At Columbia Business School, our faculty members are at the forefront of research in their respective fields, offering innovative ideas that directly impact business practice today. A glance at our publication on faculty research, CBS Insights, will give you a sense of the breadth and immediacy of the insight our professors provide.
Columbia Business School in conjunction with the Office of the Dean provides its faculty, PhD students, and other research staff with resources and cutting edge tools and technology to help push the boundaries of business research.
Specifically, our goal is to seamlessly help faculty set up and execute their research programs. This includes, but is not limited to:
All these activities help to facilitate and streamline faculty research, and that of the doctoral students working with them.
We assess how changes in the scientific consensus around equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS), as captured by the IPCC’s Fifth (AR5) and Sixth (AR6) Assessment Reports, impact policymakers’ willingness to take climate action. Taking the IPCC’s reports at face value, the ECS estimates in AR6 would have lowered a policymaker’s willingness to act on climate relative to AR5 due to a narrower "likely" range. However, Bayesian updating may reverse this conclusion.
Data assets are increasingly vital in modern economies, yet macroeconomic measurement is not well-adapted to capturing their value. Part of the problem is that data is an intangible asset: investments in data are missed in national accounts, and
Who behaves dominantly—and why? Much compelling prior research spotlights motivational sources. We focus here on beliefs, proposing that people are less likely to behave dominantly when they expect dominance to incur greater relationship costs. We posit that this situation-specific expectancy is shaped by a general competitive worldview, seeing the social world as a “competitive jungle.” In five preregistered studies, we tested whether those with a competitive worldview expected dominance to incur less relationship harm and whether expected relationship harm predicted dominance.
We study a regulatory spillover in which audit regulations for public firms can affect auditing practices for private firms through the channel of common partners—partners who audit both public and private firm clients. We exploit a regulation in China that applies only to public firm auditing and aims to enhance transparency and rigor in audit procedures. We find that audit partners are more inclined to issue modified opinions for private firm clients following the implementation of the regulation.
For general choice spaces, standard dynamic preference models cannot simultaneously satisfy the properties of time consistency, the separation of time and risk preferences, and the ability to accommodate an indifference to the timing of when risk is resolved. In the context of a consumption-portfolio choice problem often underlying asset pricing and macro models, we derive necessary and sufficient conditions such that all three properties are satisfied.
As generative AI systems rapidly improve, a key question emerges: how do users adapt to these changes, and when does such adaptation matter for realizing performance gains? This paper studies prompt adaptation—how users adjust their inputs in response to evolving model behavior—using a common experimental design applied to two preregistered tasks with 3,750 total participants who submitted nearly 37,000 prompts. We show that the importance of prompt adaptation depends critically on task structure.
Screening human capital based on signals such as job applications or entrepreneurial pitches is crucial for organizations. Signals are often informative insofar as they require differential knowledge and effort to produce. Generative AI (GAI) complicates screening by lowering the cost of producing impressive signals. We model the informational effects of GAI, showing that applicants' access to GAI can increase—but also decrease—an evaluator's screening mistakes. This result depends on how GAI affects experts' signals compared to non-experts'.
Climate-friendly technologies are the best way to stymie rising inflation — and will get better and cheaper over time.
Full text via nature.com [PDF]
We document new evidence on the capitalization, funding structure, and performance of private credit funds using comprehensive fund-and asset-level data covering most of the industry. Private credit funds are highly capitalized, with equity typically accounting for 65-80% of total assetsmore than six times the capitalization of U.S. banks, where equity represents about 10%. Debt usage is moderate and largely reflects bank credit lines used for liquidity management.
We explore how traders' equity capitalization influences asset prices in a framework that accounts for market power. In our model traders with capital constraints engage in transactions in an imperfectly competitive market. We demonstrate that looser capital constraints elevate both asset prices and price impact, which diminishes market liquidity. Using Canadian Treasury auction data, we illustrate how to apply our model to quantify these effects. We estimate the shadow costs of capital constraints by exploiting a temporary policy exemption during 2020-2021.
Observers are often dissatisfied with punishments handed down by judges for low-level crimes. This dissatisfaction emerges from a perceived trade-off between deterrence and severity. On the one hand, observers believe that harsher punishments are effective at deterring future criminal activity, but also balk at excessively harsh punishments because of their undue harm on transgressors. On the other hand, observers critique less harsh—and even proportionate—punishments for their inability to deter future crime.