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.
Having a well-defined hierarchy can contribute to organizational effectiveness: it helps people know who does what, when and how, and promotes efficient interactions by setting clear expectations for the behaviors of people of different ranks. This is especially true when people feel under threat, helping to restore a sense of order and control. However, sometimes hierarchy can hurt as much as it helps. In complex, dynamic situations, leaders need access to the most complete and varied information to make the best decisions.
In the wake of recent revelations about US involvement in torture, and widespread and seemingly-growing support of torture in the US, we consider how people judge the value of information gained from informants under coercion. Drawing on past work on confirmation biases and moral judgments, we predicted, and found, that American torture supporters are more likely than opposers to see coerced information as relatively valuable and necessary in a scenario describing the foiling of an al-Qaeda terrorist attack.
The development of predictive models in healthcare settings has been growing; one such area is the prediction of patient arrivals to the Emergency Department (ED). The general premise behind these works is that such models may be used to help manage an ED which consistently faces high congestion. In this work, we propose a class of proactive policies which utilizes future information of potential patient arrivals to effectively manage admissions into an ED while reducing waiting times for patients who are eventually treated.
This article introduces the method of single-neuron recording in humans to marketing and consumer researchers. First, the authors provide a general description of this methodology, discuss its advantages and disadvantages, and describe findings from previous single-neuron human research. Second, they discuss the relevance of this method for marketing and consumer behavior and, more specifically, how it can be used to gain insights into the areas of categorization, sensory discrimination, reactions to novel versus familiar stimuli, and recall of experiences.
This research explores vagal flexibility — dynamic modulation of cardiac vagal control — as an individual-level physiological index of social sensitivity. In 4 studies, we test the hypothesis that individuals with greater cardiac vagal flexibility, operationalized as higher cardiac vagal tone at rest and greater cardiac vagal withdrawal (indexed by a decrease in respiratory sinus arrhythmia) during cognitive or attentional demand, perceive social-emotional information more accurately and show greater sensitivity to their social context.
In this paper we address two questions that emerged in the aftermath of the 2008 financial/banking crisis. First, did the financial statements of bank holding companies provide an early warning of their impending distress? Second, were the actions of four key financial intermediaries (short sellers, equity analysts, Standard and Poor's credit ratings and auditors) sensitive to the information in the banks' financial statements about their increased risk and potential distress?
Little is known about how discrimination manifests before individuals formally apply to organizations or how it varies within and between organizations. We address this knowledge gap through an audit study in academia of over 6,500 professors at top U.S. universities drawn from 89 disciplines and 259 institutions. In our experiment, professors were contacted by fictional prospective students seeking to discuss research opportunities prior to applying to a doctoral program.
Although economists, politicians, and business leaders have long emphasized the importance of entrepreneurship, defining and characterizing entrepreneurship has been elusive. Researchers have been unable to systematically connect the type of high-impact entrepreneurship found in regions such as Silicon Valley with the overall incidence of entrepreneurship in the population.
In countries undergoing de-industrialization — and which isn’t, among developed economies—an internet-based economic growth has been widely recommended as a way to create economic activity and thereby reduce the inequality of post-industrial society. In particular, the opportunities that the internet affords to the ‘creative workforce’ are believed to be an engine for employment, at a time when industrial jobs are being automated.
In a recent statement, the American Statistical Association (ASA) discusses the use of value-added measurement to evaluate teacher quality. We present our views on the issues raised by the ASA, in light of research we and others have done on this subject. We highlight areas of agreement with the ASA statement, clarify which issues raised by the ASA have been largely resolved, and point to those issues which should be a priority for future research.
We estimate a short term reversal process for daily US equity returns. Over our primary sample period of 1972-2014, and for our sample of the 100 largest traded firms, on average approximately 90% of idiosyncratic price shocks are permanent. The remaining 10% is temporary, and decays exponentially toward zero, with a half life of about 2.5 days. While the rate of decay (the half life) is relatively constant over time, the magnitude decay varies considerably over the sample. Our findings are consistent with the slow movement of capital (Duffie 2010).
The authors discuss the current state and future scenarios of brand experience — a new concept that they contributed to the brand management literature. Specifically, they present three research and practical trends, and marketing challenges: (i) the proliferation of settings and media that evoke brand experiences; (ii) the role of brands in consumption experiences; and (iii) the need of brand experiences to reach positive psychological outcomes.
