SPEAKER

Prof. Michaël Bikard
Associate Professor of Strategy
INSEAD

ABSTRACT

Gender disparities in visible scientific contributions—such as publications and citations—are well-documented. Yet, these metrics omit important forms of scholarly input such as informal feedback. Because women may be more likely to engage in these less visible activities, exclusive reliance on conventional metrics risks understating their contribution to Science. In this study, we focus on the field of Finance and find that women receive acknowledgments more often than their publication and citation rates would suggest. We then analyze peer-review data from an academic conference, showing that female reviewers, on average, write longer and more positive reviews. Taken together, our findings suggest that relying solely on visible metrics might systematically bias evaluations against women.

SPEAKER

Prof. Benjamin Friedrich
Associate Professor of Strategy
Kellogg School of Management
Northwestern University

ABSTRACT

Managers often report that labor constraints – defined as the inability to find workers – are a major obstacle to firms’ growth. This phenomenon is puzzling, because economic theory offers a simple remedy: increase wages until the worker is found or hiring is no longer profitable. We explore why firms report labor constraints instead of pre-empting them by increasing wages using administrative data from Germany. We confirm that quasi-exogenous variation in labor constraints slows down firm growth. Wages play a role consistent with basic theory: firms that report constraints initially underpay their workers, increase wages later, and a quasi-exogenous increase in wages alleviates their problems. Why then do firms not increase wages earlier to avoid the problem to begin with? Unlike financial markets, labor markets do not have an easily observable price process. Firms set wages based on their beliefs, and when they underestimate market-clearing wages, labor constraints arise. Consistent with this mechanism, labor constraints increase after quasi-exogenous wage increases in other parts of the economy and are more prevalent in settings where firms are less informed.

SPEAKER

Prof. Dan Cable
Professor of Organisational Behaviour
London Business School

ABSTRACT

Shock events can threaten employees’ organizational attachment, but little research has focused on how leaders can help reattach employees to their organizations in the wake of shocks. Drawing on the socialization literature, we build theory about the effectiveness of leaders’ approaches to socialization when employees reenter organizations following shock events. Specifically, we conceptualize reentry as a role transition marked by physical and psychological movement that raises employees’ concerns about self-continuity, creating a need for socialization. We propose that humble leaders – because they are open to learning about and integrating employees’ shock-related experiences – will be more likely to engage in socialization approaches that reduce employee turnover and promote employee performance. Focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic as a nearly universal shock event followed by a period of reentry, we find evidence for our hypothesized effects across four studies with complementary methodologies, including online experiments and multi-source field studies (N = 2,974). Specifically, we find that humble leaders are more likely to engage in socialization approaches that affirm employees’ experiences and perspectives as they return to in-person work, which are associated with reduced turnover intentions and behavior as well as enhanced performance.

SPEAKER

Prof. Milo Wang
Assistant Professor of Management
Arizona State University

ABSTRACT

Although research has shown that environmental and social protests can indirectly influence untargeted firms through informational spillovers, we propose that these indirect effects are not confined to informational cues alone. Considering local government officials’ responses to environmental and social protests, we argue that activism can also affect untargeted organizations via a resource-spillover effect. Specifically, when politicians perceive street protests as a threat to their job security and prospects for promotion, they may adopt a middle ground approach, taking policy stances that sit between symbolic gestures and directly addressing activists’ environmental and social grievances. These policies, in turn, can contribute to the creation of new organizations. Using a longitudinal dataset organized by city-year observations in China between 2008 and 2019, we examine how street protests over environmental and social issues can indirectly affect the founding of new ventures, which are particularly sensitive to changes in available resources and operating costs. Results show that local government officials’ response to street protests indirectly facilitates entrepreneurship by lowering business operating costs and increasing access to capital. Further, the resource spillover effect on businesses is accentuated by the political-opportunity structure that enhances the impact of street protests on the responses of local politicians.

SPEAKER

Prof. David C. Chan
Associate Professor of Health Policy
Stanford University

ABSTRACT

Physicians often deviate from medical guidelines, but most guidelines focus on a single disease while ignoring complex interactions that render treatment harmful. We study prescribing decisions covered by a prominent guideline for treating atrial fibrillation in patients at higher risk for stroke. Following the guideline’s introduction, physicians rapidly demonstrated awareness of it, yet they often declined to adhere to it, even for patients with the highest stroke risk. Using machine learning on eight randomized trials of anticoagulation, we find significant stroke treatment effect heterogeneity. However, the trials do not (and were not designed to) reveal heterogeneity in the bleeding side effect of anticoagulation. In the observational data, we find that bleed risk is positively correlated with stroke reduction, raising the possibility that the patients who benefit most from treatment may also suffer greater harm from it. Analyzing the performance of known and optimal treatment rules, we show that known guidelines may perform worse than randomly treating patients. Finally, we develop a guideline under an objective that maximizes the worst outcome under scientific ambiguity and show that this guideline may significantly improve welfare relative to status quo treatment decisions. Analyzing physician behavior under this benchmark, we find that ranking patients according to predicted physician treatment under the “wisdom of the crowds'” performs better than strict adherence to known guidelines.

