Letter From the Chair
Welcome to the Management Division of Columbia Business School! Our website offers a window into the teaching and research activities of the division.
We explore the forces that affect the performance of organizations by studying individual and interpersonal behavior, group interactions, organizational structure and strategic interactions. The insights are relevant for established and large firms to small and growing entrepreneurial ventures. The members of our division are scholars and practitioners that shed light on management questions from different disciplines that include psychology, strategy, sociology, political science, and economics.
The Management Division prepares leaders for the future of business based on our theoretical and empirical research at the scientific frontier. We publish cutting edge research and translate it into insights that are practical and tangible for business leaders of today and tomorrow.
Stephan Meier
James P. Gorman Professor of Business; Chair of Management Division
In the Media
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Research
The Macroeconomics of Stakeholder Equilibria*
We propose one route to a more inclusive society. Our context is the prevailing one of high wealth inequality where stockholders alone supply the stochastic discount factor governing the allocation of capital. A large and pervasive pecuniary externality is thus imposed on non-stockholder workers, something we view as antithetical to the notion of an inclusive society.
Detecting Routines: Applications to Ridesharing CRM
Routines shape many aspects of day-to-day consumption. While prior work has established the importance of habits in consumer behavior, little work has been done to understand the implications of routines — which we define as repeated behaviors with recurring, temporal structures — for customer management. One reason for this dearth is the difficulty of measuring routines from transaction data, particularly when routines vary substantially across customers. We propose a new approach for doing so, which we apply in the context of ridesharing.
License to Layoff? Unemployment Insurance and the Moral Cost of Layoffs
This study presents moral cost as a novel behavioral constraint on firm resource adjustment, specifically layoff decisions that can cause severe harm to employees. Revising the prevailing negative view of managers as purely self-interested, we propose that managers care about their employees and incur moral cost from layoffs. We leverage expansions in unemployment insurance as a quasi-natural experiment that reduces economic hardship for laid-off workers and, in turn, the moral cost of layoffs to managers. We find that these expansions license larger layoffs.
Mitigating Disaster Risks in The Age Of Climate Change
Emissions abatement alone cannot address the consequences of global warming for weather disasters. We model how society adapts to manage disaster risks to capital stock. Optimal adaptation — a mix of firm-level efforts and public spending — varies as society learns about the adverse consequences of global warming for disaster arrivals. Taxes on capital are needed alongside those on carbon to achieve the first best.
Dynamic Banking and the Value of Deposits
We propose a theory of banking in which banks cannot perfectly control deposit flows. Facing uninsurable loan and deposit shocks, banks dynamically manage lending, wholesale funding, deposits, and equity. Deposits create value by lowering funding costs. However, when the bank is undercapitalized and at risk of breaching leverage requirements, the marginal value of deposits can turn negative as deposit inflows, by raising leverage, increase the likelihood of costly equity issuance. Banks’ inability to fully control leverage distinguishes them from non-depository intermediaries.
