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.
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.
Building infrastructure is hard; building a trillion dollars’ worth of infrastructure within a decade, while jump-starting U.S. manufacturing and protecting fragile ecosystems, is harder still. But if President Biden’s climate finance windfall is to position the United States to lead on clean-energy jobs, trade and innovation, that building needs to start now.
Speeding up the adoption of already proven and scalable technologies, and exposing the many hidden costs associated with fossil fuels, is a necessary goal. Achieving it will require new policies to guide investments in the right direction, and techno-optimists ought to be the loudest advocates.
The US entrepreneurial finance market has changed dramatically over the last two decades. Entrepreneurs who raise their first round of venture capital retain 30% more equity in their firm and are more likely to control their board of directors. Late-stage start-ups are raising larger amounts of capital in the private markets from a growing pool of traditional and new investors. These private market changes have coincided with a sharp decline in the number of firms going public—and when firms do go public, they are older and have raised more private capital.
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.
Agile decision making is imperative as you lead in a data-driven world. Uniquely bridging theory and practice, Decisions over Decimals unites data intelligence with human judgment to get to action – a sharp approach the authors refer to as Quantitative Intuition (QI). QI raises the power of thinking beyond big data without neglecting it and chasing the perfect decision while appreciating that such a thing can never really exist.
A board should be at the helm of any family business, steering the business in the right direction. If you wish to have a business that is resilient and has a positive impact on all stakeholders (e.g., employees, customers, vendors, and society) you must make sure your board is intact and functioning optimally. This article offers some questions to consider as you develop best practices for your own board, such as who should be on the board, whether you need an independent director, and how often your board should meet.
We investigate the impact of reporting regulation on corporate innovation. Exploiting thresholds in Europe’s regulation and a major enforcement reform in Germany, we find that forcing firms to publicly disclose their financial statements discourages innovative activities. Our evidence suggests that reporting regulation has significant real effects by imposing proprietary costs on innovative firms, which in turn diminish their incentives to innovate.
This paper presents the Startup Cartography Project, which offers a new set of entrepreneurial ecosystem statistics for the United States from 1988-2016. The SCP combines state-level business registration records with a predictive analytics approach to estimate the probability of “extreme” growth (IPO or high-value acquisition) at or near the time of founding for all newly-registered firms in a given year. The results indicate the ability of predictive analytics to identify high-potential start-ups at founding (using a variety of different approaches and measures).
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.
In late 2007, less than 10 years into the company’s existence, Google came out swinging on the clean energy front. To a fanfare of plaudits up and down Silicon Valley and well beyond, it declared “RE<C” as its goal: make renewable energy cheaper than coal. The company invested tens of millions of dollars into R&D efforts from concentrated solar power to hydrothermal drilling. Four years later, those efforts had been scrapped.
The initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic was characterized by voluminous, highly negative news coverage. Markets overreacted to uninformative news, and reacted more to news during high volatility periods. News coverage responded to lagged market activity, and causally impacted contemporaneous returns. The early part of the pandemic was characterized by pronounced feedback between news and markets. I propose a structural break test to identify the presence and end of such feedback episodes. This one ended in March 2020, which was knowable by the end of April.
The green transition comes with costs; but they are well worth it, and they pale in comparison to the costs of inaction. The ever-falling costs of renewables have not eliminated the politics of climate change. But they certainly have made our choices much easier.
We investigate underlying sources of the US entrepreneurial ecosystem's advantage compared to other innovative economies by assessing the benefits Israeli startups derive from migrating to the US. Addressing positive sorting into migration, we show that migrants raise larger funding amounts and are more likely to have a US trademark and be acquired than non-migrants. Migrants also achieve a higher acquisition value. However, their patent output is not larger.
Along with its interrelated companion volume, The Technology, Business, and Economics of Streaming Video, this book examines the next generation of TV—online video. It reviews the elements that lead to online platforms and video clouds and analyzes the software and hardware elements of content creation and interaction, and how these elements lead to different styles of video content.
Along with its interrelated companion volume, The Content, Impact, and Regulation of Streaming Video, this book covers the next generation of TV—streaming online video, with details about its present and a broad perspective on the future. It reviews the new technical elements that are emerging, both in hardware and software, their long-term trend, and the implications. It discusses the emerging ‘media cloud’ of video and infrastructure platforms, and the organizational form of such TV.
Licensed foreign telecom operators in Myanmar were required to also provide mobile financial services (MFS). Due to a lack of trust in the banking sector, the government believed the adoption of MFS would boost financial inclusion in the country by enabling seamless money transfers, bill payments, and more. As they entered the MFS market, foreign telecom operators Ooredoo and Telenor grappled with fundamental questions that would determine their launch and customer acquisition strategies.
Why does power lead to action? Theories of power suggest it leads to action because it presses the psychological gas pedal. A review of two decades of research finds, instead, that power releases the psychological brakes on action. Power releases the psychological brakes on action by making failure seem less probable and feel less painful, thereby decreasing the downside risks of action. Power releases the psychological brakes on action by shrouding the feelings and thoughts of others, thereby diminishing the perceived social costs of action.
