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.
The article offers the authors' views on expatriate management programs and the benefits from executives interacting with the people and institutions of the host country. The idea that international experience or interaction between foreign managers and local people will help managers become more creative, entrepreneurial, and successful is discussed. The concept of integrative complexity in bi-cultural managers which enhances job performance is mentioned.
The Kidney Case is multi-person exercise that involves the allocation of a single kidney. Students read profiles of eight candidates for the kidney and make a first allocation decision. Each candidate was designed to be high on some allocation principles but low or unknown on others (e.g., best, match, time in cue, age, personal responsibility for disease, future benefits to society, etc.). Then, students are put into groups and assigned to advocate for one of the candidates. Each group will prepare and give a 3-minute presentation on why their candidate should receive the kidney.
Emissions abatement alone cannot address the consequences of global warming for weather disasters. We model how society adapts to manage disaster risks to capital stock. Optimal adaptation — a mix of firm-level efforts and public spending — varies as society learns about the adverse consequences of global warming for disaster arrivals. Taxes on capital are needed alongside those on carbon to achieve the first best.
What are the sources of the returns to education? We study the allocation of higher education graduates from public institutions in Ohio across firms. We present three results. First, we confirm findings in the earlier literature of large pay differences across degrees. Second, we show that up to one quarter of pay premiums for higher degrees are explained by between-firm pay differences. Third, higher education degrees are associated with greater representation at the best-paying firms.
This article focuses on the role of threats in negotiations. Broadly speaking, a threat is a proposition that issues demands and warns of the costs of noncompliance. Even if neither party resorts to them, potential threats shadow most negotiations. Researchers have found that people actually evaluate their counterparts more favorably when they combine promises with threats rather than extend promises alone. Whereas promises encourage exploitation, the threat of punishment motivates cooperation.
Principals often operate on misspecified models of their agents' preferences. When preferences are such that non-local incentive constraints may bind in the optimum, even slight misspecification of the preferences can lead to large and non-vanishing losses. Instead, we propose a two-step scheme whereby the principal: (1) identifies the model-optimal menu; and (2) modifies prices by offering to share with the agent a fixed proportion of the profit she would receive if an item were sold at the model-optimal price.
We examine the international equity allocations of over 3 million individuals in 296 401(k) plans over the 2006-2011 period. These allocations show enormous cross-individual variation, ranging between zero and over 75%, as well as an upward trend that is only partially accounted for by the slight decrease in importance of the US market relative to the world market. International equity allocations also display strong cohort effects, with younger cohorts investing more internationally than older ones, but also each cohort investing more internationally over time.
Individuals behave differently when they know the objective probability of events and when they do not. The smooth ambiguity model accommodates both ambiguity (uncertainty) and risk. For an incomplete, competitive asset market, we develop a revealed preference test for asset demand to be consistent with the maximization of smooth ambiguity preferences; and we show that ambiguity preferences constructed fromfinite observations converge to underlying ambiguity preferences as observations become dense.
When one thinks hedge fund fees, the phrase “2 and 20” — meaning a 2% management fee and 20% performance fee — usually comes to mind. This wasn't always the case.
Whereas past research has focused on the downsides of task switching, the present research uncovers a potential upside: increased creativity. In two experiments, we show that task switching can enhance two principal forms of creativity — divergent thinking (Study 1) and convergent thinking (Study 2) — in part because temporarily setting a task aside reduces cognitive fixation.
We make three points in response to Boyce, Daly, Hounkpatin, and Wood (2017). First, we clarify a misunderstanding of the goal of our analyses, which was to investigate the links between life satisfaction and spending patterns, rather than spending volume. Second, we report a simulation study we ran to demonstrate that our results were not driven by the proposed statistical artifact. Finally, we discuss the broader issue of why, in a world of big data, small but reliable effect sizes can be valuable.
Using proprietary data on millions of trades by retail investors, we provide the first large-scale evidence that retail short selling predicts negative stock returns. A portfolio that mimics weekly retail shorting earns an annualized risk-adjusted return of 9%. The predictive ability of retail short selling lasts for one year and is not subsumed by institutional short selling. In contrast to institutional shorting, retail shorting best predicts returns in small stocks and those that are heavily bought by other retail investors.
