financial reporting quality. GCs have a broad oversight role within the firm, including keeping the firm in compliance with laws and regulations and dealing with potential violations with respect to financial reporting. Several high-profile U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigations have resulted in lawsuits or indictments against GCs for perpetrating financial fraud and caused many to ask: where were the gatekeepers?

1/1/2015 — This study examines the economic impact of continuing care retirement communities on North Carolina and the potential they have for creating jobs and expanding the state's tax base. The report suggests that with North Carolina’s older adult population set to explode by nearly 70% in the next twenty years (an additional one million seniors), the impact of CCRCs on our state’s economic health will be staggering.

• KEYWORD(S):
• aging
• inequality
• north carolina

1/1/2015 — The North Carolina Community College System is faced with a major dilemma: how to reduce the time to degree and increase the community colleges’ success or graduation rates, which system-wide now stands at 30% in four years. This research was designed to gain qualitative insights from a sample of recent graduates, that is, students who managed to graduate in four or fewer years, on critical success factors. From the standpoint of strategy development, we assert that building on success may be more productive than focusing on deficits in improving community college completion rates.

• KEYWORD(S):
• higher education
• north carolina

1/1/2015 — Yield curve fluctuations across different currencies are highly correlated. This paper investigates this phenomenon by exploring the channels through which macroeconomic shocks are transmitted across borders. Macroeconomic shocks affect current and expected future short-term rates as central banks react to changing economic environments. Investors could also respond to these shocks by altering their required compensation for risk. Macroeconomic shocks thus influence bond yields both through a policy channel and through a risk compensation channel.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance
• risk management

1/1/2015 — Many recent corporate scandals have been described as resulting from a slippery slope in which a series of small infractions gradually increased over time (e.g., McLean & Elkind, 2003). However, behavioral ethics research has rarely considered how unethical behavior unfolds over time.

• KEYWORD(S):
• ethics
• organizational behavior

1/1/2015 — Retail store associates are frontline employees of retail organizations and are responsible for delivering superior in-store experience to its customers. Store associates provide customer service through direct interaction with customers as well as through indirect means such as maintaining a clean store and ensuring that the shelves are fully stocked.

• KEYWORD(S):
• management
• operations

12/31/2014 — Hart (2011) argues that the Aumann and Serrano (2008) and Foster and Hart (2009) measures of riskiness have an objective and universal appeal with respect to a subset of expected utility preferences, UH. We show that mean-riskiness decision-making criteria using either measure violate expected utility and are generally inconsistent with optimal portfolio choices made by investors with preferences in UH.

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

12/18/2014 — The spatial diffusion and adoption of rDNA methods, Regional Studies. The 1980 patent granted to Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer for their development of rDNA technology played a critical role in the establishment of the modern biotechnology industry. From the birth of this general-purpose technology in the San Francisco Bay area, rDNA-related knowledge diffused across sectors and regions of the US economy.

• KEYWORD(S):
• innovation

12/11/2014 — We study whether asset-class risk dynamics can help explain the predominantly negative stock-bond return relation and movements in the term-structure's slope over 1997-2011.

• KEYWORD(S):
• equity markets
• finance
• risk management

12/5/2014 — In "Quitters Never Win: The (Adverse) Incentive Effects of Competing with Superstars," Brown (2011) argues that professional golfers perform relatively poorly in tournaments in which Tiger Woods also competes. We show that Brown's conclusions are based on a problematic empirical design, which if adjusted yields no evidence of a superstar effect.

• KEYWORD(S):
• organizational behavior

12/4/2014 — The multigenerational survival rate for family-owned businesses is not good. Lack of a shared vision for the family enterprise and weak next-generation leadership are often cited as two of the leading reasons for the failure of family firms to successfully transition from one generation of family ownership to the next. The climate of the business-owning family has also been suggested as important to the performance of the family enterprise. Despite these commonly held tenets, there is a lack of rigorous quantitative research that explores the relationships among these three factors.

