Gender and the Workplace: New Research Finds Women Are More Likely to Pursue Meaningful Work
Columbia Business School Study Finds Difference between Men and Women’s Attitudes Toward Their Jobs
Columbia Business School Study Finds Difference between Men and Women’s Attitudes Toward Their Jobs
The Theodora Rutherford Inclusion Award celebrates CBS students who are committed to diverse experiences and inclusive leadership.
Six Studies Address Key Topics Crucial for Enhancing Outcomes for Women in Business
In-group bias can be detrimental for communities and economic development. We study the causal effect of financial constraints on in-group bias in prosocial behaviors – cooperation, norm enforcement, and sharing – among low-income rice farmers in rural Thailand, who cultivate and harvest rice once a year. We use a between-subjects design – randomly assigning participants to experiments either before harvest (more financially constrained) or after harvest. Farmers interacted with a partner either from their own village (in-group) or from another village (out-group).
This paper shows that providing undocumented immigrants with an immigration pardon, or amnesty, increases their economic activity in the form of higher entrepreneurship. Using administrative census data linked to the complete formal business registry, we study a 2018 policy shift in Colombia that made nearly half a million Venezuelan undocumented migrants eligible for a pardon. Our identification uses quasi-random variation in the amount of time available to get the pardon, introducing a novel regression discontinuity approach to study this policy.
Diversity initiatives are designed to help workers from disadvantaged backgrounds achieve equitable opportunities and outcomes in organizations. However, these programs are often ineffective. To better understand less-than-desired outcomes and the shifting diversity landscape, we synthesize literature on how corporate affirmative action programs became diversity initiatives and current literature on their effectiveness. We focus specifically on work dealing with mechanisms that make diversity initiatives effective as well as their unintended consequences.
David M. Schizer served as a dean of the Law School from 2004 to 2014 and is one of the nation’s leading tax scholars. His research also focuses on nonprofits, energy law, and corporate governance.
Michael Ewens is the David L. and Elsie M. Dodd Professor of Finance and co-director of the Private Equity Program. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), Associate Editor of the Journal of Financial Economics, Associate Editor at the Review of Financial Studies, Assoicate Editor at Management Science, Associate Editor at the Journal of Corporate Finance, and co-editor of the Journal of Economics & Management Strategy. He received a Ph.D.
Adam Galinsky is the Vice Dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and Paul Calello Professor of Leadership and Ethics at the Columbia Business School.
Professor Galinsky has published more than 300 scientific articles, chapters, and teaching cases in the fields of management and social psychology. His research and teaching focus on leadership, negotiations, diversity, decision-making, and ethics.
Ashli Carter is a Lecturer in the Management Division at Columbia Business School. Currently, she teaches topics in leadership, negotiations, and cultivating a growth mindset in the MBA and Executive Education programs, as well as for CBS administrators and staff. Prior to joining CBS faculty, she taught MBA and undergraduate courses in leadership and professional ethics at NYU Stern where she was an Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow of Management and Organizations.
Wei Cai joined Columbia University in 2020. Her research interests revolve around management accounting, organizational culture, and diversity and inclusion. Her research broadly investigates how to measure and manage key organizational capital. For example, she examines how corporate leaders and managers can deliberately design and shape organizational culture, and improve organizational outcomes through innovative management control systems. She uses multiple research methods including statistical analyses of archival data sources, field experiments, and surveys.
Loss aversion can occur in riskless and risky choices. We present novel evidence on both in a non-student sample (660 randomly selected customers of a car manufacturer). We measure loss aversion in riskless choice in endowment effect experiments within and between subjects and find similar levels of average loss aversion in both. The subjects of the within study also participate in a simple lottery choice task which arguably measures loss aversion in risky choices. We find substantial heterogeneity in both measures of loss aversion.
We extract aggregate supply and aggregate demand shocks for the US economy from macroeconomic data on inflation, real GDP growth, core inflation and the unemployment gap. We first use unconditional non-Gaussian features in the data to achieve identification of these structural shocks while imposing minimal economic assumptions. We find that recessions in the 1970s and 1980s are better characterized as driven by supply shocks while later recessions were driven primarily by demand shocks. The Great Recession exhibited large negative shocks to both demand and supply.
This paper studies lockdown policy in a dynamic economy without government commitment. Lockdown imposes a cap on labor supply, which improves health prospects at the cost of economic output and consumption. A government would like to commit to the extent of future lockdowns in order to guarantee an economic outlook that supports efficient levels of investment into intermediate inputs. However, such a commitment is not credible, since investments are sunk at the time when the government chooses a lockdown. As a result, lockdown under lack of commitment deviates from the optimal policy.
This paper studies lockdown policy in a dynamic economy without government commitment. Lockdown imposes a cap on labor supply, which improves health prospects at the cost of economic output and consumption. A government would like to commit to the extent of future lockdowns in order to guarantee an economic outlook that supports efficient levels of investment into intermediate inputs. However, such a commitment is not credible, since investments are sunk at the time when the government chooses a lockdown. As a result, lockdown under lack of commitment deviates from the optimal policy.
Turning around distressed operations is an alternative response to underperformance — as contrasted with using transactions such as divestitures or resource redeployment to deal with troublesome assets during corporate renewal. Taking the perspective of private-equity owners whose interests are primarily financial, we explain how their approach to turnarounds of troubled companies may differ from that of managers within publicly traded firms who may envision the realization of longer-term sources of operating synergy among their firms' lines of business.
An historical review of managers' corporate renewal decisions reveals an evolving pattern away from using operating turnarounds in favor of making changes in corporate scope via transactions. One explanation for this progression away from operations is that financial valuation considerations supplant other inputs to managers' strategic logics — a reflection of the rising influence of financial institutions as activist owners.
Choice architecture tools, commonly known as nudges, powerfully impact decisions and can improve welfare. Yet it is unclear who is most impacted by nudges. If nudge effects are moderated by socioeconomic status (SES), these differential effects could increase or decrease disparities across consumers. Using field data and several preregistered studies, the authors demonstrate that consumers with lower SES, domain knowledge, and numerical ability are impacted more by a wide variety of nudges.
Choice architecture tools, commonly known as nudges, powerfully impact decisions and can improve welfare. Yet it is unclear who is most impacted by nudges. If nudge effects are moderated by socioeconomic status (SES), these differential effects could increase or decrease disparities across consumers. Using field data and several preregistered studies, the authors demonstrate that consumers with lower SES, domain knowledge, and numerical ability are impacted more by a wide variety of nudges.