We propose the anticipation-event-recall (AER) model. Set in a continuous time frame, the AER model formally links the three components of total utility (i.e., utility from anticipation, event utility, and utility from recall). The AER model predicts the temporal profiles of instant utility experienced before, during, and after a given event. Total utility is calculated as the integral of instant utility. The model builds on the psychological elements of conceptual consumption, adaptation, and time distance.
Rivalry is prevalent across many competitive environments and differs in important ways from non-rival competition. Here, we draw upon research on relational schemas and automatic goals to explore whether mere exposure to or recall of a rival can be sufficient to increase individuals' Machiavellianism and unethical behavior, even in contexts where their rivals are not present.
The present research considered what leads perceivers to evaluate someone as a good or poor judge of people. In general, we found a substantial role for agreement: perceivers evaluated another person as a good judge when he or she agreed with their perception of someone's characteristics. Importantly, the effect of agreement depended on who this " someone" was. We found that perceivers' evaluation of another individual as a good judge was more heavily shaped by agreement about their own characteristics than by agreement about a third-party target's characteristics.
I model an economy inhabited by heterogeneous individuals that form teams and choose an appropriate production technology. The model characterizes how the technological environment shapes the equilibrium assignment of individuals into teams. I apply the theoretical insights to study cross-country differences in the allocation of talent and technology.
Two-sided matching platforms, such as those for labor, accommodation, dating, and taxi hailing, can control and optimize over many aspects of the search for partners. To understand how the search for partners should be designed, we consider a dynamic model of search by strategic agents with costly discovery of pair-specific match value. We find that in many settings, the platform can mitigate wasteful competition in partner search via restricting what agents can see/do.
We study the efficient resolution of global banks by national regulators. Single-point-of-entry (SPOE) resolution, where loss-absorbing capacity is shared across jurisdictions, is efficient in principle, but may not be implementable. First, when expected transfers across jurisdictions are too asymmetric, national regulators fail to set up an efficient SPOE resolution regime ex ante. Second, when required ex-post transfers across jurisdictions are too large, national regulators ring-fence local banking assets instead of cooperating in a planned SPOE resolution.
We consider the implications for optimal fiscal policy when taxes are non-distortionary and households are heterogeneous and borrowing constrained. The main result is that optimal policy keeps some households borrowing constrained in order to reduce interest rates on government debt.
Decades of questionnaire and interview studies have revealed various leadership behaviors observed in successful leaders. However, little is known about the actual behaviors that cause those observations. Given that lay observers are prone to cognitive biases, such as the halo effect, the validity of theories that are exclusively based on observed behaviors is questionable. We thus follow the call of leading scientists in the field and derive a parsimonious model of leadership behavior that is informed by established psychological theories.
Schools across the globe routinely organize students by grade levels, where individuals of a similar age are taught together. Children typically enter school with members of their cohort, as determined by a date-of-birth cutoff, and advance one grade level per year. Undoubtedly, this practice arises from the notion that some form of tracking, ie grouping together students with relatively similar levels of knowledge and maturity, is the most efficient way to provide instruction.
In many centralized school admission systems, a significant fraction of allocated seats are later vacated, often due to students obtaining better outside options. We consider the problem of reassigning these seats in a fair and efficient manner while also minimizing the movement of students between schools. Centralized admissions are typically conducted using the Deferred Acceptance (DA) algorithm, with a lottery used to break ties caused by indifferences in school priorities.
While most studies of the formalization of pay systems suggest that it helps reduce inequality, some recent studies suggest the opposite. The present study draws on social identity theory to shift this debate from whether formalization reduces inequality to when, or under what conditions, less formalized pay systems may also serve to reduce inequality. Specifically, I consider both the gender of the decision maker and the job of the employee being evaluated.
Despite lab-based evidence supporting the argument that double standards — by which one group is unfairly held to stricter standards than another — explain observed gender differences in evaluations, it remains unclear whether double standards also affect evaluations in organization and market contexts, where competitive pressures create a disincentive to discriminate.
This paper studies a quantitative general equilibrium model of housing. The model has two key elements not previously considered in existing quantitative macro studies of housing finance: aggregate business cycle risk, and a realistic wealth distribution driven in the model by bequest heterogeneity in preferences. These features of the model play a crucial role in the following results. First, a relaxation of financing constraints leads to a large boom in house prices. Second, the boom in house prices is entirely the result of a decline in the housing risk premium.