Can subsidies promote Pareto-optimum coordination? We found that partially subsidizing the cooperative actions for two out of six players in a laboratory coordination game usually produced better coordination and higher total social welfare with both deterministic and stochastic payoffs. Not only were the subsidized players more likely to cooperate (choose the Pareto-optimum action), but the unsubsidized players increased their expectations on how likely others would cooperate, and they cooperated more frequently themselves.
We decompose the squared VIX index, derived from US S&P500 options prices, into the conditional variance of stock returns and the equity variance premium. We evaluate a plethora of state-of-the-art volatility forecasting models to produce an accurate measure of the conditional variance. We then examine the predictive power of the VIX and its two components for stock market returns, economic activity and financial instability.
International business (IB) research has predominantly relied on value constructs to account for the influence of societal culture, notably Hofstede's cultural dimensions. While parsimonious, the value approach's assumptions about the consensus of values within nations, and the generality and stability of cultural patterns of behavior are increasingly challenged.
This work examines the process of admission to a hospital’s intensive care unit (ICU). ICUs currently lack systematic admission criteria, largely because the impact of ICU admission on patient outcomes has not been well quantified. This makes evaluating the performance of candidate admission strategies difficult. Using a large patient-level data set of more than 190,000 hospitalizations across 15 hospitals, we first quantify the cost of denied ICU admission for a number of patient outcomes.
Purchase intentions are frequently measured and used by marketing managers as an input for decisions about new and existing products and services. Purchase intentions are correlated and predict future sales, but do so imperfectly. I review and summarize research on the relationship between purchase intentions and sales that has been conducted over the past 60 years. This review offers insights into how best to measure purchase intentions, how to forecast sales from purchase intentions measures, and why purchase intentions do not always translate into sales.
We develop a structural model for the analysis of systemic risk in financial markets based on asset price contagion. Specifically, we describe a mechanism of contagion where exogenous random shocks to individual agents in an economy force portfolio rebalancing and endogenously impact asset prices. This, in turn, creates a chain reaction as downstream agents trade in reaction to price changes.
Just as we have learned a great deal in consumer psychology by focusing on understanding how different sub-groups of humans think, this paper suggests that we can also learn from examining how different types of animals think. To that end, this manuscript offers a review of literature on topics in animal cognition that have also been investigated by consumer researchers.
I was thrilled to see thousands of activists and celebrities marching through Manhattan Sunday calling on the United Nations and government leaders to do more on climate change. Inaction by U.S. politicians is always at the epicenter of these calls, given Washington's lack of consensus on the issue. But this overlooks the track record of this country when it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
This paper investigates whether so-called anomalous returns predicted by accounting numbers reflect normal returns for risk or abnormal returns. It does so via a model showing how accounting numbers inform about normal returns if pricing were rational. The model equates expected returns to expectations of earnings and earnings growth, so that any variable that forecasts earnings and earnings growth also indicates the required return if the market prices those outcomes as risky.
As Gerakos and Linnainmaa (2014) point out, the Daniel and Titman (2006) decomposition of returns into tangible and intangible components can potentially be ambiguous. In particular DT's book return, the adjusted growth rate in book value per share which DT use as a tangible measure of long term performance, can be affected by a firm's issuance and repurchase choices as well as by its profitability.
This paper studies the optimal level of discretion in policymaking. We consider afiscal policy model where the government has time-inconsistent preferences with a present bias towards public spending. The government chooses a fiscal rule to trade off its desire to commit to not overspend against its desire to have flexibility to react to privately observed shocks to the value of spending. We analyze the optimal fiscal rule when the shocks are persistent.
Companies have long struggled to get a handle on how consumers feel about brands and products in real time. Perceptual maps are often used to help visualize a product’s relationship to other products in the competitive arena, but the data referenced to build perceptual maps is often expensive to obtain or incomplete. This case introduces students to a new tool that mines and aggregates social media to support the development of more meaningful perceptual maps.
We develop a simple dynamic investment strategy that allows long‐term passive investors to hedge climate risk without sacrificing financial returns. Our proposed hedging strategy goes beyond a simple divestment of high carbon footprint or stranded assets stocks. This is just the first step. The second step is to optimize the composition of the low carbon portfolio so as to minimize the tracking error with the reference benchmark index. We show that tracking error can be almost eliminated even for a low carbon index that has 50% less carbon footprint.
We investigate whether homeowners respond strategically to news of mortgage modification programs by defaulting on their mortgages. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in modification policy induced by U.S. state government lawsuits against Countrywide Financial Corporation, which agreed to offer modifications to seriously delinquent borrowers with subprime mortgages throughout the country. Using a difference-in-difference framework, we find that Countrywide's relative delinquency rate increased more than ten percent per month immediately after the program's announcement.
