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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
Journal Article
Date

Identifying Factors Predicting Kidney Graft Survival in Chile Using Elastic-Net-Regularized Cox Regression

Author
Olivares, Marcelo, L. Magga, S Maturana, M. Valdevenito, J. Cabezas, J. Chapochnick, F. González, A. Kompatzki, H. Muller, J. Pefaur, C. Ulloa, and R. Valjalo

We developed a predictive statistical model to identify donor–recipient characteristics related to kidney graft survival in the Chilean population. Given the large number of potential predictors relative to the sample size, we implemented an automated variable selection mechanism that could be revised in future studies as more national data is collected. Materials and Methods: A retrospective multicenter study was conducted to analyze data from 822 adult kidney transplant recipients from adult donors between 1998 and 2018.

Type
Working Paper
Date

Is Physical Climate Risk Priced? Evidence from Regional Variation in Exposure to Heat Stress

Author
Acharya, Viral V, Tim Johnson, M. Suresh Sundaresan, and Tuomas Tomunen

We exploit regional variations in exposure to heat stress to study if physical climate risk is priced in municipal and corporate bonds as well as in equity markets. We find that local exposure to damages related to heat stress equaling 1% of GDP is associated with municipal bond yield spreads that are higher by around 15 basis points per annum (bps), the effect being larger for longer-term, revenue-only and lower-rated bonds, and arising mainly from the expected increase in energy expenditures and decrease in labor productivity.

Type
Newspaper/Magazine Article
Date
Publication
Administrative Science Quarterly

Book Review for The Bank Did It: An Anatomy of the Financial Crisis, by Neil Fligstein

Author

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.

Type
Journal Article
Date

Fiscal Rules and Discretion under Limited Enforcement

Author
Halac, Marina and Pierre Yared

We study a fiscal policy model in which the government is present-biased towards public spending. Society chooses a fiscal rule to trade off the benefit of committing the government to not overspend against the benefit of granting it flexibility to react to privately observed shocks to the value of spending. Unlike prior work, we examine rules under limited enforcement: the government has full policy discretion and can only be incentivized to comply with a rule via the use of penalties which are joint and bounded. We show that optimal incentives must be bang-bang.

Type
Newspaper/Magazine Article
Date
Publication
Institutional Investor

What Does ESG Need to Work?

High returns for investors. Our author argues that a different approach to ESG can strike a better balance between environmental and social goals and profits.

Type
Journal Article
Date

Formalizing the Informal: Adopting a Formal Culture-fit Measurement System in the Employee Selection Process

Author

Many organizations rely on formal management control systems that align employee values with organizational values (i.e., culture-fit) to shape organizational culture. Using proprietary data from a highly-decentralized organization, I examine the employee performance consequences of adopting a formal culture-fit measurement system in employee selection. I exploit the staggered feature of the adoption of the system, and find that employees selected with the system perform significantly better than those without the system.

Type
Journal Article
Date

Does ESG Negative Screening Work?

Author
Rajgopal, Shivaram, Jing Xie, and Robert G. Eccles

We revisit the firm value and pricing implications of the negative screening of sin stocks. Unlike prior work, we find that institutional ownership and valuations related to sin stocks are not different from those of other stocks after controlling for differences in fundamentals between sin and non-sin stocks. Sin stocks do not differ in the likelihood of exiting the public market, the cost of raising new equity, and in the announcement returns around negative ESG news relative to non-sin stocks, casting further doubt on whether negative screening hurts sin stocks.

Type
Journal Article
Date

Utilizing Partial Flexibility to Improve Emergency Department Flow: Theory and Implementation

Author
Chan, Carri, Vahid Sarhangian, Prem Talwai, and Kriti Gogia

Emergency Departments (EDs) typically have multiple areas where patients of different acuity levels receive treatments. In practice, different areas often operate with fixed nurse staffing levels. When there are substantial imbalances in congestion among different areas, it could be beneficial to deviate from the original assignment and reassign nurses. However, reassignments typically are only feasible at the beginning of 8-12-hour shifts, providing partial flexibility in adjusting staffing levels.

Type
Journal Article
Date

An Accounting-based Asset Pricing Model and a Fundamental Factor

Author
Penman, Stephen and Julie Zhu

This paper recasts the consumption asset pricing model in terms of observable accounting outcomes by recognizing accounting principles that connect those outcomes to consumption and the risk to consumption. The model prompts the construction of a pricing factor from observed accounting information. The factor performs well relative to extant factors in explaining cross-sectional returns. Further, it delivers out-of-sample expected returns that forecast the actual returns and the forward betas that investors actually experience.

Type
Journal Article
Date

Issues Revisited from Rumelt’s (1974) “Diversification, Strategy & Performance”

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.

Type
Working Paper
Date

Does Growing up in Hard Economic Times Increase Compassion? The Case of Attitudes towards Immigration

Author
Meier, Stephan, Maria Cotofan, and Robert Dur

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.