• KEYWORD(S):
• family business

12/1/2014 — We investigate whether firms and their top executives bear reputational costs from engaging in aggressive tax avoidance activities. Prior literature has posited that reputational costs partially explain why so many firms apparently forgo the benefits of tax avoidance, the so-called “under-sheltering puzzle.” We employ a database of 118 firms that were subject to public scrutiny for having engaged in tax shelters, representing the largest sample of publicly identified corporate tax shelters analyzed to date.

• KEYWORD(S):
• federal tax

12/1/2014 — In closed-end funds, a managed distribution policy (MDP) is a dividend commitment potentially requiring the liquidation of assets. We argue that MDPs lower managerial claims on fund assets and, when the fund is at a discount, increase shareholder value. This transfer of wealth can be rationalized by managers wishing to deter a challenge from activist shareholders through a costly proxy vote. We find strong empirical evidence that managers respond to the presence of activists using MDPs, that MDPs constitute an effective wealth transfer to shareholders, and that activists are less likely to challenge management when an MDP is in place.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance

12/1/2014 — In this article, we analyze how retailers change their inventory investment behavior in response to macroeconomic shocks. We examine if service level, as measured by the ratio of stockout to inventory holding costs, can explain the differences in observed behavior across retailers. We use data on macroeconomic indicators and quarterly filings of US public retailers from 1985 to 2009 to estimate a dynamic model of short- and long-term impact of macroeconomic shocks on inventory investment.

• KEYWORD(S):
• economics
• investments
• operations

11/14/2014 — We study the role of information in asset pricing models with long-run cash flow risk. When investors can distinguish short- from long-run consumption risks (full information), the model generates a sizable equity risk premium only if the equity term structure slopes up, contrary to the data.

• KEYWORD(S):
• equity markets
• finance
• investments

11/5/2014 — This study analyzes optimal replenishment policies that minimize expected discounted cost of multi-product stochastic inventory systems. The distinguishing feature of the multi-product inventory system that we analyze is the existence of correlated demand and joint-replenishment costs across multiple products.

• KEYWORD(S):
• operations
• supply chain

11/1/2014 — I provide big picture comments on the review of the banking literature in accounting by Beatty and Liao (2014). Beatty and Liao (2014) does a service to the accounting field by providing an intelligent, well organized and accessible point of entry to banking research in accounting.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting

11/1/2014 — Employees are getting less sleep, which has been shown to deplete self-regulatory resources and increase unethical behavior (Barnes, Schaubroeck, Huth, & Ghumman, 2011; Christian & Ellis, 2011). In this study, we extend the original mediated model by examining the role of 2 moderators in the relationship between sleep deprivation, depletion, and deceptive behavior.

• KEYWORD(S):
• ethics
• organizational behavior

11/1/2014 — We analyze the sizes of standard cointegration tests applied to data subject to linear interpolation, discovering evidence of substantial size distortions induced by the interpolation. We propose modifications to these tests to effectively eliminate size distortions from such tests conducted on data interpolated from end-of-period sampled low-frequency series. Our results generally do not support linear interpolation when alternatives such as aggregation or mixed-frequency-modified tests are possible.

• KEYWORD(S):
• data project

10/28/2014 — This paper documents macroeconomic forecasting during the global financial crisis by two key central banks: the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

• KEYWORD(S):
• economic development policy

10/23/2014 — We disentangle and study the relative importance of different risk preferences in explaining extended warranty purchases and the high premia paid for them. Empirical and behavioral research on insurance is at odds with whether diminishing returns (curvature of the utility function), or loss aversion and nonlinear probability weighting lead to observed consumer behavior. This lack of consensus is primarily due to the inability of standard choice data to separate different risk preferences, and the consequent need to rely on strong parametric assumptions.

