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.
We model an electronic limit order book as a multi-class queueing system under fluid dynamics, and formulate and solve a problem of limit and market order placement to optimally buy a block of shares over a short, predetermined time horizon. Using the structure of the optimal execution policy, we identify microstructure variables that affect trading costs over short time horizons and propose a resulting microstructure-based model of market impact costs.
The current research examines how power affects performance in pressure-filled contexts. We present low-power-threat and high-power-lift effects, whereby performance in high-stakes situations suffers or is enhanced depending on one's power; that is, the power inherent to a situational role can produce effects similar to stereotype threat and lift. Three negotiations experiments demonstrate that role-based power affects outcomes but only when the negotiation is diagnostic of ability and, therefore, pressure-filled.
Using personnel data from nine large firms in three industries (call centers, trucking, and high-tech), we empirically assess the benefit to firms of hiring through employee referrals. Compared to nonreferred applicants, referred applicants are more likely to be hired and more likely to accept offers, even though referrals and nonreferrals have similar skill characteristics. Referred workers tend to have similar productivity compared to nonreferred workers on most measures, but referred workers have lower accident rates in trucking and produce more patents in high-tech.
Extant knowledge of Ponzi schemes in the accounting and finance literature is mainly anecdotal. The consequence of this is that it is difficult to know what, if anything, can be done to deter these frauds. We seek to fill part of our knowledge gap about Ponzi schemes by providing large-scale evidence based on a sample of 376 Ponzi schemes prosecuted by the SEC between 1988 and 2012. Our evidence indicates that the majority of SEC-prosecuted schemes involve sums that are much lower than those in the highly visible frauds perpetrated by Bernard Madoff and Allen Stanford.
Eight studies explored the antecedents and consequences of whether people locate their sense of self in the brain or the heart. In Studies 1a–f, participants' self-construals consistently influenced the location of the self: The general preference for locating the self in the brain rather than the heart was enhanced among men, Americans, and participants primed with an independent self-construal, but diminished among women, Indians, and participants primed with an interdependent self-construal.
It is becoming increasingly easier for researchers and practitioners to collect eye tracking data during online preference measurement tasks. We develop a dynamic discrete choice model of information search and choice under bounded rationality, that we calibrate using a combination of eye-tracking and choice data. Our model extends the directed cognition model of Gabaix et al. (2006) by capturing fatigue, proximity effects, and imperfect memory encoding and by estimating individual-level parameters and partworths within a likelihood-based, hierarchical Bayesian framework.
People frequently feel anxious. Although prior research has extensively studied how feeling anxious shapes intrapsychic aspects of cognition, much less is known about how anxiety affects interpersonal aspects of cognition. Here, we examine the influence of incidental experiences of anxiety on perceptual and conceptual forms of perspective taking.
This paper studies the competition between Web 2.0 communities in a game theoretic framework. We model three important features of these institutions: (i) firms' content is usually user-generated; (ii) consumers' content preferences are governed by local network effects, and (iii) consumers have strong tendencies to multi-home. Our analyses reveal that ex-ante identical community sites can acquire differentiated market positions that spontaneously emerge from user-generated content.
We conduct a randomized control trial that generates exogenous variation in the access to foreign markets for rug producers in Egypt. Using this methodology and detailed survey data, we causally identify the impact of exporting on firm performance. Treatment firms report 15–25 percent higher profits and exhibit large improvements in quality alongside reductions in quantity-based productivity relative to control firms. These findings do not simply reflect firms being offered higher margins to manufacture high-quality products that take longer to produce.
We consider a multi-period single product pricing problem with an unknown demand curve. The seller's objective is to adjust prices in each period so as to maximize cumulative expected revenues over a given finite time horizon; in so doing, the seller needs to resolve the tension between learning the unknown demand curve, and earning revenues by solving the dynamic optimization problem.
Contingent capital (CC), which intends to internalize the costs of too-big-to-fail in the capital structure of large banks, has been under intense debate by policy makers and academics. We show that CC with a market trigger, in which direct stake-holders are unable to choose optimal conversion policies, does not lead to a unique competitive equilibrium, unless value transfer at conversion is not expected ex-ante. The "no value transfer" restriction precludes penalizing bank managers for taking excessive risk.
Ad Exchanges are emerging Internet markets where advertisers may purchase display ad placements, in real-time and based on specific viewer information, directly from publishers via a simple auction mechanism. Advertisers join these markets with a pre-specified budget and participate in multiple second-price auctions over the length of a campaign. This paper studies the competitive landscape that arises in Ad Exchanges and the implications for publishers' decisions.
During the 2014 EPIC Conference, Allen Batteau and Robert J. Morais led a workshop entitled “Toward Conceptual, Methodological, and Ethical Standards of Practice in Business Anthropology.” This article summarizes the objectives and results of the workshop.
Although skilled return migrants are structurally positioned as cross-border brokers to conduct knowledge transfer from abroad to their home countries, they do not systematically do so. Using an original dataset of 4,183 former J1 Visa holders—all of whom worked in the U.S.—from 81 different countries, I argue that returnees' knowledge transfer success depends on their embeddedness in their home and host country workplaces and the evaluation of the knowledge recipients in their home country organizations.
We consider a broad class of dynamic portfolio optimization problems that allow for complex models of return predictability, transaction costs, trading constraints, and risk considerations. Determining an optimal policy in this general setting is almost always intractable. We propose a class of linear rebalancing rules and describe an efficient computational procedure to optimize with this class. We illustrate this method in the context of portfolio execution and show that it achieves near optimal performance.
