Speaker on 15 June, 2023

Prof. Anthea Zhang
Fayez Sarofim Vanguard Professor of Management
Jones Graduate School of Business
Rice University

Title
Caught Between Female Tokenism And Female Dominance: Examining The Impact Of Female Representation On Evaluations Of Entrepreneurial Projects In The Technology Field

ABSTRACT

It has been well noted that relative to their male counterparts, female entrepreneurs encounter disadvantages in seeking financial resources in the technology field. We examine how the level of female representation in technological projects—token female representation, substantive female representation, vs. no female representation—may affect how female and male evaluators evaluate the projects. We propose that compared to male evaluators, projects with token female representation are more likely to remind female evaluators of their own token status, and such an identity threat may lead them to give lower evaluations. We also propose that compared to female evaluators, projects with substantive female representation are more likely to be viewed by male evaluators as a liability of capability, leading them to give lower evaluations. Conducted in a unique setting wherein panels comprising female and male evaluators rated funding applications, our study supports these predictions. Moreover, we find that female evaluators’ lower evaluations of projects with token female representation are mitigated if the evaluators have a non-tech background, the entrepreneurs present their projects with languages consistent with a muscular style, or the ventures have received external investment. Our research can make important contributions to the literature on technological entrepreneurship and gender research.

Speaker on 16 June 2023

Prof. Amy Hillman
Professor & Rusty Lyon Chair in Strategy
W. P. Carey Management and Entrepreneurship
Arizona State University

Title
Help the poor? Governing corporate investment in poverty alleviation

ABSTRACT

Today both scholars and practitioners increasingly pay attention to a firm’s role in tackling grand societal challenges. We explore why and when some firms invest in solving grand challenges by specifically examining the role of governance in poverty alleviation. Poverty alleviation is an important societal challenge notable in its distal nature from the day-to-day activities of the firm. Focusing on a key institutional infrastructure, governments, we show two external governance mechanisms—local political pressure and local extractive power—important to our understanding of a firm’s investments in poverty alleviation. We also explore the role of two important internal governance mechanisms—firm ownership and political connections—and find interesting results regarding the level of ownership and connections and a firm’s efforts to address poverty alleviation. We build our understanding of the connection between institutional theory and corporate governance and develop the nexus between internal (ownership and political connections) and external (political pressure and extractive power) governance mechanisms as an important part of a firm’s commitment to this grand challenge.

SPEAKER

Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics
Postdoctoral Fellow at J-PAL
Harvard University and MIT

ABSTRACT

An influential explanation for global productivity differences is that frontier technologies are adapted to the high-income, research-intensive countries that develop them and “inappropriate” elsewhere. We study this hypothesis in the context of global agriculture by using mismatch in the presence of crop-specific pests and pathogens (CPPs) as a shifter of technology’s inappropriateness and investigating its effect on global innovation, technology diffusion and productivity. We find that (i) technology development is biased toward CPP threats in high-income countries; (ii) CPP mismatch reduces plant-variety transfer at the crop-by-country-pair level, particularly from innovation-intensive origins; and (iii) CPP mismatch with innovation-intensive countries reduces crop production, both statically in the modern cross-section and dynamically in response to historical events that have altered the geography of agricultural innovation. Our estimates, combined with a model, imply that the inappropriateness of technology reduces global productivity by 58% and increases cross-country disparities by 15%. We use our framework to explore how global productivity gaps would be affected by counterfactual changes to both the geography of innovation, for example from the rise of R&D in emerging markets, and environmental differences across countries, for example due to climate change. Together, these findings provide support for each pillar of the inappropriate technology hypothesis and demonstrate how the direction of innovation underlies disparities in global agricultural productivity.

SPEAKER

Dr. Tianxu Chen
Associate Professor
John Chambers College of Business and Economics
West Virginia University

ABSTRACT

Drawing on the attentional perspective and the awareness-motivation-capability framework in competitive dynamics, this study provides a theoretical framework linking a focal firm’s public display of executive attention breadth to a rival’s subsequent volume of competitive actions. We argue that a wider executive attention breadth displayed by the focal firm will motivate its rival to engage in more aggressive attacks. We also argue that the focal firm’s level of visibility and market dominance will moderate the impact of its executive attention breadth on a rival’s competitive actions. Based on a unique sample of competitor dyads from duopoly industries composed of Standard and Poor’s (S&P) 1500 firms, we found a positive association between a focal firm’s expressed executive attention breadth and its rival’s subsequent volume of competitive actions. We also found that when a focal firm’s visibility is high, the relationship between the focal firm’s expressed executive attention breadth and a rival’s action volume is stronger; whereas, when a focal firm’s market dominance is high, the relationship between the focal firm expressed executive attention breadth and a rival’s action volume is weaker.

SPEAKER

Prof. Junjie Zhou
Professor of Economics
School of Economics and Management
Tsinghua University

ABSTRACT

We provide a simple network model of multiple layers (referred to as multiplexity), an important but understudied topic in the network literature. On any layer, agents’ incentives are influenced by their within-layer social ties. Facing aggregate effort constraint, agents optimize across layers, which may have heterogeneous network structures. We first characterize the equilibrium of this game and determine the importance of both within and between-layer interactions in terms of shock propagations. Then, we identify the optimal targeting interventions with multiplexity. Applications to multiple club goods, markets with neighborhood effects, and management of multiple social relationships are provided.

