Research, Media Impact, and Awards: Spring 2023
This sampling of recent faculty activity at the Boston College Carroll School of Management includes papers published in leading peer-reviewed journals. Among them:听Journal of Financial Economics, Academy of Management Journal, Management Science, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Accounting and Economics,听and others. Also included in this roundup are recent media spotlights on Carroll School faculty research as well as awards and other distinctions.
Rui Albuquerque, Vyacheslav (Slava) Fos
Professor, Finance and Seidner Family Faculty Fellow
Professor, Finance and Hillenbrand Family Faculty Fellow
Journal of Financial Economics
"Value Creation in Shareholder Activism"
Co-author:
听Enrique Schroth, EDHEC Business School
"Higher treatment values predict improvements in firm performance and lower proxy contest probabilities, whereas abnormal announcements returns do not, suggesting that our estimate identifies more effective activism campaigns. The evidence demonstrates the importance of using the joint distribution of investment strategies and announcement returns to recover the expected returns and costs of activism."
Curtis Chan
Assistant Professor, Management and Organization
Academy of Management Journal
"The Role of Discernment and Modulation in Enacting Occupational Values: How Career Advising Professionals Navigate Tensions with Clients"
Co-author:
听Luke N. Hedden,听PhD candidate, Boston College
"We contribute to the relational perspective on occupations and professions by positing how discernment and modulation help experts navigate relational tensions by recognizing and drawing on intra-clientele heterogeneity, unpacking how professionals might not entirely resist or change amidst incongruence but instead pursue a more mixed approach, and highlighting when and how experts mask or moderate rather than overtly enact their values."
Samuel Hartzmark
Professor, Finance and Hillenbrand Family Faculty Fellow
Working Paper
"Counterproductive Sustainable Investing: The Impact Elasticity of Brown and Green Firms"
Co-authors:
听Kelly Shue, Yale University
"We show empirically that a reduction in financing costs for firms that are already green leads to small improvements in impact at best. In contrast, increasing financing costs for brown firms leads to large negative changes in firm impact. Thus, sustainable investing that directs capital away from brown firms and toward green firms may be counterproductive, in that it makes brown firms more brown without making green firms more green.听"
Nan Liu
Associate Professor, Business Analytics and William S. McKiernan '78 Family Faculty Fellow
Management Science
"Managing Outpatient Service with Strategic Walk-ins"
Co-authors:
听Willem van Jaarsveld,听Eindhoven University of Technology
听Shan Wang, Stanford University
听Guanlian Xiao, University of Calgary
"Our research highlights that there is no one-size-fits-all model for outpatient care management, and the best use of operational levers critically depends on the practice environment."
Gergana Nenkov, Linda Court Salisbury
Associate Professor, Marketing
Associate Professor, Marketing
Journal of Marketing (forthcoming)
"Consumer Financial Vulnerability: Novel Insights for Theory, Practice, and Public Policy"
Co-authors:
听Simon J. Blanchard, Georgetown University
听Ronald Paul Hill, American University
听Alexander L. Brown,听Texas A&M University
听Kelly D. Martin, Colorado State University
"The authors propose a novel, theory-driven definition of consumer financial vulnerability (CFV), as the risk of incurring future harm, given the consumer鈥檚 current access to various financial resources."
Paul Schmelzing
Assistant Professor, Finance
National Bureau of Economic Research
"The March 2023 Bank Interventions in Long-Run Context 鈥� Silicon Valley Bank and Beyond"
Co-authors:
听Andrew Metrick, Yale University
"This paper contextualizes events using a new long-run database on banking-sector policy interventions over the last eight centuries. On that basis, recent actions have already been unusual in their policy mix and size 鈥� in the database, the vast majority of events with the same pattern of interventions ultimately evolved into 鈥渟ystemic鈥� bank-distress episodes."
Hanyi (Livia) Yi
Assistant Professor, Finance
Journal of Public Economics
"Aging and Public Financing Costs: Evidence From U.S. Municipal Bond Markets"
Co-author:
听Alexander W. Butler, Rice University
"We examine the impact of population aging on municipal access to credit. A one standard deviation increase in a state鈥檚 population age leads to a 23 basis point increase in municipal bond issue spread. Three mechanisms drive this effect: income tax revenue, healthcare spending, and pension liabilities. Constitutional pension protections and securities with lower credit quality or longer maturity exacerbate the effect."
Pierluigi Balduzzi
Professor, Finance
The Economic Journal
"Political Risk, Populism, and the Economy"
"We show that adverse political risk shocks have negative effects on domestic financial markets and in some countries generate spillovers on the spreads of other euro-zone economies. Moreover, in Italy populism-related political risk shocks have a larger effect on financial markets and they harm the real economy."