Poor compliance of prescription medication is an ongoing public health crisis. Nearly half of patients do not take their medication as prescribed, harming their own health while also increasing public health care costs. Despite these detrimental consequences, prior research has struggled to establish cost-effective and scalable interventions to improve adherence rates.
Abundant research has established that first proposals can anchor negotiations and lead to a first-mover advantage. The current research developed and tested a motivated anchor adjustment hypothesis that integrates the literatures on framing and anchoring and highlights how anchoring in negotiations differs in significant ways from standard decision-making contexts.
The acceleration of start-up activity is often cited as a rationale for the R&D tax credit, a key innovation policy instrument adopted increasingly by US states over the past quarter century. While there is a strong empirical base linking the R&D tax credit to increased R&D expenditures and innovation, prior work has not provided causal evidence that this policy effects the rate of formation and growth potential of new businesses.
Entrepreneurial motivation is important to the process of economic growth. However, evidence on the motivations of innovative entrepreneurs, and how those motivations differ across fundamental characteristics, remains scant. We conduct three interrelated field experiments with the MIT Inclusive Innovation Challenge to study how innovative entrepreneurs respond to messages of money and social impact, and how this varies across gender and culture.
Cryptocurrencies provide an important dimension of innovation to the evolution of the exchange medium we call money. There are now over 2,000 such currencies, and their potential and volume is growing. How- ever, they will, collectively and in volume, create real problems for the monetary system of a country. Central banks, which are institutions tasked with providing monetary stability, are more essential than ever.
The main objectives of this commentary are to discuss the replication study of Adam and Galinsky (2012, Experiment 1) by Burns, Fox, Greenstein, Olbright, and Montgomery, clarify the main idea behind enclothed cognition, supplement the literature review presented by Burns et al., discuss why our original study failed to replicate, and offer potential avenues for future research. Overall, we believe the replication study was conducted competently, and thus the results cast doubt on our finding that wearing a lab coat decreases errors on the Stroop test. At the same time, Burns et al.
Prior research attributes the positive effects of passion on professional success to intrapersonal characteristics. We propose that interpersonal processes are also critical because observers confer status on and support those who express passion. These interpersonal benefits of expressing passion are, however, contingent on several factors related to the expresser, perceiver, and context. Six studies, including entrepreneurial pitches from Dragons' Den and two pre-registered experiments, establish three key findings.
Do men and women generate the same benefits from using their social ties? This study addresses this question by examining how resources are allocated within social networks. Prior research has commonly attributed observed gender differences in network benefits to the tendency for women to be embedded in networks that are poorer in social and economic resources. Implicit in this explanation is that if women had access to more valuable networks they would receive similar benefits as do men.
Using data on the entire population of businesses registered in the states of California and Massachusetts between 1995 and 2011, we decompose the well-established gender gap in entrepreneurship. We show that female-led ventures are 63 percentage points less likely than male-led ventures to obtain external funding (i.e., venture capital). However, investors' gendered preferences can, at most, explain about 35 percent of this differential (or 22 percentage points).
While the study of high-growth firms focuses predominantly on venture-financed startups, the majority of IPOs and acquisitions are achieved without venture capital. This paper uses a predictive analytics approach to shed light on these "missing" growth firms.
What does it take for success in the media business? Creativity, innovation, and performance, of course. Plus experience and good judgment. However, it also requires an understanding of the principles and tools of management. This book summarizes the major dimensions of a business school curriculum and applies them to the entire media, media-tech, and digital sectors. Its chapters cover—in a jargonless, non-technical way—the major management functions.
We introduce a novel approach to measure the founding strategic differentiation of startups and its relationship to follow-on performance. We use natural language processing and historical websites to estimate the similarity between the founding website of an individual startup, the historical website of public firms at the startup's founding year, and the founding website of other startups founded in the same year. We propose that distance in the value proposition stated in these websites represents differentiation in the market.
Being a successful manager or entrepreneur in the media and digital sector requires creativity, innovation, and performance. It also requires an understanding of the principles and tools of management. Aimed at the college market, this book is a short, foundational volume on media management. It summarizes the major dimensions of a business school curriculum and applies them to the entire media, media-tech, and digital sector. Its chapters cover—in a jargonless, non-technical way—the major functions of management.
The current research explores the role of power in moral decision-making. Some work suggests that power increases utilitarianism; other work suggests power increases deontological judgments. Conversely, we propose that power can both increase and decrease both deontological and utilitarian decisions by building on two recent insights in moral psychology. First, we utilize the moral orientation scale to assess four thinking styles that jointly predict moral dilemma decisions.
We (1) propose that evidence linking grit and performance is mixed because the measure used to assess grit—the Short Grit (Grit-S) scale (2)—captures only perseverance, not passion, whereas the definition of grit encompasses both perseverance and passion (3). Our studies find that the combination of perseverance (measured through the whole Grit-S scale) and passion (measured through the passion attainment scale) predicted higher performance.
