Faculty research

Assistant Professor of Operations Management Işıl Alev’s post “3 Ways to Fix E-Waste Regulations,” written with five co-authors was featured on The Huffington Post’s blog highlighting work by members of the Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability.

Assistant Professor of Finance Ian Appel wrote a post for Harvard Business Review’s website. The post, “Research: Index Funds Are Improving Corporate Governance,” explains the surprising findings of the research paper “Passive Investors, Not Passive Owners,” co-authored by Appel and published in the July 2016 issue of the Journal of Financial Economics.

Jean M. Bartunek, Robert A. and Evelyn J. Ferris Chair and professor of management and organization, published the paper “An Affect-Based Model of Recipients’ Responses to Organizational Change Events” in the journal Academy of Management, with coauthors Shaul Oreg, Gayoung Lee, and Boram Do. Bartunek, with Robert MacIntosh, Mamta Bhatt, and Donald MacLean, also contributed a chapter titled “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden: When Research Questions Ought to Change” to the book series Research in Organizational Change and Development. In August, she gave the keynote presentation, “How Academic Relevance Really, Truly Happened in Practice: The US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,” at the Strategies, Activities, and Practices Special Interest Group Meeting at the 2016 Academy of Management Annual Meeting in Anaheim, California.

Assistant Professor of Marketing Alexander Bleier was invited to give talks at two universities recently. He spoke about online content adaptation at Stanford Graduate School of Business in May and about the influence of content factors on the performance of online product listings at Rotterdam School of Management in September. He also presented “Brands as Stewards: The Role of Brand Leadership in the Process of Restoring Control” at the 45th European Marketing Academy Conference in Oslo and “A Cross-Firm, -Channel, and -Product Analysis of the Effects of Online Content Factors on Business Performance” at the 2016 ISMS Marketing Science Conference in Shanghai.

Andy Boynton, John and Linda Powers Family Dean, added a new post to the Forbes leadership blog on August 10, titled “How to Stay out of the Don’t Zone (with a Don’t-Do List).” In the post, Dean Boynton—a frequent online contributor to Forbes—recommends that organizations maintain strategic focus by actively defining what they don’t do.

S. Adam Brasel, associate professor and chair of marketing, and Henrik Hagtvedt, associate professor of marketing, published a paper in the August Journal of Marketing Research showing that in a store piping in high-frequency music, customers are more likely to pick up items off a light-colored shelf.

Thomas J. Chemmanur, professor of finance and Hillenbrand Family Faculty Fellow, published two new papers: “Institutional Trading, Information Production, and Corporate Spin-offs” in the June 2016 Journal of Corporate Finance, with co-author Shan He; and “Do Local and International Venture Capitalists Play Well Together? The Complementarity of Local and International Venture Capitalists” in September’s Journal of Business Venturing, with co-authors Tyler J. Hull and Karthik Krishnan.

“Coping with the Effects of Emotionally Difficult Work,” an article by Associate Professor of Management and Organization Judith Clair, with Jamie J. Ladge and Richard D. Cotton, was published on the Harvard Business Review’s website on August 16. The article discusses widely applicable insights from a recent study of HR professionals who have had to carry out repeated layoffs for their organizations.

Professor of Accounting Jeffrey Cohen co-authored the paper “CSR Disclosure Items Used as Fairness Heuristics in the Investment Decision” with Helen Brown-Liburd and Valentina L. Zamora. The paper was published in the August 2016 volume of the Journal of Business Ethics.

In the article “Funds That Find Speedsters, Even in a Slow Economy,” part-time Accounting Department faculty member Tim Gray profiled for the New York Times several mutual funds whose approaches to investment are yielding dividends in today’s market.

Brad Harrington, executive director of the Boston College Center for Work and Family, told The Huffington Post “What Millennial Dads Tell Us About the Key to Fulfillment” in a new blog post about today’s “caring, committed and conflicted” working fathers.

Professor of Finance Clifford G. Holderness and co-author Alex Edmans wrote the column “The Role of Blockholders in Governance,” which was published on the VoxEU website on September 15.

Assistant Professor of Operations Management Tingliang Huang’s article “Myopic Analysis for Multi-Echelon Inventory Systems with Batch Ordering and Nonstationary/Time-Correlated Demands” (with Yi Yang and Yimin Yu), was published online by the journal Production and Operations Management prior to print publication. At June’s INFORMS International Conference in Hawaii, Huang chaired the invited session “OM/Marketing: Innovative Strategies” and presented the working paper “Managing Quality and Product Returns in Competitive Markets.” In July, he presented “Dynamic Management of Probabilistic Selling” in an invited session on marketing and manufacturing strategy at the 9th Annual International Conference of the Chinese Scholars Association for Management Science and Engineering (CSAMSE).

Professor of Finance Edward Kane served as a speaker in the Levy Economics Institute’s panel “Bank Regulation, Too Big to Fail, and Liquidity,” part of the Institute’s 25th Annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference on the State of the US and World Economies. A video of the panel, which was moderated by New York Times reporter Peter Eavis, can be streamed online here.

Gerald C. Kane, associate professor of information systems and McKeirnan Family Faculty Fellow, wrote three new posts for the MIT Sloan Management Review website. In “Adobe Reinvents Its Customer Experience,” Kane interviewed Adobe Executive Vice President of Customer and Employee Experience Donna Morris about the power of employee engagement. Co-authored with Senior Lecturer of Marketing Bridget Akinc and student contributor Danielle Dalton, “Can Social Media Cultivate Long-Term Loyalty?” argued that social media branding can pay off in future ROI, and “‘One Weird Trick’ to Digital Transformation” outlined the path companies take to reach digital maturity.

