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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
Newspaper/Magazine Article
Date
Publication
Emotion

Thriving under pressure: The effects of stress-related wise interventions on affect, sleep, and exam performance for disadvantaged college students

Author
Goyer, J.P., A.J. Crum, R. Grunberg, and Modupe Akinola

Nearly all students experience stress as they pursue important academic goals. Because stress can be magnified for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, it becomes important to identify interventions that can help mitigate this stress, particularly for these populations as they enter academic environments. We examine the effects of stress mindset and stress management interventions administered to students from disadvantaged backgrounds (N = 140) before freshman year.

Type
Journal Article
Date

Do Socially Responsible Firms Walk the Talk?

Author
Rajgopal, Shivaram and Aneesh Raghunandan

Several firms claim to be socially responsible. We confront these claims with the data using the most notable such proclamation in recent years, the August 2019 Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation by the Business Roundtable (BRT). The BRT is a large, deeply influential business group containing many of America’s largest firms; the 2019 Statement proclaimed that a corporation’s purpose is to deliver value to all stakeholders, rather than to solely maximize shareholder value.

Type
Journal Article
Date

Welfare Consequences of Sustainable Finance

Author
Hong, Harrison, Neng Wang, and Jinqiang Yang

We model the welfare consequences of portfolio mandates that restrict investors to hold firms with net-zero carbon emissions. To qualify for these mandates, value-maximizing firms have to accumulate decarbonization capital. Qualification lowers a firm’s required rate of return by its decarbonization investments divided by Tobin’s q, i.e., the dividend yield shareholders forgo to address the global-warming externality.

Type
Working Paper
Date

The Endowment Model and Modern Portfolio Theory

Author
Dimmock, Stephen, Neng Wang, and Jinqiang Yang

We develop a dynamic portfolio-choice model with illiquid alternative assets to analyze conditions under which the "Endowment Model," used by some large institutional investors such as university endowments, does or does not work. The alternative asset has a lock-up, but can be voluntarily liquidated at any time at a cost. Quantitatively, our model's results match the average level and cross-sectional variation of university endowment funds' spending and asset allocation decisions.

Type
Journal Article
Date

Strategic Bank Liability Structure Under Capital Requirements

Author
Sundaresan, M. Suresh and Zhenyu Wang

Banks strategically choose and dynamically restructure deposits and nondeposit debt in response to the minimum requirements on total capital and tangible equity. We derive the optimal strategic liability structure and show that it minimizes the protection for deposits conditional on capital requirements. Although, given any liability structure, regulators can set capital requirements high enough to remove the incentive for risk substitution, the strategic response to the capital requirements always preserves this incentive.

Type
Journal Article
Date

The Value of Data Records

Author
Galperti, Simone, Aleksandr Levkun, and Jacopo Perego

Many e-commerce platforms use buyers' personal data to intermediate their transactions with sellers. How much value do such intermediaries derive from the data record of each single individual? We characterize this value and find that one of its key components is a novel externality between records, which arises when the intermediary pools some records to withhold the information they contain. Ignoring this can significantly bias the evaluations of data records.

Type
Journal Article
Date

Flattening the Curve: Pandemic-Induced Revaluation of Real Estate

Author
Gupta, A., V. Mittal, J. Peeters, and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh

We show that the COVID-19 pandemic brought house price and rent declines in city centers, and price and rent increases away from the center, thereby flattening the bid-rent curve in most U.S. metropolitan areas. Across MSAs, the flattening of the bid-rent curve is larger when working from home is more prevalent, housing markets are more regulated, and supply is less elastic. Housing markets predict that urban rent growth will exceed suburban rent growth for the foreseeable future.

Type
Journal Article
Date

Managing with Style? Micro-Evidence on the Allocation of Managerial Attention

Author
Brahm, Francisco, Wouter Dessein, Desmond Lo, and Chieko Minami

How does task expertise affect the allocation of attention?

Type
Journal Article
Date

Private or public equity? The evolving entrepreneurial finance landscape

The US entrepreneurial finance market has changed dramatically over the last two decades. Entrepreneurs who raise their first round of venture capital retain 30% more equity in their firm and are more likely to control their board of directors. Late-stage start-ups are raising larger amounts of capital in the private markets from a growing pool of traditional and new investors. These private market changes have coincided with a sharp decline in the number of firms going public—and when firms do go public, they are older and have raised more private capital.

Type
Working Paper
Date

The Economic Effects of Immigration Pardons: Evidence from Venezuelan Entrepreneurs

Author
Cowgill, Bo, Jorge Guzman, and Dany Bahar

This paper shows that providing undocumented immigrants with an immigration pardon, or amnesty, increases their economic activity in the form of higher entrepreneurship. Using administrative census data linked to the complete formal business registry, we study a 2018 policy shift in Colombia that made nearly half a million Venezuelan undocumented migrants eligible for a pardon. Our identification uses quasi-random variation in the amount of time available to get the pardon, introducing a novel regression discontinuity approach to study this policy.

Type
Newspaper/Magazine Article
Date
Publication
Financial Times

Why active management makes sense in bonds for institutions

Author

Equity investors have been shifting away from actively managed funds to passive strategies for decades. Passification, if that is a word, has been slower to take off in fixed-income strategies, though.

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.