Vyacheslav (Slava) Fos, Nancy Xu
Professor, Finance and Hillenbrand Family Faculty Fellow
Assistant Professor, Finance
European Corporate Governance Institute (working paper)
"Do the Voting Rights of Federal Reserve Bank Presidents Matter?"
"Supporting the voting mechanism, we show that voting presidents dissent based on economic conditions in their districts. Reserve Bank presidents鈥� districts are more likely to be mentioned in FOMC transcripts than are the districts of non-voting presidents. Finally, we show that the path of the target rate would have been different if economic conditions in all districts affected FOMC decisions."
Bradford Hudson
Associate Professor of the Practice, Marketing
Journal of Brand Management
"Inducing Omni-temporality: Product Heritage Appropriation in Corporate Heritage Brand Construction"
Co-authors:
听Pedro Mir Bernal,听University of Navarra
听Fabien Pecot, TBS Education
听Virginie de Barnier, Universit茅 de Nouvelle-Cal茅donie
"The study identifies how a younger corporate brand appropriates an older product brand鈥檚 heritage. Results contribute to a better understanding of the induction of omni-temporality, and of the development of a corporate heritage brand."
Gergana Nenkov
Associate Professor, Marketing
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
"Friend or Foe? Can Anthropomorphizing Self-Tracking Devices Backfire on Marketers and Consumers?"
Co-authors:
听Lane Peterson Fronczek, Georgia State University
听Martin Mende, Florida State University
听Maura L. Scott, Florida State University
听Anders Gustafsson, BI Norwegian Business School
"These findings provide novel insights to marketing scholars and managers, by suggesting that anthropomorphism can be a successful short-term selling strategy, but over time, it can have unintended consequences for both firms and consumers."
Alicia Munnell
Peter F. Drucker Chair in Management Sciences
Director of the Center for Retirement Research
The Journal of Retirement
"Do Retirees Want Constant, Increasing, or Decreasing Consumption?"
Co-authors:
听Anqi Chen, Center for Retirement Research at Boston College
"This project builds on the existing literature by: 1) examining retirement consumption over longer periods; 2) using wealth to separate constrained and unconstrained households in order to analyze whether declines in consumption are driven by necessity or preferences; and 3) exploring whether, within unconstrained households, those with steeper mortality profiles are more likely to front-load consumption."
The Journal of Retirement
1.听鈥�,鈥澨�with Anthony Webb
Center for Retirement Research at Boston College
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2.听鈥溾�� with Anqi Chen
3.听鈥溾�� with Anqi Chen and Siyan Liu
4.听鈥溾�� with Anqi Chen, Gal Wettstein, and Nilufer Gok
5.听鈥�,鈥� with Diana Horvath
6.听鈥溾�� with Laura D. Quinby and听Siyan Liu
Working Papers
1.听鈥溾�� with Anqi Chen and Nilufer Gok
2.听鈥溾�� with Andrew G. Biggs and Anqi Chen
3.听鈥溾�� with Anqi Chen and Siyan Liu
4.听鈥溾�� with Gal Wettstein, Nilufer Gok, and Anqi Chen
Hassan Tehranian
Professor, Finance and Griffith Family Millennium Chair
Working Paper
"Climate Risk, ESG Performance, and ESG Sentiment for U.S. Commercial Banks"
Co-authors:
听Otgontsetseg Erhemjamts, University of San Francisco
听Kershen Huang,听Nova Southeastern University
"We identify the climate risk exposure of U.S. commercial banks and assess its financial materiality. Climate risk is positively associated with the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance of banks and negatively associated with the stakeholder ESG sentiment towards them."
Benjamin Yost
Assistant Professor, Accounting
Journal of Accounting and Economics
"Do Tax-Based Proprietary Costs Discourage Public Listing?"
"I hypothesize and find evidence of an increased propensity to go private by public, tax aggressive firms following the enactment of the disclosure rule but prior to its adoption. Cross-sectionally, the effect is stronger among firms that are more sensitive to tax-based proprietary costs. Moreover, IPOs by tax aggressive firms exhibit a relative decline after FIN 48, consistent with the disclosure requirement deterring private, tax aggressive firms from going public. Overall, my findings suggest that mandatory disclosure rules imposing tax-based proprietary costs may discourage some firms from operating as public entities."
