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.
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.
Although there have been numerous studies on voluntary departure—i.e., quit behavior—the way race influences voluntary departure is not yet settled. Some studies suggest racial minorities are more apt to voluntarily depart than non-minority employees due to discrimination in the workplace. Other studies suggest racial minorities are more apt to stay due to discrimination in the labor market.
We examine how managers' political power reallocates resources in the internal capital market. By shifting the focus from financial to firm-specific, non-financial resources that are difficult to evaluate and zero-sum in nature, we revise the prevailing view that managers' political power plays a significant yet contingent role under financial constraint and weak governance. We instead characterize managerial political power as an intrinsic, inescapable determinant of internal competition and resource allocation.
Strategies for coping with businesses that face the declining demand of late life-cycle products are
revisited in light of the enhanced competitive capabilities made possible by access to the World
Wide Web and connectivity to the Internet. Presumably endgame competitors may draw upon a
wider variety of implementation options on both the demand and supply sides when serving the
highly-connected markets reached via Internet access. Results are posited to be mixed since supply-
Modifying attitudes and behaviours related to climate change is difficult. Attempts to offer information, appeal to values and norms or enact policies have shown limited success. Here we examine whether participation in a climate prediction market can shift attitudes by having the market act as a non-partisan adjudicator and by prompting participants to put their ‘money where their mouth is’.
In-group bias can be detrimental for communities and economic development. We study the causal effect of financial constraints on in-group bias in prosocial behaviors – cooperation, norm enforcement, and sharing – among low-income rice farmers in rural Thailand, who cultivate and harvest rice once a year. We use a between-subjects design – randomly assigning participants to experiments either before harvest (more financially constrained) or after harvest. Farmers interacted with a partner either from their own village (in-group) or from another village (out-group).
Why do dominant incumbents decline? Extant analyses of declining dominance largely focus on the erosion of technological bases of dominance. In contrast, our novel explanation focuses on the effect of geographic fragmentation on the erosion of demand-side barriers to entry and rise in strategic rivalry along the evolutionary path of the dominant incumbent’s growing industry.
Nearly all students experience stress as they pursue important academic goals. Because stress can be magnified for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, it becomes important to identify interventions that can help mitigate this stress, particularly for these populations as they enter academic environments. We examine the effects of stress mindset and stress management interventions administered to students from disadvantaged backgrounds (N = 140) before freshman year.
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.
Despite the skyrocketing of sustainability-related research in the strategy and management fields, there has been no comprehensive systematic review of the field as a whole. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of the field of corporate sustainability using a science mapping co-word bibliometric analysis. Through analysis of the co-occurrence of 25,701 keywords in 11,962 sustainability-related articles from 1994-2021, we identify and graphically illustrate the thematic and theoretical evolution of the field, in addition to emerging and waning research trends in the field.
The early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic revealed stark regional variation in the spread of the virus. While previous research has highlighted the impact of regional differences in sociodemographic and economic factors, we argue that regional differences in social and compliance behaviors-the very behaviors through which the virus is transmitted-are critical drivers of the spread of COVID-19, particularly in the early stages of the pandemic.
The financial crisis of 2007–2008 was the most serious since the Great Depression and severely impacted the global economy. Yet more than 10 years after the crisis, we still lack clear understanding of its cause. Accounts point to some elements of fact but tend to be fragmented and sometimes contradictory. More than ever, we need an account that can put the puzzle pieces together and help us understand how to prevent a crisis like this from happening again.
Performance expectations are revisited pertaining to particular corporate strategies that were highlighted by Rumelt (1974). In particular, suggestions regarding expectations about conglomerate enterprises, vertical integration, and mature- or declining-demand businesses are offered in light of additional information about research findings and observed industry phenomena that are at odds with information available when Rumelt's (1974) study of diversification was performed.
Recent evidence shows that people who grew up in economic hard times more strongly favor government redistribution and are more compassionate towards the poor. We investigate how inclusive this increase in compassion is by studying how macroeconomic conditions experienced during young adulthood affect immigration attitudes. Using US and global data, we show that experiencing bad macroeconomic circumstances strengthen anti-immigration attitudes for life. Moreover, we find that people become generally more outgroup hostile.
Diversity initiatives are designed to help workers from disadvantaged backgrounds achieve equitable opportunities and outcomes in organizations. However, these programs are often ineffective. To better understand less-than-desired outcomes and the shifting diversity landscape, we synthesize literature on how corporate affirmative action programs became diversity initiatives and current literature on their effectiveness. We focus specifically on work dealing with mechanisms that make diversity initiatives effective as well as their unintended consequences.