Harvard Business Review published the online article “Why Companies Are Becoming B Corporations” by Assistant Professor of Management and Organization Suntae Kim, co-written with Matthew J. Karlesky, Christopher G. Myers, and Todd Schifeling.

Professor of the Practice Amy LaCombe and Portico Program Lecturer Sarah Cabral co-presented “Portico: Its Evolution and Lessons Learned 2009−2016” at July’s Colleagues in Jesuit Business Education Annual Conference at Le Moyne College.

Misrepresenting financial earnings can harm a firm's reputation. It also has a spillover effect, tarnishing analysts who were previously bullish on the company, found Lian Fen Lee, associate professor of accounting, and Alvis Lo, assistant professor of accounting, who published their research in the September Journal of Accounting Research. Meanwhile, the reputations of analysts who gave bearish assessments are burnished when the firm is found out.

Three journals have recently published articles by Accenture Professor of Marketing Katherine N. Lemon. “Mere Measurement ‘Plus’: How Solicitation of Open-Ended Positive Feedback Influences Customer Purchase Behavior,” written with six co-authors, appeared in the Journal of Marketing Research. “Less of This One? I’ll Take It: New Insights on the Influence of Shelf-based Scarcity,” co-authored with Stacey G. Robinson, Michael K. Brady, and Michael Giebelhausen, was published in the International Journal of Research in Marketing, and “Understanding Customer Experience throughout the Customer Journey,” written with Peter C. Verhoef, was published in the Journal of Marketing. Lemon also served as executive director of the Marketing Science Institute’s “Gaining REAL Insights from Social Media” conference in July.

When an uninformed principal makes a timing decision with an informed but biased agent, the direction of the bias determines how credibly the agent can communicate information. “Delegation adds value when the bias is for early decision making, but not for late decision making,” wrote Assistant Professor of Finance Nadya Malenko and coauthors in the September American Economic Review. She also published “The Labor Market for Directors and Externalities in Corporate Governance” (with Doron Levit) in the April issue of the Journal of Finance. In late spring, Malenko was a discussant at two conferences: the Drexel Conference on Corporate Governance in Philadelphia and the SFS Cavalcade in Toronto.  

Assistant Professor of Management and Organization Sean Martin revealed in an online article for Harvard Business Review that “Growing Up Wealthy Makes Leaders More Narcissistic” (with Stéphane Côté and Col. Todd Woodruff).

Alicia H. Munnell, Peter F. Drucker Chair in Management Sciences and director of the Center for Retirement Research, wrote four new articles about issues facing retired Americans for the Market Watch website: “Proposal to Cut Social Security Undermines Retirement Security,” “What Happens when Kids Leave Home?,” “The Decline in Social Security’s Family Benefits,” and “What’s Going on with CBO’s Social Security Projections?”

Associate Professor of Marketing Gergana Y. Nenkov and collaborators argue for a more expansive definition of “marketplace morality” in their paper “The Case for Moral Consumption: Examining and Expanding the Domain of Moral Behavior to Promote Individual and Collective Well-Being,” published in the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing.

In a paper published this fall by the Journal of Consumer Research​, Coughlin Sesquicentennial Assistant Professor of Marketing Hristina Nikolova and a co-researcher found​ that in negotiations where no women are present, men are less likely to find middle ground.

Should employers be allowed to require workers to sign away their rights to collective action as a condition of employment? Professor of Business Law and Society Christine Neylon O’Brien examines that question in a paper to be published in the spring 2017 University of Pennsylvania Journal of Business Law.

The Oxford Handbook of Organizational Identity, co-edited by O’Connor Family Professor Michael G. Pratt, publishes this fall. In addition, Pratt, who is also Ph.D. director of the management and organization department, co-authored a study, “Meaningful Work as Realization and Justification: Toward a Dual Conceptualization,” in the June 2016 Organizational Psychology Review; and he spoke about dignifying work at the Institute for Ethics in Communication and Organizations’ colloquium in the spring.

Could a robot do the work of a CEO? Sam Ransbotham, associate professor of information systems, explored that question in MIT Sloan Management Review. In other Sloan pieces, Ransbotham interviewed Jeffrey Bohn of State Street about data analytics, and wrote about data experiments and getting business value out of the Internet of Things. He also presented his paper, “Electronic Trace Data and Legal Outcomes: The Effect of Electronic Medical Records on Malpractice Claim Resolution Time,” at a National Bureau of Economic Research conference this past summer.

Associate Professor of Finance Jonathan Reuter presented “New Evidence on the Demand for Advice within Retirement Plans” at the TIAA Institute.

In August, Marketing Science published “When Random Assignment Is Not Enough: Accounting for Item Selectivity in Experimental Research” by Linda Court Salisbury, associate professor of marketing, and co-authors.

“Brexit, Trump, and Who Knows What More Is to Come?” wondered Associate Professor of Management and Organization Mohan Subramaniam in an op-ed in NetIndian. And in MIT Sloan Management Review, Subramaniam also wrote about how digital technology is putting consumers in control of customization.

Sandra Waddock, Professor and Galligan Chair of Strategy, co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Corporate Citizenship, carrying the theme “Intellectual Shamans, Wayfinders, Edgewalkers, and Systems Thinkers: Building a Future Where All Can Thrive.” Waddock also published papers delving into social issues in management, developing humanistic leadership, and the role of business in society in, respectively, Business & Society, Humanistic Management Journal, and Humanistic Management Journal.

 

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