This paper investigates the impact of lower mortgage rates on household balance sheets and other economic outcomes during the housing crisis. We use proprietary loan-level panel data matched to consumer credit records using borrowers' Social Security numbers, which allows for accurate measurement of the effects. Our main focus is on borrowers with agency loans, which constitute the vast majority of U.S. mortgage borrowers.
Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff (2014)[CFR] evaluate the degree of bias in teacher value-added (VA) estimates using a “teacher switching” research design, regressing changes in mean test scores across cohorts on changes in mean teacher VA. Recent studies (Kane, Staiger, and Bacher-Hicks 2014, Rothstein 2014) have found that regressing changes in mean scores in the prior grade on changes in mean VA also yields a positive coefficient, a result we confirm in our data.
After a backward slide during the 2008-09 recession, Starbucks appeared to be back on track in 2014. That said, the complexities of globalization—particularly expansion into China—as well as increased competition on a number of fronts continued to challenge the coffee house giant. This case asks students to consider how the brand should fuel growth as it markets to the increasingly diverse tastes of its customers.
Value stocks earn higher returns than growth stocks on average, but it is well documented that those returns come with risk. This paper supplies an understanding of that risk in terms of fundamentals. The fundamental analysis informs that, in buying value stocks, the investor may be trapped into buying firms where prospective earnings growth is quite risky. However, the trap can be avoided by recognizing how earnings and book value are accounted for in financial statements. Specifically, the application of conservative accounting informs the investor ex ante of the risk involved.
This research examines how core consumers of selective brands react when core users obtain access to the brand. Contrary to the view that non-core users and downward brand extensions pose a threat to the brand, this work investigates the conditions under which these non-core users enhance rather than dilute the brand image.
This research examines how oral haptics (due to hardness/softness or roughness/smoothness) related to foods influence mastication (i.e., degree of chewing) and orosensory perception (i.e., orally perceived fattiness), which in turn influence calorie estimation, subsequent food choices, and overall consumption volume. The results of five experimental studies show that, consistent with theories related to mastication and orosensory perception, oral haptics related to soft (vs. hard) and smooth (vs. rough) foods lead to higher calorie estimations.
The emergence of large longitudinal datasets linking students to teachers has led to an explosion in the study of teacher effects on student outcomes by economists over the last decade. One large literature has documented wide variation in teacher effectiveness that is not well explained by observable student or teacher characteristics. A second literature has investigated how educational outcomes might be improved by leveraging teacher effectiveness, through processes of recruitment, assignment, compensation, evaluation, promotion, and retention.
Power transforms consumer behavior. This research introduces a critical theoretical moderator of power's effects by promoting the idea that power is accompanied by both an experience (how it feels to have or lack power) and expectations (schemas and scripts as to how those with or without power behave). In some cases, the psychological experience of power predisposes people to behave one way, whereas attention to the expectations of power suggests behaving in another way. As a consequence, power's effects for consumer behavior can hinge on consumers' focus.
Five studies examined the relationship between talent and team performance. Two survey studies found that people believe there is a linear and nearly monotonic relationship between talent and performance: Participants expected that more talent improves performance and that this relationship never turns negative. However, building off research on status conflicts, we predicted that talent facilitates performance — but only up to a point, after which the benefits of more talent decrease and eventually become detrimental as intrateam coordination suffers.
We propose a new definition of skill as a general cognitive ability to either pick stocks or time the market at different times. We find evidence for stock picking in booms and for market timing in recessions. Moreover, the same fund managers that pick stocks well in expansions also time the market well in recessions. These fund managers significantly outperform other funds and passive benchmarks. Our results suggest a new measure of managerial ability that gives more weight to a fund's market timing in recessions and to a fund's stock picking in booms.
We conduct the first nationwide study of incentives under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, which requires states to punish schools failing to meet target passing rates on students' standardized exams. States' idiosyncratic policies created variation in the risk of failure among very similar schools in different states, which we use to identify effects of accountability pressure.
We conduct and analyze two large surveys of hypothetical annuitization choices. We find that allowing individuals to annuitize a fraction of their wealth increases annuitization relative to a situation where annuitization is an "all or nothing" decision. Very few respondents choose declining real payout streams over flat or increasing real payout streams of equivalent expected present value. Highlighting the effects of inflation increases demand for cost of living adjustments. Frames that highlight flexibility, control, and investment significantly reduce annuitization.