Assessing the state of American entrepreneurship requires not simply counting the quantity but also the initial quality of new ventures. Combining comprehensive business registries and predictive analytics, we present estimates of entrepreneurial quantity and quality from 1988-2014. Rather than a secular pattern of declining business dynamism, our quality-adjusted measures follow a cyclical pattern sensitive to economic and capital market conditions.
Organizations often empower employees at all levels to propose innovation ideas that rely on their first-hand knowledge of their standard task (i.e. employee-initiated innovation). Many, however, struggle with motivating employees to develop innovative ideas that may benefit the firm, especially when the standard tasks for which employees are hired, measured and incentivized do not explicitly include innovation.
The current research explores the relationship between living abroad and self-concept clarity. We conducted six studies (N = 1,874) using different populations (online panels and MBA students), mixed methods (correlational and experimental), and complementary measures of self-concept clarity (self-report and self-other congruence through 360-degree ratings). Our results indicate that living abroad leads to a clearer sense of self because it prompts self-discerning reflections on whether parts of their identity truly define who they are or merely reflect their cultural upbringing.
The current research offers a new theoretical perspective on the relationship between power and persuasion. An agentic-communal model of power is presented that proposes power affects both the type of messages generated by communicators and the types of messages that persuade audiences. Compared to low-power and neutral states, high-power states produce a greater emphasis on information that conveys competence. As a consequence, high-power communicators generate messages with greater competence information and high-power audiences are persuaded more by competence information.
I study the benefits to entrepreneurial migration, focused on firms moving to Silicon Valley. Using a machine learning estimator and panel data, I find moving to Silicon Valley leads to higher startup performance on equity outcomes, financing, patenting, products, and revenue. These results are robust to a stringent coefficient stability test, and show no evidence of pre-trends. The benefits are partially driven by knowledge spillovers, and sensitive to capital market conditions during migration. Despite the benefits to migration, most startups do not move.
People quickly form impressions about moral character; for example, if people learn that someone cheated, they form a negative impression about that person's character and expect that person to cheat in the future. Four studies show that the formation of such moral character impressions depends on the degree of valence homogeneity in the target's context. We argue that this is the case because the degree of homogeneity in the context (the evaluative ecology) informs perceivers about the reliability of signals.
Moral Utility Theory provides an integrative framework for understanding the motivational basis of ethical decision making by modeling it as a process of subjective expected utility (SEU) maximization. The SEUs of ethical and unethical behavioral options are proposed to be assessed intuitively during goal pursuit, with unethical conduct emerging when the expected benefits of moral transgressions outweigh the expected costs.
Past studies have found that multicultural approaches to diversity can reduce prejudice and stimulate positive intergroup relations. The current research explored a possible negative side effect of multiculturalism: whether organizational diversity structures geared toward multiculturalism can conceal racial discrimination and delegitimize racial discrimination claims.
An essential function of the Federal Reserve is to manage the central payment system. The distributed ledger technology is a digital innovation with the potential to transform payments, clearing, and settlement processes. In my brief remarks, I will introduce the Federal Reserve's management of payment systems, emphasize how the distributed ledger technology could reduce operational and financial inefficiencies for payment systems, and highlight some potential challenges to the distributed ledger technology's broad implementation.
Air pollution is a serious problem that affects billions of people globally. Although the environmental and health costs of air pollution are well known, the present research investigates its ethical costs. We propose that air pollution can increase criminal and unethical behavior by increasing anxiety. Analyses of a 9-year panel of 9,360 U.S.
This integrative review presents the Agentic-Communal Model of Advantage and Disadvantage to offer insight into the psychology of inequality. This model examines the relation between individuals' position of advantage or disadvantage in a social hierarchy and their propensity toward agency and communion. We begin by identifying and reviewing four inequalities — Resources, Opportunities, Appraisals, and Deference, or the ROAD of inequality — that are fundamental to social advantage and disadvantage.
Research has established that competing head to head against a rival boosts motivation and performance. The present research investigated whether rivalry can affect performance over time and in contests without rivals. We examined the long-term effects of rivalry through archival analyses of postseason performance in multiple high-stakes sports contexts: National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I Men's Basketball and the major U.S.
Prior studies linking grit — defined as perseverance and passion for long-term goals — to performance are beset by contradictory evidence. As a result, commentators have increasingly declared that grit has limited effects. We propose that this inconsistent evidence has occurred because prior research has emphasized perseverance and ignored, both theoretically and empirically, the critical role of passion, which we define as a strong feeling toward a personally important value/preference that motivates intentions and behaviors to express that value/preference.
This article offers a primer on social power and social class with respect to their theoretical importance, conceptual distinction, and empirical relationship. We introduce and define the constructs of social power, social class, and one's psychological sense of power. We next explore the complex relationship between social power and social class. Because social class can produce a sense of power within an individual, studies on social power can inform theory and research on social class.