The present research investigates whether close intercultural relationships promote creativity, workplace innovation, and entrepreneurship — outcomes vital to individual and organizational success. We triangulate on these questions with multiple methods (longitudinal, experimental, and field studies), diverse population samples (MBA students, employees, and professional repatriates), and both laboratory and real-world measures.
Many financial markets operate as electronic limit order books under a price-time priority rule. In this setting, among all resting orders awaiting trade at a given price, earlier orders are prioritized for matching with contra-side liquidity takers. This creates a technological arms race among high-frequency traders and other automated market participants to establish early (and hence advantageous) positions in the resulting first-in-first-out (FIFO) queue.
This paper presents a theory of disclosure in a market where investors have heterogeneous beliefs and face short-sale constraints. Assets trade above fundamentals reflecting the value of the option to sell to more optimistic investors in the future. The initial seller has an incentive to commit to an imprecise disclosure policy, despite the negative effect this has on the fundamental value of the asset, in order to increase the potential for disagreement and hence the magnitude of the speculative premium.
In this chapter, we discuss both the criticisms and benefits of advertising and address ethical concerns for anthropologists involved in the creation of advertising. We examine how ethical complexities range from the question of advertising as a necessary form of consumer-brand engagement to socially responsible advertising as a necessary form of consumer-brand engagement to socially responsible advertising, to professional ethics surrounding the objects or brands being advertised, and to the work of anthropologists in advancing advertising campaigns.
We explore captain-ownership and vessel performance in eighteenth-century transatlantic shipping. Although contingent compensation often aligned incentives between captains and ship owners, one difficult-to-contract hazard was threat of capture during wartime. We exploit variation across time and routes to study the relationship between capture threat and captain-ownership. Vessels were more likely to have captain-owners when undertaking wartime voyages on routes susceptible to privateers.
The goal of this research was to test whether including an inexpensive nonfood item (toy) with a smaller-sized meal bundle (420 calories), but not with the regular-sized meal bundle version (580 calories), would incentivize children to choose the smaller-sized meal bundle, even among children with overweight and obesity. Logistic regression was used to evaluate the effect in a between-subjects field experiment of a toy on smaller-sized meal choice (here, a binary choice between a smaller-sized or regular-sized meal bundles).
A stigma — originally a branding-iron mark on a prisoner or slave — serves as a mark of disgrace. To carry the stigma of a bankruptcy, an HIV infection, an addiction, a reviled religion, or another negatively stereotyped social group is to be dishonored, disapproved, or even dehumanized by others.
Past investigations show that asking participants to recall a personal episode of power affects behavior in a variety of ways. Recently, some researchers have questioned the replicability of such priming effects. This article adds to this conversation by investigating a moderator of power recall effects: ease of retrieval. Four experiments find that the effects of the power recall manipulation are reduced or even reversed when the power episode is difficult to recall.
Ethics in business is a major topic both in the social sciences and in business itself. Anthropologists, long attendant to the intersection of ethics and practice, are particularly well suited to offer vital insights on the subject.
Couples appear to help each other remember outstanding tasks ("to-dos") by issuing reminders. We examine if women and men differ in the frequency with which they offer this form of mnemonic assistance. Five studies measure how heterosexual couples coordinate mnemonic work in romantic relationships. The first two studies demonstrate that men are assumed to do less of this form of mnemonic work (Study 1) and experience less societal pressure to do so than women do (Study 2).
Recent bank regulations have imposed large compliance costs on banks of all sizes, and have increased the costs of borrowing to both consumers and companies. But in this summary of his recent book, the author argues that the problems with banking system regulation go well beyond the excessive costs. Indeed, Dodd-Frank and other post-crisis regulatory reforms have failed to address the major shortcomings that produced the crisis of 2007–2009. Most importantly, excessive housing finance risk was not dealt with adequately, and is already on the rise again.
The factors that combined to help elect the new US president have the internet as a common denominator, reckons – and these factors are now inherent in an internet-based economy and society
In this paper we show how simple text mining and semantic network analysis may be used to (i) improve our theoretical understanding of idea generation, (ii) help people improve the creativity of their ideas. From a theoretical perspective, we contribute to the cognitive idea generation literature by establishing a link between the set of concepts used to form an idea and the creativity of the idea. Each idea contains a subset of the semantic network of concepts related to the topic.