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

3/28/2022 — This study examines the information content of risk factor disclosures following private debt issuance. Loan issuance is an information-intensive activity that significantly increases private information production through borrower-lender interactions.

• KEYWORD(S):
• accounting

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

2/11/2022 — Using 391 high-skilled firm entries in the U.S. from 1990–2010, we estimate the effects of the firm entry on incumbent residents’ consumption, finances, and mobility. We compare outcomes for residents living close to the entry location with those living far away while controlling for their proximity to potential high-skilled firm entry sites.

• KEYWORD(S):
• real estate
• strategy and entrepreneurship

2/9/2022 — We document that there is commonality in the loan fees that short sellers pay, and the common component of loan fees explains a significant amount of loan fee variation. While the top principal component of stock returns only explains 28.3% of their variation, we find that the top principal component of loan fees explains 45.6% of their variation.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance

2/1/2022 — We examine the role of political affiliation during the selection of Opportunity Zones, a place-based tax incentive enacted by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. We find governors are on average 7.6% more likely to select a census tract as an Opportunity Zone when the tract’s state representative is a member of the governor’s political party. This effect is incremental to local demographic factors that increased the likelihood of selection, such as lower income levels and preceding improvements in local conditions.

• KEYWORD(S):
• opportunity zones

2/1/2022 — How does sentiment in a pitch affect an entrepreneur’s fundraising outcomes? Although research suggests that negativity in entrepreneurial “pitches” to investors adversely impacts resource acquisition, there is a lack of empirical research showing whether, and to what extent, this is true. We study over 30,000 entrepreneurial loan requests from one of the largest loan marketplaces to understand how the sentiment in text-only pitches to investors affects fundraising. In contrast to prior literature, we find that negatively-worded pitches are funded faster than positively-worded ones.

• KEYWORD(S):
• entrepreneurial ecosystems
• strategy and entrepreneurship

1/14/2022 — Research and practice suggest that cofounded ventures outperform solo-founded ventures. Yet, little work has explored the conditions under which solo founding might be preferable to cofounding. Combining an inductive case-oriented analysis with a Qualitative Comparative Analysis of 70 new entrepreneurial ventures, we examine why and how solo founders can be as successful as their peers in cofounded ventures.

• KEYWORD(S):
• venture capital

1/4/2022 — Prior evidence suggests that macroprudential policy has small and insignificant effects on the volume of portfolio flows. We show, however, that these minor effects mask very different relationships across the global financial cycle. A tighter ex-ante macroprudential stance amplifies the impact of global risk shocks on bond and equity flows—increasing outflows by significantly more during risk-off episodes and increasing inflows significantly more during risk-on episodes.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance

1/1/2022 — The Trends in Entrepreneurship Report brings together expertise and data from academia, industry and policy to highlight relevant topics facing entrepreneurs and investors today. For the 2022 annual report, we invited researchers to submit trends based on their own emerging research. We welcomed submissions related to current topics in entrepreneurship, with a particular interest on trends related to funding; ecosystems; teams and talent; emerging technologies; and addressing diversity, equity and inclusion in entrepreneurship and small business. Each trend was reviewed for quality and relevance by our editorial board

• KEYWORD(S):
• strategy and entrepreneurship

1/1/2022 — Although past research demonstrates that perceived fairness leads to many benefits, it also tends to assume that fairness flows almost exclusively from justice adherence. We instead reason that when employees form fairness judgments, they consider not only the extent to which supervisors adhere to justice but also why supervisors do so.

• KEYWORD(S):
• operations
• organizational behavior

12/17/2021 — Do founder-CEOs have an expiration date? In the wake of Jack Dorsey’s resignation from Twitter, some have begun asking whether the move could herald a new era, in which founders voluntarily step aside rather than sticking around for decades or waiting to be ousted. To explore the value added by a founder-CEO, the authors analyzed stock price and financial performance data from more than 2,000 publicly traded companies.

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

11/2/2021 — Public calls for a national paid sick leave policy continue to grow in the United States. In the absence of a federal policy, many localities and states enacted their own paid sick leave mandates. We document an average increase of 1.9% in employment following the implementation of a paid sick leave policy.

• KEYWORD(S):
• finance
• labor

10/17/2021 — Following state-level legal changes that increase labor dismissal costs, firms increase their innovation in new processes that facilitate the adoption of cost-saving production methods, especially in industries with a large share of labor costs in total costs. Firms with high innovation ability exhibit larger increases in process innovation and capital-labor ratios, an effect driven by both increases in capital investment and decreases in employment. By facilitating the adjustment of the input mix when conditions in input markets change, innovation ability allows firms to mitigate value losses and is a key driver of their performance.

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

9/30/2021 — This paper studies how corporate tax cuts in developed countries affect economies in the developing world. We focus on one of the most prominent fiscal policies – the corporate income tax regime – and study a major U.K. tax cut as an exogenous shock to foreign investment in Africa.

• KEYWORD(S):
• global business
• tax

9/28/2021 — Financial hardships caused by the COVID-19 pandemic are hitting low-income families in North Carolina especially hard, according to a new report released by the North Carolina Community Action Association (NCCAA). The study was commissioned by NCCAA to gauge how the pandemic was affecting its efforts to combat poverty and facilitate self-sufficiency in low-income communities.

8/25/2021 — Seven powerful demographic trends—analogous to gale force wind gusts in an adverse weather event—constitute potentially powerful disruptors of business and commerce in the years ahead. Four of the gale force demographic disruptors—slowing total and foreign-born population growth, white population loss, and declining fertility— have evolved over the past several decades.

8/24/2021 — Certification by analysts on a FinTech platform that harnesses the “wisdom of crowds” is associated with successful initial coin offerings (ICOs). We show that favorable ratings by a group of analysts with diverse backgrounds positively predict fundraising success and long-run token performance. Analysts’ ratings also help detect potential fraud ex ante. We document that analysts have career concerns and are incentivized by the platform to issue informative ratings. Overall, our results suggest that a market-based certification process that relies on a diverse group of individuals is at play in financing blockchain startups.

• KEYWORD(S):
• blockchain
• fintech

8/16/2021 — To increase revenue or improve customer service, companies are increasingly personalizing their product or service offerings based on their customers' history of interactions. In this paper, we show how call centers can improve customer service by implementing personalized priority policies.

• KEYWORD(S):
• management