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.
Selecting more productive employees among a pool of job applicants can be a cost-effective means of improving organizational performance and may be particularly important in the public sector. We study the relationship among applicant characteristics, hiring outcomes, and job performance for teachers in the Washington DC Public Schools. Applicants' academic background (e.g., undergraduate GPA) is essentially uncorrelated with hiring.
Sumner Redstone was one of the most important figures in the evolution of the media industry during the twentieth century. He saw opportunities and seized them, exponentially growing his father's drive-in theater business to become one of the world's largest media conglomerates, with two publicly traded companies -- CBS and Viacom -- at its core. His larger-than-life personality and trials and tribulations kept the tabloid press more than busy. But Sumner's story was never his alone.
We examine the Cochrane and Piazzesi (2005, 2008) model in several out-of-sample analyzes. The model's one-factor forecasting structure characterizes the term structures of additional currencies in samples ending in 2003. In post-2003 data one-factor structures again characterize each currency's term structure, but we reject equality of the coefficients across the two samples. We derive some implications of the model for the predictability of cross-currency investments, but we find little support for these predictions in either pre-2004 or post-2003 data.
We propose a new theory of Optimum Currency Areas (OCAs) based on monetary sovereignty. We consider two economically integrated countries with separate currencies and monetary policies, but with exchange rate underreaction. We show that the two countries are then engaged in a strategic monetization game, which may generate excessive inflation in equilibrium. A monetary union between the two countries can eliminate this excess inflation cost, but also removes a nation's monetary sovereignty.
People can be surprisingly insensitive to quantities in valuation judgments—a phenomenon called scope insensitivity, which is generally attributed to the operation of affective processes in judgment. Building on research showing that affect is inherently a decision-making system of the present, we propose that scope insensitivity is more likely to be observed in decisions that are psychologically proximate to the immediate self.
Two modern economic trends are the increase in firm size and advances in information technology. We explore the hypothesis that big data disproportionately benefits big firms. Because they have more economic activity and a longer firm history, large firms have produced more data. As processor speed rises, abundant data attracts more financial analysis. Data analysis improves investors’ forecasts and reduces equity uncertainty, reducing the firm’s cost of capital. When investors can process more data, large firm investment costs fall by more, enabling large firms to grow larger.
Governments are present-biased toward spending. Fiscal rules are deficit limits that trade off commitment to not overspend and flexibility to react to shocks. We compare coordinated rules, chosen jointly by a group of countries, to uncoordinated rules. If governments' present bias is small, coordinated rules are tighter than uncoordinated rules: individual countries do not internalize the redistributive effect of interest rates. However, if the bias is large, coordinated rules are slacker: countries do not internalize the disciplining effect of interest rates.
Many service systems have servers with different capabilities and customers with varying needs. One common way this occurs is when servers are hierarchical in their skills or in the level of service they can provide. Much of the literature studying such systems relies on an understanding of the relative costs and benefits associated with serving different customer types by the different levels of service. In this work, we focus on estimating these costs and benefits in a complex healthcare setting where the major differentiation among server types is the intensity of service provided.
Kubler, Selden, and Wei (2017) identify the incremental axioms which are required for an EU representation to have an NM index that is dependent on rather than independent of state probabilities. This paper aims to answer the question: Are asset demands compatible with the maximization of risk preferences with probability dependent NM indices?
As with previous technological revolutions, innovations in the online world have triggered transformations in the labor market and the economy. While the Internet is trumpeted as a great job creator, there are also downsides that need to be identified and dealt with. The book discusses the following topics:
Using the staggered adoption of universal demand (UD) laws in the United States, we study the effect of shareholder litigation risk on corporate disclosure. We find that disclosure significantly increases after UD laws make it more difficult to file derivative lawsuits. Specifically, firms issue more earnings forecasts and voluntary 8-K filings, and increase the length of management discussion and analysis (MD&A) in their 10-K filings. We further assess the direct and indirect channels through which UD laws affect firms' disclosure policies.
Inquiry into CSR as a human capital management tool has suggested that firms benefit from such activities because employees value the meaningfulness of these activities, which influences motivation and retention. We propose an alternate avenue through which firms can benefit from an important type of socially responsible activity — pro bono services — that does not require that employees derive utility from the meaningfulness of the activity.
We extract aggregate supply and aggregate demand shocks for the US economy from macroeconomic data on inflation, real GDP growth, core inflation and the unemployment gap. We first use unconditional non-Gaussian features in the data to achieve identification of these structural shocks while imposing minimal economic assumptions. We find that recessions in the 1970s and 1980s are better characterized as driven by supply shocks while later recessions were driven primarily by demand shocks. The Great Recession exhibited large negative shocks to both demand and supply.
