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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 Past and Future of Corporate Sustainability Research

Author
Burbano, Vanessa, Magali Delmas, and Martin Cobo

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.

Type
Working Paper
Date

Fiscal Capacity: An Asset Pricing Perspective

Author
Jiang, Z., H. Lustig, Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, and M. Xiaolan-Zhang
Type
Working Paper
Date

LOLR Policies, Banks' Borrowing Capacities and Funding Structures

Author
Sundaresan, M. Suresh and Stefano Corradin

We investigate banks' benefits and costs of having access to LOLR. Integrating novel data sets we estimate the borrowing capacities of euro area banks at the ECB. Controlling for ratings, we find that banks with more fragile funding are likely to borrow more from the ECB during the great financial and euro area sovereign debt crises. We develop a dynamic model of a bank and calibrate it to our empirical estimates. A bank with access to LOLR has higher equity value and makes larger investments in new loans, but it is more leveraged, pays more dividends and issues less equity.

Type
Journal Article
Date

The More You Ask, the Less You Get: When Additional Questions Hurt External Validity

Author
Li, Ye, Antonia Krefeld-Schwalb, Daniel Wall, Olivier Toubia, Eric Johnson, and Daniel Bartels

Researchers and practitioners in marketing, economics, and public policy often use preference elicitation tasks to forecast realworld behaviors. These tasks typically ask a series of similarly structured questions.

Type
Working Paper
Date

Thompson Sampling with Information Relaxation Penalties

Author
Maglaras, Costis, Seungki Min, and Ciamac Moallemi

We consider a finite-horizon multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem in a Bayesian setting, for which we propose an information relaxation sampling framework. With this framework, we define an intuitive family of control policies that include Thompson sampling (TS) and the Bayesian optimal policy as endpoints. Analogous to TS, which, at each decision epoch pulls an arm that is best with respect to the randomly sampled parameters, our algorithms sample entire future reward realizations and take the corresponding best action.

Type
Working Paper
Date

Working From Home and the Office Real Estate apocalypse

Author
Gupta, Arpit, Vrinda Mittal, and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh

The authors thank Jonas Peeters, Neel Shah, and Luofeng Zhou for excellent research assistance and CompStak for generously providing data for academic research. We would like to thank Chen Zheng (discussant), Cameron LaPoint (discussant) and seminar participants at AREUEA (DC), AREUEA International (Dublin), the USC Macro-Finance Conference, the Chinese University of Hong Kong finance seminar, National University of Singapore, Columbia Business School finance seminar, and the Urban Economics Association Conference (DC).

Type
Working Paper
Date

Diminishing Treasury Convenience Premiums: Effects of Dealers’ Excess Demand and Balance Sheet Constraints

Author
Klinglera, Sven and M. Suresh Sundaresan

After the global financial crisis, the yields of U.S. Treasury bills frequently exceed other risk-free rate benchmarks, thereby pointing to a diminishing convenience premium. Constructing a new measure of dealers’ balance sheet constraints for providing intermediation in U.S. Treasury markets, we trace these diminishing convenience premiums to primary dealers’ ability to act as intermediaries.

Type
Journal Article
Date

Office Real Estate as a Hedge against Inflation and the Impact of Lease Contracts

This article analyzes the hedging potential of real estate and especially looks at the impact of lease contracts in various countries around the world on the inflation hedge capability for both expected and unexpected inflation. The dataset consists of direct real estate rent and capital value data for 59 cities/MSAs in 25 countries between 1991 and 2020 to make international comparison over a long time period possible. The results indicate that real estate is a good hedge against inflation, and especially against unexpected inflation.

Type
Working Paper
Date

Regional personality differences predict variation in COVID-19 infections and social distancing behavior

Author
Peters, Heinrich, Friedrich Gotz, Tobias Ebert, Sandrine Muller, P. Rentfrow, Samuel Gosling, Marin Obschonka, Daniel Ames, Jeff Potter, and Sandra Matz

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.

Type
Working Paper
Date

Using Social Media to Change Gender Norms: An Experimental Evaluation Within Facebook Messenger in India

Author
Donati, Dante, Victor Orozco-Olvera, and Nandan Rao

This paper experimentally tests the effectiveness of two short edutainment campaigns (under 25 minutes) delivered through Facebook Messenger at reshaping gender norms and reducing social acceptability of violence against women (VAW) in India. Participants were randomly assigned to watch video-clips with implicit or explicit messaging formats (respectively a humorous fake reality TV drama or a docu-series with clear calls to action).

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
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.