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 develop a methodology to collect and analyze data on CEOs' time use. The idea — sketched out in a simple theoretical set-up — is that CEO time is a scarce resource and its allocation can help us identify the firm's priorities as well as the presence of governance issues. We follow 94 CEOs of top-600 Italian firms over a pre-specified week and record the time devoted each day to different work activities. We focus on the distinction between time spent with insiders (employees of the firm) and outsiders (people not employed by the firm).
We propose a new, valuation-based measure of world equity market segmentation. While we observe decreased levels of segmentation in many developing countries, the level of segmentation is still significant. In contrast to previous research, we characterize the factors that account for variation in market segmentation both through time as well as across countries.
First we discuss how extrinsic incentives may come into conflict with other motivations. For example, monetary incentives from principals may change how tasks are perceived by agents, with negative effects on behavior. In other cases, incentives might have the desired effects in the short term, but they still weaken intrinsic motivations. To put it in concrete terms, an incentive for a child to learn to read might achieve that goal in the short term, but then be counterproductive as an incentive for students to enjoy reading and seek it out over their lifetimes.
The current research investigated whether mind-sets and contexts that afford a focus on self-other differences can facilitate perceptual and conceptual forms of perspective taking. Supporting this hypothesis, results showed that directly priming a difference mind-set made perceivers more likely to spontaneously adopt other people's visual perspectives (Experiment 1) and less likely to overimpute their own privileged knowledge to others (Experiments 2 and 3).
Dominant theories of trade tend to ignore the role of finance as a source of comparative advantage. On the other hand, the finance literature places financial institutions as a driver of economic growth. This paper unites these two competing schools of thought in a general equilibrium framework. For economies with high-quality institutions (defined by the competitiveness of the financial sector, the quality of corporate governance, and the level of property rights protection), finance is passive.
This paper reviews the pattern of bank failures during the financial crisis and asks whether there was a link with corporate governance. It revisits the theory of bank governance and suggests a multiconstituency approach that emphasizes the role of weak creditors. The empirical evidence suggests that, on average, banks with stronger risk officers, less independent boards, and executives with less variable remuneration incurred fewer losses. There is no evidence that institutional shareholders opposed aggressive risk-taking.
The article discusses research that shows managers who are perceived as being tough and wielding power are more likely to be promoted than others. The author cites the example of drug maker Pfizer, where in 2001 the no-nonsense Hank McKinnell was hired as chief executive instead of the more collegial Karen Katen. In 2006 Pfizer got rid of McKinnel for poor performance.
The efficacy of corporate governance practices are examined in the context of Boards that govern Chinese joint ventures. Results suggest that Board independence and diversity improve JV performance, while larger Boards reduce the dividends paid by JV. Findings are consistent with that adage that manageable-sized Boards should be preferred over larger ones that attempt to include the viewpoints of all possible affected constituents.
Identity movements rely on a shared "we-feeling" amongst a community of participants. In turn, such shared identities are possible when movement participants can self-categorize themselves as belonging to one group. We address a debate as to whether community diversity enhances or impedes such protests, and investigate the role of racial diversity since it is a simple, accessible, and visible basis of community diversity and social categorization.
Contact Lalit Manral at [email protected] for a copy of the manuscript.
This paper examines whether underwriters of prime mortgage-backed securities exploit private information when trading in the secondary market. While underwriters bid on more than 83 percent of their own tranches, the tranches they avoid bidding on have fewer bidders and exhibit worse-than-average ex-post performance. Most strikingly, when an underwriter declines to submit a bid at a secondary market sale, 30-day delinquent loans are about 3 times as likely to roll to 60-days delinquent in the next month compared to pools where the underwriter bids.
One of the most important features of securitization is the ability to create securities whose credit risk is based on the quality of a pool of loans rather than the credit risk of the lender who originated the assets. However, the recent failure of many specialized lenders who relied on securitization, and the subsequent extremely poor performance of their securities, raises the question whether the performance of the security can be separated from the financial condition of its sponsor.