This book provides new evidence for the Impact of the Internet on jobs. All of the empirical articles indicate that the Internet has indeed created many new jobs, but that a large number of jobs may have been destroyed or downgraded, at least in the short run. Furthermore, routinization, job market polarisation and new labour market inequalities have emerged. Thus, while the diffusion of the Internet is generating opportunities it also comes with ambiguous trends that by themselves will not generate a more resilient and inclusive labour market.
This chapter examines the impacts of the digital economy on employment, the drivers of change, and the options to alleviate the emerging problems. The digital economy was supposed to replace and enhance industrial jobs, but it has also accelerated the outmigration of blue-collar and service jobs, with only inadequate replacements. The impact on different income classes and generational levels has been unequal. Midpay jobs decreased while low- and high-skilled jobs rose.
We find that voters who associate themselves with the "winning team" in election, i.e., Leave voters in the 2016 UK Brexit vote and Trump voters in 2016 US presidential election, substantially increase their expectations for the stock market, but change their expectations of their household economic wellbeing only modestly. Respondents who associate themselves with the "losing team" are more varied in their responses, but the overall impact of the election outcome on this group is more muted.
Expectancies play an important and understudied role in influencing a negotiator's decision to be deceptive. Studies 1a–1e investigated the sources of negotiators' expectancies, finding evidence of projection and pessimism; negotiators consistently overestimated the prevalence of people who share their views on deception and assumed a sizable share of others embrace deceptive tactics. This phenomenon generalized beyond American samples to Chinese students (Study 1d) and Turkish adults (Study 1e).
Objective:
We sought to build on the template-matching methodology by incorporating longitudinal comorbidities and acute physiology to audit hospital quality.
Study Setting:
Patients admitted for sepsis and pneumonia, congestive heart failure, hip fracture, and cancer between January 2010 and November 2011 at 18 Kaiser Permanente Northern California hospitals.
Study Design:
We quantify the difference in the convenience yield of U.S. Treasuries and government bonds of other developed countries by measuring the deviation from covered interest parity between government bond yields. We call this wedge the "U.S. Treasury Premium." We document a secular decline in the U.S. Treasury Premium at medium to long maturities. The five-year U.S. Treasury Premium averages approximately 21 basis points prior to the Global Financial Crisis, increases up to 90 basis points during the crisis, and has disappeared after the crisis with the post-crisis mean at -8 basis points.
I study a single-agent sequential search problem as in Weitzman. Contrary to Weitzman, conditional on stopping, the agent may take any uninspected box without first inspecting its contents. This introduces a new trade-off. By taking a box without inspection, the agent saves on its inspection costs. However, by inspecting it, he may discover that its contents are lower than he anticipated. I identify sufficient conditions on the parameters of the environment under which I characterize the optimal policy.
Unplanned transfers of patients from general medical-surgical wards to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) may occur due to unexpected patient deterioration. Such patients tend to have higher mortality rates and longer lengths of stay than direct admits to the ICU. A new predictive model, the EDIP2, was developed with the intent to identify patients at risk for deterioration, which in some cases could trigger a proactive transfer to the ICU. While it is conceivable that proactive transfers could improve individual patient outcomes, they could also lead to ICU congestion.
In “The Intelligent Investor in an Era of Autonomous Learning”, Jeffrey Tarrant delineated the concept of Autonomous Learning Investment Strategies (ALIS), the new AI and data-driven strategies he argued would disrupt today’s fundamental and quantitative managers. This was followed by an article I wrote, “What a long strange trip it’s been...on ALIS”, which explained the best and worst traits of ALIS managers. This brief article is called “Think Twice, It Ain’t Alright...ALIS Clarified”, repurposing the title of Bob Dylan’s 1963 song, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”.
This paper documents how life cycle wage growth varies across countries. We harmonize repeated cross-sectional surveys from a set of countries of all income levels and then measure how wages rise with potential experience. Our main finding is that experience-wage profiles are on average twice as steep in rich countries as in poor countries. In addition, more educated workers have steeper profiles than the less educated; this accounts for around one-third of cross-country differences in aggregate profiles.
We examine the effects of financial reporting regulation on firms' banking. Exploiting discontinuous public disclosure and auditing requirements assigned to otherwise similar small and medium-sized private firms, we document that financial reporting regulation reduces firms' reliance on concentrated and local bank relationships and increases banks' reliance on firms' financial reporting, consistent with a shift in firms' banking from relationship toward transactional approaches.