SPEAKER

Prof. Steve Gray
Assistant Professor
McCombs School of Business
The University of Texas at Austin

ABSTRACT

Founding team members typically have a founder role identity while also having distinctive professional role identities (i.e., engineer, marketing). Drawing from role identity theory and research on organizational identity, we theorize that founding teams whose members strongly identify with the founder role are likely to experience more startup identity conflict. These negative effects can be mitigated, however, when founding team members strongly identify with their professional roles. We test our hypotheses using a multi-informant three-wave survey of 318 founders in 102 startups. Findings demonstrate that identifying with distinctive role identities (profession) limits the negative effects of identifying with a shared role identity (founder). We discuss implications for theory on multiple identities in founding teams, founding team conflict, and organizational identity.

SPEAKER

Prof. Jason Greenberg
Associate Professor of Management
Cornell SC Johnson College of Business

ABSTRACT

Research Summary: We investigate the extent to which the increasing availability of ratings information has affected heterogeneity in firm performance and, if so, what market segments are responsible for these changes. A unique dataset was constructed with restricted-access government data to examine these questions in the context of the New York City restaurant industry between 1994 and 2013. We find that firms serving tourist and expensive price point market segments experienced increasing sales discrepancies as a function of rating differentials when ratings information became more easily accessible with the advent of online rating platforms. These findings depict how the prevalence of online rating systems have shaped competition and value capture, thus providing insight into the determinants of firm performance heterogeneity.

Managerial Summary: We examine the extent to which increasing availability of ratings information has affected firm performance by estimating changes in comparative sales between New York City restaurants between 1994 and 2013. Analyses indicate that increased access to ratings information during this period had a considerable effect on comparative sales for firms serving the tourist and the expensive price point market segments. These results provide insights into other industries where access to evaluations and rating systems have also increased. This work suggests that online ratings have affected how firms compete and capture value, and managers have opportunities to use rating systems to their advantage.

SPEAKER

Prof. Ling Zhong
Assistant Professor of Economics
Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business

ABSTRACT

This paper studies the gender gap among full time college educated workers born between 1931 and 1984. Using rich data from the National Survey of College Graduates and other sources on college graduates and their labor market outcomes, we decompose trends in the gender earnings gap across birth cohorts into trends due to differences in the relative returns to undergraduate and graduate degree field combinations, trends in gender differences in undergraduate field, graduate degree attainment, and graduate field, and trends in a cohort and gender specific “residual component”  that shifts the gender gap in earnings by the same amount for all college graduates. We have three main sets of findings. First, we find that much of the large gap in earnings between the 1931 and 1950 cohorts is due to the “residual component”. Most of the decline is within occupation, especially for the early cohorts. The residual gap varies little from 1951 to the late 70s, after which it resumes its decline. Second, we find that gender differences in the relative return to undergraduate and graduate degree combinations matter for the gender gap, but contribute very little to the decline in the gender gap over the full time period. Third, we study and further decompose the “education gap” the contribution of college major, graduate degree attainment and graduate field to the gap. When evaluated at fixed relative returns to each degree type, the education gap declines substantially and is an important part of the narrowing of the gender gap. But this decline is largely offset by cohort trends in the relative returns to specific fields that worked in favor of men against women. Overall, the education gap varies in a narrow range around 0.2 and accounts for very little of the decline.

SPEAKER

Prof. Christopher M. Barnes
Professor and Provost Chair
Department of Management and Organisation
National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

In this presentation, Prof. Barnes will walk through the topic of human sustainability. Human sustainability focuses on how employees can meet their needs for maintenance without neglecting their needs for growth and generativity, such that they can maintain a (preferably high) level of performance over long periods of time. Prof. Barnes will discuss Restricted Employee Sustainability Theory (REST), as well as a theoretical extension to REST which focuses on the role of the leader. Following this, Prof. Barnes will discuss a construct validation process in which my coauthors and he developed new measures associated with REST, and how these constructs relate to employee health. Prof. Barnes will devote special attention to the topics of preventive versus corrective maintenance, which seem very similar on the surface but are better differentiated in predicting outcomes over time. Finally, Prof. Barnes will discuss potential future directions for research on the topic of human sustainability.

SPEAKER

Prof. Yiqun Chen
Assistant Professor
Department of Economics
University of Illinois at Chicago

ABSTRACT

This paper studies the productivity of nurse practitioners (NPs) and physicians, two professions performing overlapping tasks but with starkly different backgrounds, training, and pay. Using quasi-experimental variation in patient assignment to NPs versus physicians in Veterans Health Administration emergency departments, we find that, on average, NPs use more resources and achieve less favorable patient outcomes than physicians. However, the NP-physician performance difference varies by case complexity and severity. Importantly, even larger productivity variation exists within each profession, leading to substantial overlap between the productivity distributions of the two professions; NPs perform better than physicians in 38 percent of random pairs.