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At the Forefront of Their Fields

At Columbia Business School, our faculty members are at the forefront of research in their respective fields, offering innovative ideas that directly impact the practice of business today. A quick 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.

As a student at the School, this will greatly enrich your education. In Columbia classrooms, you are at the cutting-edge of industry, studying the practices that others will later adopt and teach. As any business leader will tell you, in a competitive environment, being first puts you at a distinct advantage over your peers. Learn economic development from Ray Fisman, the Lambert Family Professor of Social Enterprise and a rising star in the field, or real estate from Chris Mayer, the Paul Milstein Professor of Real Estate, a renowned expert and frequent commentator on complex housing issues. This way, when you complete your degree, you'll be set up to succeed.

The Columbia Advantage

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:

  • Highly skilled staff of full-time predoctoral fellows, summer research interns, and part-time research assistants
  • Access to centralized funding from the Dean's office and external grants to support research activities
  • Providing a state-of-the-art high-performance grid computing environment
  • Acquisition of proprietary data sets and access to various databases
  • Leading library which provides faculty with latest tools and techniques to enable digital scholarship

All these activities help to facilitate and streamline faculty research, and that of the doctoral students working with them.

 

Research at CBS

Filters
Type
Working Paper
Date

Carbon Dioxide as a Risky Asset

Author
Bauer, Adam Michael, Cristian Proistosescu, and Gernot Wagner

We develop a financial-economic model for carbon pricing with an explicit representation of decision making under risk and uncertainty that is consistent with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth assessment report. We find that this approach provides economic support for the warming targets in the Paris Agreement across a variety of specifications. We show that risk associated with high damages in the long term leads to stringent mitigation of carbon dioxide emissions in the near term.

Type
Journal Article
Date

Green Moral Hazards

Author
Wagner, Gernot and Daniel Zizzamia

Moral hazards are ubiquitous. Green ones typically involve technological fixes: Environmentalists often see ‘technofixes’ as morally fraught because they absolve actors from taking more difficult steps toward systemic solutions. Carbon removal and especially solar geoengineering are only the latest example of such technologies. We here explore green moral hazards throughout American history. We argue that dismissing (solar) geoengineering on moral hazard grounds is often unproductive.

Type
Working Paper
Date

Is Physical Climate Risk Priced? Evidence from Regional Variation in Exposure to Heat Stress

Author
Acharya, Viral V, Tim Johnson, M. Suresh Sundaresan, and Tuomas Tomunen

We exploit regional variations in exposure to heat stress to study if physical climate risk is priced in municipal and corporate bonds as well as in equity markets. We find that local exposure to damages related to heat stress equaling 1% of GDP is associated with municipal bond yield spreads that are higher by around 15 basis points per annum (bps), the effect being larger for longer-term, revenue-only and lower-rated bonds, and arising mainly from the expected increase in energy expenditures and decrease in labor productivity.

Type
Case Study
Date

The Cost to Achieve Net-Zero

Climate change brought on by human activities lead to acute and chronic hazards that threaten the planet; to reduce the chances of the most dangerous and irreversible damage, the global community must reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide. While more than 70 countries (~80% of global CO2 emissions and ~90% of global GDP) and over 5,000 influential companies have adopted net-zero commitments, coordination of an effort to this scale, given the complex economic, societal, governance and infrastructure considerations, is no easy feat.

Type
Working Paper
Date

Mitigating Disaster Risks in The Age Of Climate Change

Author
Hong, Harrison, Jinqiang Yang, and Neng Wang

Emissions control cannot address the consequences of global warming for weather disasters until decades later. We model regional-level mitigation or adaptation, which reduces disaster risks to capital in the interim. Mitigation depends on belief regarding the adverse consequences of global warming. Pessimism jumps with a disaster and slowly reverts in the absence of arrivals. Mitigation spending by firms is less than first-best because of externalities. We prove that capital taxes to fund public mitigation, which requires collective action, restores first-best.