As technology disrupts industry after industry, it is logical to expect the hedge fund industry will be similarly disrupted. We pose the question: How will that disruption happen and where will it come from?
In the United States, the Golden Age of the public network, in which substantial universal service coincided with group substantial monopoly, was as brief and romanticized as the cowboy era; it lasted about twenty years from 1950, but in the mid-1960s centrifugal forces began their assault. The departure from the public school system cannot be explained primarily by the supply of new options or by new technology but rather by an increased demand to exit. In a similar sense, recent centrifugal development in independent electric power generation had very little to do with new technology.
Originally published in 1992 this book charts the global restructuring of telecommunications industries away from the monopoly structures of the past towards increased competition, deregulation and privatization. The book's authors are international policy-makers and scholars, who examine the regulatory environment within a theoretical and historical context. The book looks at the roots of regulatory and legislative changes by discussing individually the countries at the forefront of the revolution: the UK, France, Germany, Japan and the United States.
Objective:
To understand the impact of adding a medical step-down unit (SDU) on patient outcomes and throughput in a medical intensive care unit (ICU).
Design:
Retrospective cohort study.
Setting:
Two academic tertiary care hospitals within the same health-care system.
Patients:
Adults admitted to the medical ICU at either the control or intervention hospital from October 2013 to March 2014 (preintervention) and October 2014 to March 2015 (postintervention).
How do different bankruptcy approaches affect the local economy? Using U.S. Census microdata, we explore the spillover effects of reorganization and liquidation on geographically proximate firms. We exploit the random assignment of bankruptcy judges as a source of exogenous variation in the probability of liquidation. We find that employment declines substantially in the immediate neighborhood of the liquidated establishments, relative to reorganized establishments.
When companies plan to build multi-category brands by adding new products to their product lines, two questions loom large: (1) whether and (2) when brand extensions perceived as distant (comparatively dissimilar) from the company’s existing core line of products should be introduced. Since many real-world firms have introduced distant brand extensions, this paper focuses on the second question: when the company should introduce a distant extension within a series of other closer extensions — a decision for which there is little research-based guidance for managers.
The paper draws on Mohanty and Sundaresan (2018) to explore the effects of bankruptcy laws on the ex ante incentive for firms to hedge FX exposures. We use a simple model in which the bankruptcy code may result in deadweight losses, and may allow equity holders a share of residual value of the firm's assets in the bankruptcy proceedings. The paper predicts that, while value-maximising firms promise to hedge a higher fraction of the value of their FX exposure when the debt is issued, they may renege subsequently and take on some FX exposures at the expense of foreign creditors.
In today's turbulent business environment, customer retention presents a significant challenge for many service companies. Academics have generated a large body of research that addresses part of that challenge — with a particular focus on predicting customer churn. However, several other equally important aspects of managing retention have not received a similar level of attention, leaving many managerial problems not completely solved, and a program of academic research not completely aligned with managerial needs.
The current research explores the relationship between living abroad and self-concept clarity. We conducted six studies (N = 1,874) using different populations (online panels and MBA students), mixed methods (correlational and experimental), and complementary measures of self-concept clarity (self-report and self-other congruence through 360-degree ratings). Our results indicate that living abroad leads to a clearer sense of self because it prompts self-discerning reflections on whether parts of their identity truly define who they are or merely reflect their cultural upbringing.
Students who want to work in business are well served by taking anthropology courses and earning anthropology degrees. Their anthropological education can be applied in a broad array of businesses: marketing, advertising, marketing research, design, new product development, organizational culture and change, sustainability, risk management, and more.
Precautionary saving typically refers to the additional investment in a risk free asset when exogenous labor income is risky versus certain. When risky income results endogenously from the investment in a risky asset, the meaning and characterization of precautionary saving change and far less is known about this case. Capital risk is important for macro and finance models as risk often arises from the variability in asset returns, and precautionary saving plays a key role in interpreting the results.
We have titled this paper with an ode to a compilation album by a band that was founded in Palo Alto and developed a counter-culture. Though the title espouses a new state of mind, it is investment, not consumption driven, as this is 2017 and not 1965.
The authors examine how consumers respond to pseudo-free offers--offers that are presented to consumers as free but that require consumers to make a nonmonetary payment (such as completing a survey or providing personal information) in order to receive the "free" good or service. Across six studies, the authors find that consumers are generally just as likely to accept pseudo-free offers (with nonmonetary costs) as comparable truly free offers (with no costs), as long as the costs of the pseudo-free offers are below some threshold.