We estimate a New-Keynesian macro model accommodating regime-switching behavior in monetary policy and in macro shocks. Key to our estimation strategy is the use of survey-based expectations for inflation and output. We identify accommodating monetary policy before 1980, with activist monetary policy prevailing most but not 100% of the time thereafter. Systematic monetary policy switched to the activist regime in the 2000-2005 period through an aggressive lowering of interest rates.
Are the rich more unethical than the poor? To answer this question, the current research introduces a key conceptual distinction between selfish and unethical behavior. Based on this distinction, the current article offers 2 novel findings that illuminate the relationship between social class and unethical behavior. First, the effects of social class on unethical behavior are not invariant; rather, the effects of social class are moderated by whether unethical behavior benefits the self or others.
The paper investigates the long-run consequences of multichannel shopping on customers' spending. Using data from a major US catalog company which introduced an online channel, our results validate previous findings that multichannel customers spend more than mono-channel customers in the short run. However, the difference in spending dissipates over time with multichannel customers reverting to their regular consumption pattern in 3 years.
The current research shows that having no power can be better than having a little power. Negotiators prefer having some power (weak negotiation alternatives) to having no power (no alternatives). We challenge this belief that having any alternative is beneficial by demonstrating that weak alternatives create low anchors that reduce the value of first offers. In contrast, having no alternatives is liberating because there is no anchor to weigh down first offers.
The current research explores whether the foreign professional experiences of influential executives predict firm-level creative output. We introduce a new theoretical model, the Foreign Experience Model of Creative Innovations, to explain how three dimensions of executives' foreign work experiences — breadth, depth, and cultural distance — predict an organization's creative innovations, which we define as the extent to which final, implemented products or services are novel and useful from the standpoint of external audiences.
Shortfall aversion reflects the higher utility loss of a spending cut from a reference point than the utility gain from a similar spending increase, in the spirit of Prospect Theory's loss aversion. This paper posits a model of utility of spending scaled by a function of past peak spending, called target spending. The discontinuity of the marginal utility at the target spending corresponds to shortfall aversion.
Six years after the passage of the 2008 Troubled Asset Relief Program, commonly known as TARP, it remains hard to measure the total social costs and benefits of the assistance to banks provided under TARP programs. TARP was not a single approach to assisting weak banks but rather a variety of changing solutions to a set of evolving problems. TARP's passage was associated with significant improvements in financial markets and the health of financial intermediaries, as well as an increase in the supply of lending by recipients.
We develop a model to understand and predict customers’ observed multichannel behavior in a customer support setting.
Organizational techniques are labels, such as Reengineering, denoting linguistic prescriptions, which organizations can implement to transform organizational inputs into organizational outputs. The theory of fashions in organizational techniques tends to explain the causes of the relative transience of certain organization techniques, whereas the theory of institutions in these techniques tends to explain the causes of other techniques' relative persistence.
Past research indicates that foreign experience helps problem solving because the experience of adapting ones lifestyle imparts cognitive flexibility. We propose that an independent process involves studying cultural traditions and systems, which imparts foreign concepts that enable unconventional solutions. If so, advantages on unconventionality problems should be associated with experiences studying of another culture, such as typically occurs in study-abroad programs.
The fields of judgment and decision making (JDM) and cultural psychology have not seen much overlap, but recent research at the intersection of culture and JDM has provided new insights for both fields. This chapter reviews recent advances, with a focus on how studying cultural variations in JDM has yielded novel perspectives on basic psychological processes. JDM perspectives can propose novel explanations for differences across national cultures beyond those suggested by the prevailing models of culture.
We estimate the elasticity of exports to credit using matched customs and firm-level bank credit data from Peru. To account for non-credit determinants of exports, we compare changes in exports of the same product and to the same destination byfirms borrowing from banks differentially affected by capital-flow reversals during the 2008 financial crisis. We find that credit shocks affect the intensive margin of exports, but have no significant impact on entry or exit of firms to new product and destination markets.
In 2013, a new law required Indian firms, which satisfied certain size and profitability thresholds, to spend at least 2% of their net income on CSR. We exploit this natural experiment to isolate the shareholder value implications of CSR activities.
We develop a dynamic contingent-claim framework to model S. Myers's idea that a firm is a collection of growth options and assets in place. The firm's composition between assets in place and growth options evolves endogenously with its investment opportunity set and its financing of growth options, as well as its dynamic leverage and default decisions. The firm trades off tax benefits with the potential financial distress and endogenous debt-overhang costs over its life cycle.
Facebook is rapidly gaining recognition as a powerful research tool for the social sciences. It constitutes a large and diverse pool of participants, who can be selectively recruited for both online and offline studies. Additionally, it facilitates data collection by storing detailed records of its users' demographic profiles, social interactions, and behaviors. With participants' consent, these data can be recorded retrospectively in a convenient, accurate, and inexpensive way.
This essay analyzes some problems that accounting standard setters confront in erecting barriers to managers bent on boosting their firms' financial reports through financial engineering (FE) activities. It also poses some unsolved research questions regarding interactions between preparers and standard setters. It starts by discussing the history of lease accounting to illustrate the institutional disadvantage of standard setters relative to preparers in their speeds of response.
We comment on Gilovich and colleagues' program of research on happiness resulting from experiential versus material purchases, and critique these authors' interpretation that people derive more happiness from experiences than from material possessions. Unlike goods, experiences cannot be purchased, and possessions versus experiences do not seem to form the endpoints of the same continuum.