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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

The Economic Effects of Immigration Pardons: Evidence from Venezuelan Entrepreneurs

Author
Cowgill, Bo, Jorge Guzman, and Dany Bahar

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.

Type
Newspaper/Magazine Article
Date
Publication
Harvard Business Review

Your Family Business Needs a Board

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.

Type
Working Paper
Date

Reporting Regulation and Corporate Innovation

Author
Breuer, Matthias, Christian Leuz, and Steven Vanhaverbeke

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.

Type
Newspaper/Magazine Article
Date
Publication
Research Policy

The Startup Cartography Project: Measuring and Mapping Entrepreneurial Ecosystems

Author
Andrews, RJ, Catherine Fazio, Jorge Guzman, Yupeng Liu, and Scott Stern

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).

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
Working Paper
Date

News and Markets in the Time of COVID-19

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.

Type
Journal Article
Date

What is the U.S. Comparative Advantage in Entrepreneurship? Evidence from Israeli Migrations to the United States

Author
Conti, Annamaria and Jorge Guzman

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.

Type
Book
Date

The Content, Impact, and Regulation of Streaming Video: The Next Generation of Media Emerges

Author

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.

Type
Book
Date

The Technology, Business, and Economics of Streaming Video: The Next Generation of Media Emerges

Author

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.

Type
Journal Article
Date
Journal
Current Opinion in Psychology

Power leads to action because it releases the psychological brakes on action

Author
Pike, B. and Adam Galinsky

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.

Type
Newspaper/Magazine Article
Date
Publication
Behavioural Public Policy

Making medications stick: Improving medication adherence by highlighting the personal health costs of non-compliance

Author
Jachimowicz, J.M., J.G. Gladstone, D. Berry, C.L. Kirkdale, T. Thornley, and Adam Galinsky

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.

Type
Newspaper/Magazine Article
Date
Publication
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Open to offers, but resisting requests: How the framing of anchors affects motivation and negotiated outcomes

Author
Majer, J.M., R. Trotschel, Adam Galinsky, and D. Loschelder

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.