By integrating the intersectional invisibility hypothesis with the behaviors from intergroup affect and stereotypes map framework, we examine the extent to which Black women’s dual-subordinated identities render them nonprototypical victims of discrimination, relative to White women and Black men, and the corresponding consequences.
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).
The SMR was pleased to conduct a set of launch conferences before its first published issue in 2020. One launch conference occurred at Columbia Business School in the summer of 2019 at which James Gorman, Chairman and CEO of Morgan Stanley served as the keynote speaker. An edited excerpt of part of his address appears below, in which he describes essential elements of his conception of strategy, or his principles of strategy. Kathryn Rudie Harrigan, Henry R.
The extent to which men and women sort into different jobs and organizations—namely, gender differences in supply-side labor market processes—is a key determinant of workplace gender composition. This study draws on theories of congruence to uncover a unique organization-level driver of gender differences in job seekers’ behavior. We first argue and show that congruence between leadership gender and organizational claims is a key mechanism that drives job seekers’ interest.
Employee misconduct is costly to organizations and has the potential to be even more common in gig and remote work contexts, in which workers are physically distant from their employers. There is, thus, a need for scholars to better understand what employers can do to mitigate misconduct in these nontraditional work environments, particularly as the prevalence of such work environments is increasing.
We examine how organizations of different types --public, non-profit and for-profit -- engage in consumer-benefiting misconduct (CBM) by examining which patients benefit from hospitals of the three types gaming the market for liver transplants. Consistent with our theory, we find that public firms are the least likely of the three organization types to engage in CBM.
The stalling of COVID-19 vaccination rates threatens public health. To increase vaccination rates, governments across the world are considering the use of monetary incentives. Here we present evidence about the effect of guaranteed payments on COVID-19 vaccination uptake. We ran a large preregistered randomized controlled trial (with 8286 participants) in Sweden and linked the data to population-wide administrative vaccination records.
This symposium aims to deepen and expand our understanding of the relationship between the way organizations and managers understand and provide narratives related to inequality and their subsequent diversity practices. The four papers presented in this symposium offer new theoretical insights and mechanisms for the conditions under which organizations are more (less) apt to redress inequality.
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.
Turning around distressed operations is an alternative response to underperformance — as contrasted with using transactions such as divestitures or resource redeployment to deal with troublesome assets during corporate renewal. Taking the perspective of private-equity owners whose interests are primarily financial, we explain how their approach to turnarounds of troubled companies may differ from that of managers within publicly traded firms who may envision the realization of longer-term sources of operating synergy among their firms' lines of business.
An historical review of managers' corporate renewal decisions reveals an evolving pattern away from using operating turnarounds in favor of making changes in corporate scope via transactions. One explanation for this progression away from operations is that financial valuation considerations supplant other inputs to managers' strategic logics — a reflection of the rising influence of financial institutions as activist owners.
This article describes randomized field experiments implemented on two online labor market platforms examining the effect of employer charitable giving on a source of human capital that is becoming increasingly important to firms: the gig worker. It provides support that a message about charitable giving increases gig workers' willingness to complete extra work, and that pro-socially oriented gig workers are most responsive.
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.
The extent to which men and women sort into different jobs and organizations—namely, gender differences in supply-side labor market processes—is a key determinant of workplace gender composition. This study draws on theories of congruence to uncover a unique organization-level driver of gender differences in job seekers’ behavior. We first argue and show that congruence between leadership gender and organizational claims is a key mechanism that drives job seekers’ interest.
Despite a recent surge in corporate activism, with firm leaders communicating about social-political issues unrelated to their core businesses, we know little about its strategic implications. This paper examines the effect of an employer communicating a stance about a social-political issue on employee motivation, using a two-phase, pre-registered field experiment in an online labor market platform. Results demonstrate an asymmetric treatment effect of taking a stance depending on whether the employee agrees or disagrees with that stance.
There has been extensive discussion about gender gaps in representation and career advancement in the sciences. However, psychological science itself has yet to be the focus of discussion or systematic review, despite our field’s investment in questions of equity, status, well-being, gender bias, and gender disparities. In the present article, we consider 10 topics relevant for women’s career advancement in psychological science.
Organizations regularly divide members in ways that maximize diversity, yet it is unclear whether efforts to induce diversity are effective in producing lasting ties. In this paper, we explore the extent to which an organization can induce diverse networks in small groups versus large groups, and in the short term (while induced contact persists) and in the long term (after induced contact ends). We evaluate this in an incoming MBA cohort as they are assigned to 70-person sections and five-person learning teams, both intended to maximize diversity and facilitate diverse ties.