SPEAKER

Dr. Christobal Otero
Assistant Professor
Economics Division
Columbia Business School

ABSTRACT

We study whether, and how, managers can increase government productivity in the context of public health provision. Using novel data from public hospitals in Chile, we document that top managers (CEOs) account for a significant amount of variation in hospital mortality. We then use a staggered difference-in-differences design, and show that a reform which introduced a competitive selection system for recruiting CEOs in public hospitals reduced hospital mortality by approximately 8%. The effect is not explained by a change in patient composition and is robust to several alternative explanations. The financial incentives included in the reform—performance pay and higher wages—do not explain our findings. Instead, we show that the policy changed the pool of CEOs by displacing older doctors with no management training in favor of younger CEOs who had studied management. The mortality effects were driven by hospitals in which the new CEOs had managerial qualifications. These CEOs improved operating room efficiency and reduced staff turnover.

SPEAKER

Prof. Shibin Sheng
Professor of Marketing
Collat School Of Business
University of Alabama at Birmingham

ABSTRACT

Although firms see green innovation as a means to manage regulatory pressures and meet customer needs, little is known about its impact on firm performance. The underlying mechanisms and contingent conditions of the relationship between green innovation and firm financial performance also remain underexplored. Drawing on institutional theory, this study examines the mediating effect of tone management, including media tone and manager tone, on the relationship between green innovation and firm financial performance, as well as the moderating effect of state ownership on the relationship between tone management and financial performance. Using a dataset consisting of 10,064 observations of 1,460 Chinese high-tech firms over a 20-year period (2000–2019), this study reveals that green innovation can improve firm financial performance through positive media and manager tone. In addition, state ownership attenuates the positive effects of media tone and manager tone on firm performance. These findings offer important implications for academic research and managerial practice.

SPEAKER

Dr. Hong Luo
Associate Professor
Business Administration in the Strategy Unit
Harvard Business School

ABSTRACT

How do the Harvey Weinstein scandal and #MeToo affect women’s likelihood of working in male-dominated domains and the types of ideas developed in Hollywood? To discern these events’ impact, we exploit the variation in whether a producer previously collaborated with Weinstein. We find that compared to their non-associated counterparts, Weinstein-associated teams with female talent are more likely to work on male-oriented stories after the shock, and their depiction of female protagonists is less traditionally feminine. Finally, we find no change in the share of female-oriented stories by Weinstein-associated producers, even though they now work substantially more with female talent. Our findings suggest that these events have helped counteract gender stereotypes for women, but they do not mitigate the shortage of female-oriented ideas.

SPEAKER

Dr. Trevor Foulk
Associate Professor
Management & Organization
The Robert H. Smith School of Business
University of Maryland

ABSTRACT

In two papers, I will discuss how considering employees’ internal mindsets can help us both identify and solve important work problems that employees may be experiencing. In the first paper, taking an identity perspective, I will demonstrate that domain-incongruent self-affirmation (defined as affirming an important non-work identity while at work) can change employees’ mindsets in a way that induces anxiety, and that this affirmation-induced anxiety can have costs for employees, both at work and at home.  In the second paper, taking a goal perspective, I will demonstrate how non-work goal reflection (thinking about important non-work goals at the end of the workday) can shift employees mindsets in a way that helps them stop ruminating about work during non-work time, and how rumination mediates the effect of non-work goal reflection on employees’ after-work well-being.  Taken together, these studies highlight the importance of employees’ internal mindsets, and provide insights into how employees understand and interpret the work environment and their relationships with it.

SPEAKER

Dr. Matthias Fahn
Associate Professor
An affiliate of the CESifo Network
Johannes Kepler University Linz

ABSTRACT

We study the relationship between outside options and workers’ incentives to exert effort. We first set up a relational contracting model where effort is constrained by the future surplus of an employment relationship. To test the predictions from this model, we evaluate changes in outside options arising from age and experience cutoffs in the Austrian unemployment insurance (UI) system. Results indicate that a 9-week UI benefit extension increasesworker absenteeism at the intensive margin by 0.5 days per half-year, on average. Consistent with our model predicting that these effort reductions are more pronounced if the perceived relationship value is small, we find that our effects are stronger for workers with higher potential cost of unemployment, for older workers, in declining rather than in growing firms, in low-wage firms, and for women who have children.

SPEAKER

Prof. Florian Englmaier
Professor of Organizational Economics
Department of Economics
LMU Munich

ABSTRACT

This paper empirically examines whether management practices that work well during an economic boom are also e ective in times of economics crisis, using plant-level survey data collected in Spain in 2006 just prior to the Great Recession. By employing unsupervised machine learning, we leverage high-dimensional human resource policies at each plant to describe clusters of management practices (“management styles”). We establish a positive correlation of a management style associated with structured management with performance prior to the crisis starting in 2006. Even accounting for firm survival, this correlation turns negative during the financial crisis. Further results suggest that more structured management correlates with relatively higher holdings of non-liquid assets and lower employee turnover. This suggests that a structured management style allows firms to strive during a boom but may be an impediment to adjusting to rapidly deteriorating economic conditions.