• KEYWORD(S):
• marketing
• risk management

10/1/2014 — This paper investigates whether investor-level taxes affect corporate payout policy decisions. We predict and find a surge of special dividends in the final months of 2010 and 2012, immediately before individual-level dividend tax rates were expected to increase.

• KEYWORD(S):
• federal tax

10/1/2014 — Today's marketing environment is characterized by a surge in multichannel shopping and ever more choice in advertising channels. This requires firms to understand how both digital and traditional advertising drive sales within the same channel (e.g., digital advertising affecting online sales) and across channels (e.g., digital advertising affecting offline sales).

• KEYWORD(S):
• marketing

10/1/2014 — Cross-training of nursing staff has been used in hospitals to reduce labor cost, provide scheduling flexibility, and meet patient demand effectively. However, cross-trained nurses may not be as productive as regular nurses in carrying out their tasks because of a new work environment and unfamiliar protocols in the new unit.

• KEYWORD(S):
• data project
• operations

10/1/2014 — Cross-training of nursing staff has been used in hospitals to reduce labor cost, provide scheduling flexibility, and meet patient demand effectively. However, cross-trained nurses may not be as productive as regular nurses in carrying out their tasks because of a new work environment and unfamiliar protocols in the new unit.

• KEYWORD(S):
• data project
• operations

9/18/2014 — The Strategic Management Journal encourages studies using qualitative empirical methods that investigate important research questions and phenomena in order to generate new insights. We believe that qualitative research often provides a means of identifying generalizable patterns concerning important questions in the field of strategic management.

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

9/14/2014 — Experimentation, iteration and improvisational change are all the rage in today’s dynamic business environments. But when evaluating new business opportunities, there’s a paradoxical tension between strategic focus and flexibility that can define or break your busines

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

9/10/2014 — We present a survey design that generalizes static conjoint experiments to elicit inter-temporal adoption decisions for durable goods. We show that consumers’ utility and discount functions in a dynamic discrete choice model are jointly identified using data generated by this specific design. In contrast, based on revealed preference data, the utility and discount functions are generally not jointly identified even if consumers’ expectations are known.

• KEYWORD(S):
• earnings
• marketing

9/8/2014 — We study a new class of conditional skewness models based on conditional quantiles regressions. The approach is much inspired by work of Hal White. To handle multiple horizons I consider quantile MIDAS regressions which amount to direct forecasting—as opposed to iterated forecasting—conditional skewness.

• KEYWORD(S):
• data project
• finance

9/1/2014 — We analyze how consumer switching costs affect firm pricing and profits under competition. In our model, duopolists who implement customized pricing compete over two periods.

• KEYWORD(S):
• strategy and entrepreneurship

9/1/2014 — Beginning with Anderson, Banker, and Janakiraman (2003), a rapidly growing literature attributes the short-run asymmetric cost response to activity changes (i.e., sticky costs) as resulting from short-run managerial choices. In this paper, we are agnostic on the theory of sticky costs. Rather, we focus on empirical tests of cost stickiness.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting
• management

9/1/2014 — This paper examines the relation between tax enforcement and financial reporting quality. The government, due to its tax claim on firm profits, is de facto the largest minority shareholder in almost all corporations. Therefore, the government, like other shareholders, has an interest in the accurate reporting of (taxable) income and preventing insiders from siphoning corporate funds to obtain private benefits.

• KEYWORD(S):
• federal tax

9/1/2014 — Campbell, Hilscher, and Szilagyi (2008) show that firms with a high probability of default have abnormally low average future returns. We show that firms with a high potential for default (death) also tend to have a relatively high probability of extremely large (jackpot) payoffs.

• KEYWORD(S):
• equity markets
• finance
• risk management

9/1/2014 — Conventional wisdom dictates that convenience goods should be distributed as intensively as possible. Still, exclusivity arrangements are rapidly gaining way in grocery retailing.