Type
Working Paper
Date

How Do (Green) Innovators Respond to Climate Change Scenarios? Evidence from a Field Experiment

Author
Guzman, Jorge, Jean Oh, and Ananya Sen

This paper aims to unpack the pro-social motivations of green innovators. In a field experiment inviting SBIR grantees to learn more about and apply to MIT Solve, we provide scientifically valid scenarios varying the time-frame and scale of human cost of climate change. Innovators' response in clicks and applications increases with both scale and immediacy treatments. Our structural model estimates a welfare discount rate of 0.76%, providing a measure of innovators' value of future generations, and an elasticity to lives lost of 0.23, implying diminishing marginal concern to human loss.

Type
Journal Article
Date
Journal
Journal of Marketing

Buy Less, Buy Luxury: Understanding and Overcoming Product Durability Neglect for Sustainable Consumption

Author
Sun, Jennifer, Silvia Bellezza, and Neeru Paharia

The authors propose that purchasing luxury can be a unique means to engage in sustainable consumption because high-end products are particularly durable. Six studies examine the sustainability of high-end products, investigate consumer decision making when considering high-end versus ordinary goods, and identify effective marketing strategies to emphasize product durability, an important and valued dimension of sustainable consumption.

Type
Working Paper
Date

Applying Asset Pricing Theory to Calibrate the Price of Climate Risk

Author
Daniel, Kent, Robert Litterman, and Gernot Wagner

Pricing greenhouse gas emissions involves making trade-offs between consumption today and unknown damages in the (distant) future. This setup calls for an optimal control model to determine the carbon dioxide (CO2) price. It also relies on society's willingness to substitute consumption across time and across uncertain states of nature, the forte of Epstein-Zin preference specifications.

Type
Journal Article
Date
Journal
Nature Human Behavior

The critical role of second-order normative beliefs in predicating energy conservation

Author
Jachimowicz, J.M., Oliver Hauser, Julia D. O'Brien, E. Sherman, and Adam Galinsky

Sustaining large-scale public goods requires individuals to make environmentally friendly decisions today to benefit future generations. Recent research suggests that second-order normative beliefs are more powerful predictors of behaviour than first-order personal beliefs. We explored the role that second-order normative beliefs — the belief that community members think that saving energy helps the environment — play in curbing energy use.

Type
Journal Article
Date
Journal
Review of Environmental Economics and Policy

Reflections–What Would It Take to Reduce U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions 80 Percent by 2050?

This article investigates the cost and feasibility of reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent from 2005 levels by 2050. The United States has stated in its Paris Conference of the Parties (COP) 21 submission that this is its aspiration. I suggest that this goal can be reached at a net cost in the range of $37 to $135 billion/year. I assume that the goal is to be reached by extensive use of solar photovoltaic and wind energy (66 percent of generating capacity), in which case the cost of energy storage will play a key role in the overall cost.

Type
Journal Article
Date
Journal
Journal of Applied Corporate Finance

Governance and Climate Change: A Success Story in Mobilizing Investor Support for Corporate Responses to Climate Change

Author
Andersson, Mats, Patrick Bolton, and Frederic Samama

Until fairly recently, the main approach to getting business to respond to climate change has been top-down efforts to regulate emissions and enact various forms of "carbon pricing." The aim of such efforts has been to make businesses "internalize" the costs associated with greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Governments are expected to set the environmental protection rules for companies in their respective countries, and markets are expected to adjust to the new regulations and carbon prices.

Type
Newspaper/Magazine Article
Date
Publication
Huffington Post

The U.S. as a Climate Change Leader?

Author

I was thrilled to see thousands of activists and celebrities marching through Manhattan Sunday calling on the United Nations and government leaders to do more on climate change. Inaction by U.S. politicians is always at the epicenter of these calls, given Washington's lack of consensus on the issue. But this overlooks the track record of this country when it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.