In deciding the type and quantity of vehicles to produce, it is important that managers anticipate the quantity of products or services customers will demand at various price levels — and the associated costs. This case asks students to analyze the data and consider whether GM's management made the wrong business decision in producing the cars they did.
ZigZag Zippers planned a $90 million renovation of their 100-year-old factory site. What was the least expensive option for funding this long-term project?
Accounting for Value teaches investors and analysts how to handle accounting in evaluating equity investments. The book's novel approach shows that valuation and accounting are much the same: valuation is actually a matter of accounting for value.
During 2008 and 2009, the insurance industry experienced unprecedented volatility. The large swings in insurers' market valuations, and the significant role that financial reporting played in the uncertainty surrounding insurance companies during that period, highlight the importance of understanding insurers' financial information and its implications for the risk and value of insurance companies.
Joel I. Klein's legacy as New York City's schools chancellor will ultimately be defined by results. Did he improve student outcomes across the board?
We believe the answer is an unequivocal yes. Comparing the academic achievement of the city's 1.1 million children when Klein took over to current levels, the city moved mountains.
This study investigates the information content of variation analysis—that is, analysis of year-over-year changes in the components of operating profit. Using industry level data, we find that the effects on profitability of changes in the prices of output products and costs of intermediate inputs are more persistent than the effects of changes in output volume, labor cost, labor productivity, and intermediate input productivity. We further show that this information is priced by investors.
Many companies do not know their marketing ROI because their organizations are not set up to evaluate marketing ROI.
This article examines the population dynamics and viability of network weavers, which are organizations that provide network relations for others. An analysis of the population dynamics of the intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) that are the basis of the interstate networks that influenced global economic relations, peace, and democracy in the 1815–2000 period show that IGO founding and failure depends on the ease and value of specific interstate relations.
This research investigates the effects of regulatory focus on alternative search and consideration set formation in consumer decision making. Results from three experiments yield two primary findings. First, promotion‐focused consumers tend to search for alternatives at a more global level, whereas prevention‐focused consumers tend to search for alternatives at a more local level. Second, promotion‐focused consumers tend to have larger consideration sets than do prevention‐focused consumers.
What type of social network is associated with greater well-being? We argue that the effects of social networks on well-being depend on individuals' self-regulatory orientation — a basic motivational factor. We propose that brokerage networks fit a promotion-focused orientation that is concerned with eagerly pursuing gains, whereas closure networks fit a prevention-focused orientation that is concerned with vigilantly maintaining non-losses.
<p>We present a tractable, linear model for the simultaneous pricing of stock and bond returns that incorporates stochastic risk aversion. In this model, analytic solutions for endogenous stock and bond prices and returns are readily calculated. After estimating the parameters of the model by the general method of moments, we investigate a series of classic puzzles of the empirical asset pricing literature.
We examine the implications of separating students of different grade levels across schools for the purposes of educational production. Specifically, we find that moving students from elementary to middle school in 6th or 7th grade causes significant drops in academic achievement. These effects are large (about 0.15 standard deviations), present for both math and English, and persist through grade 8, the last year for which we have achievement data. The effects are similar for boys and girls, but stronger for students with low levels of initial achievement.
We examine the effects of two important types of medical innovation—diagnostic imaging innovation and pharmaceutical innovation—and cancer incidence rates on U.S. cancer mortality rates during the period 1996–2006. The outcome measure we use is not subject to lead-time bias, and our measures of medical innovation are based on extensive data on treatments given to large numbers of patients with different types of cancer.
Four studies examine the existence, underlying mechanism, and effectiveness of a new norm endorsed by both Black and White Americans for managing interracial interactions: “racial paralysis,” the tendency to opt out of decisions involving members of different races. While Whites were quite willing to choose which of two White individuals was more likely to be class valedictorian or to have committed a violent crime, they were less likely to make the same choice between a White and Black person (Study 1).
Using a cross-national survey of Citibank employees, the authors examine the persistent influence of ethnic background on perceptions of choice and its association with performance, intrinsic motivation, and well-being in the workplace. Among Anglo-Americans, task choice was prominent and associated with benefits for employees, whereas choices made by supervisors were less salient and associated with detriments.