• KEYWORD(S):
• marketing

9/1/2014 — This paper deals with the estimation of the risk-return trade-off. We use a MIDAS model for the conditional variance and allow for possible switches in the risk-return relation through a Markov-switching specification. We find strong evidence for regime changes in the risk-return relation.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance
• risk management

9/1/2014 — Internet-based business-to-business platforms involve a buyer side transacting with a seller side, both of which are customers of an intermediary platform firm. Dyadic viewpoints implicit in conventional theories of customer orientation thus must be modified to apply to a triadic relationship system (seller-platform-buyer) in platform settings.

• KEYWORD(S):
• marketing

8/26/2014 — Volatility component models have received considerable attention recently, not only because of their ability to capture complex dynamics via a parsimonious parameter structure, but also because it is believed that they can handle well structural breaks or nonstationarities in asset price volatility.

• KEYWORD(S):
• asset pricing

7/24/2014 — DaimlerChrysler’s origins date as far back as 1883, when its predecessor “Benz & Co. Rheinische Gasmotoren-Fabrik, Mannheim” was founded by Karl Benz in Germany. The Chrysler Corporation was founded in the United States in1925 by Walter P. Chrysler. In November 1998 Chrysler and Daimler Benz completed a $36 billion merger, forming DaimlerChrysler, the fifth largest automaker in the world with estimated sales of $160 billion.

• KEYWORD(S):
• global business

7/1/2014 — Recent studies emphasize that survey-based inflation risk measures are informative about future inflation and thus useful for monetary authorities. However, these data are typically available at a quarterly frequency whereas monetary policy decisions require a more frequent monitoring of such risks.

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

7/1/2014 — Interorganizational relationships connect people affiliated with organizations rather than corporate actors themselves. The managers and owners of organizations therefore do not always control these connections and consequently often cannot profit from them. We discuss the circumstances under which individuals (versus organizations) own these relationships (and therefore also the social capital generated by them).

• KEYWORD(S):
• organizational behavior

6/27/2014 — Often the story of successful places is predicated on the story of an individual who was instrumental in creating institutions and making connections that were transformative for a local economy. Certainly this is the case for Silicon Valley in California and Fred Terman, the Dean of Engineering at Stanford University, USA, who offered his garage to his students, Hewlett and Packard, and encouraged other start-ups. Or George Kozmetsky, the founder of Teledyne, who created the Institute for Innovation, Creativity and Capital (IC2) and mentored over 260 local computer companies in Austin, Texas. Any reading of the lives of these individuals highlights their connection to community and motivations beyond making profits.

• KEYWORD(S):
• entrepreneurial ecosystems

6/13/2014 — We study a longitudinal fit model of adaptation and its association with the longitudinal risk-return relationship. The model allows the firm to adjust its position in response to partial learning about a changing environment characterized by two path-dependent processes—a random walk and a stochastic trend.

• KEYWORD(S):
• data project
• risk management
• strategy and entrepreneurship

6/1/2014 — Existing models of industry evolution describe a smooth pattern over time in which initial growth in the number of firms is followed by a sharp decrease due to a shakeout and an eventual stabilization as the industry reaches maturity.

• KEYWORD(S):
• emerging markets
• global business
• innovation
• strategy and entrepreneurship

6/1/2014 — Young firms disproportionately employ and hire young workers. On average, young employees in young firms earn higher wages than young employees in older firms. Young employees disproportionately join young firms with greater innovation potential and that exhibit higher growth, conditional on survival. We argue that the skills, risk tolerance, and joint dynamics of young workers contribute to their disproportionate share of employment in young firms. Moreover, an increase in the supply of young workers is positively related to new firm creation in high-tech industries, supporting a causal link between the supply of young workers and new firm creation.

• KEYWORD(S):
• aging

6/1/2014 — Private labels or store brands have witnessed considerable growth in the last few decades, especially in grocery products. However, market shares of store brand vary considerably across categories, markets, and countries. A natural question of interest to academics and practitioners is what factors influence store brand market shares.

• KEYWORD(S):
• global business
• marketing