Min Zhao
Associate Professor, Marketing
International Journal of Research in Marketing (in press)
"Converging vs. Diverging: The Effect of Visual Depiction of Goal Structure on Financial Decisions"
Co-authors:
听Joonkyung Kim, independent researcher
听Dilip Soman, University of Toronto
"Drawing on the visual-congruence literature, we propose that each diagram can increase processing fluency and facilitate goal intention when it enables a match with the monetary flow embedded in the financial goal. Specifically, for financial goals involving an inward monetary flow (e.g., saving or earning), a converging diagram provides a match and increases goal intention. In contrast, for goals involving an outward monetary flow (e.g., spending or donating), a diverging diagram provides a match, leading to greater goal intention."
Research by Rui Albuquerque, a Siedner Family Faculty Fellow, and Vyacheslav (Slava) Fos, a Hillenbrand Family Faculty Fellow, both professors of finance, have been highlighted by the . A recent paper by Albuquerque and Fos, along with Enrique Schroth (EDHEC Business School), finds that the stock market rewards activist investors and argues these investors create value by improving firms鈥� corporate policies. Albuquerque also authored an op-ed for , the daily publication of the Vatican, on why financial institutions should help alleviate poor countries鈥� sovereign debts. He argued that financial institutions have a social responsibility to address these issues, notably in cases where their employees, say, took bribes as part of loan negotiations. He likened the banks鈥� obligation to product recalls by makers of defective consumer products.
Consumer product companies love brand extensions鈥攖hus you can find dozens of Tide-branded offerings on the Procter & Gamble website. But Larisa Kovalenko, assistant professor of marketing, told that these kinds of extensions aren鈥檛 riskless. Companies can dilute their brands if they don鈥檛 hew to five principles that Kovalenko, together with colleagues Alina Sorescu (Texas A&M University) and Mark B. Houston (Texas Christian University), identified in a recent research project.
Multiple publications have lately called upon the expertise of Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College and Peter F. Drucker Chair in Management Sciences. cited Munnell鈥檚 research on worker age in an article on working while receiving Social Security benefits. and referenced her work on the taxability of Social Security benefits in articles about inflation鈥檚 influence on those benefits. And included her in a feature on how notions of what retirement means are evolving.
In retailing, honesty really is the best policy. Research by Dmitry Mitrofanov, featured by , shows retailers can retain more customers if they鈥檙e frank when they鈥檙e running low on inventory. Traditionally retailers have been reluctant to talk about stockouts, and Mitrofanov, assistant professor of business analytics, did find that some customers refrain from purchasing items when told supply is low.
featured research by Samuel Hartzmark, finance professor and a Hillenbrand Family Faculty Fellow, and colleague Kelly Shue (Yale University) that reached a surprising conclusion: Some sustainable investing strategies may be self-defeating inasmuch as they lower the cost of capital for environmentally friendly firms while raising it for big polluters. The green firms can鈥檛 get much greener, so cheaper funding doesn鈥檛 help stem much additional pollution. But the big polluters, anticipating higher funding costs, may opt to 鈥減ollute as much as they can while the polluting is good,鈥� Bloomberg wrote. Hartzmark's research on听environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing was also featured by and the podcast.
Beth Schinoff, assistant professor of management and organization, told that 鈥渜uiet quitting鈥濃�攚hen disgruntled employees shirk instead of resigning鈥攃an be prevented by encouraging work/life balance. When people 鈥渁re expected to put work above everything and be available 24/7, they may not want to be that perfect worker,鈥� she cautioned.
Richard Powers, associate professor of the practice in the Business Law and Society Department, was interviewed by about cybersecurity audits. Powers said the audits are a critical way that companies demonstrate to the public their trustworthiness and the robustness of their data protections.听
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed how society thinks about so-called gig workers鈥攁nd how at least some of them think about themselves, according to a story in on research by Curtis Chan, assistant professor of management and organization, and colleagues Lindsey D. Cameron (University of Pennsylvania) and Michel Anteby (Boston University). The research determined that some workers for InstaCart, a grocery delivery service, embraced being called heroes, others balked, and a third group struggled, redoubling their efforts to live up to an honorific they were unsure they deserved. In addition, Chan and Anteby鈥檚 work on within-job inequality was featured in , a book about gender inequality in the workplace. The highlighted research delved into women鈥檚 work conditions within the Transportation Safety Administration, finding that female TSA workers were disproportionately assigned to pat down passengers, a less desirable task.
Today鈥檚 employees are demanding more flexible work arrangements, and companies are trying to accommodate, Brad Harrington, executive director of the Boston College Center for Work and Family, commented in an article in听. To succeed at this, firms need to modify how they hire and operate; in particular they should consider investing in technologies that enable remote collaboration, he said.
Banking crises aren鈥檛 new. Paul Schmelzing, assistant professor of finance, and Andrew Metrick (Yale University) analyzed more than 800 years鈥� worth for a National Bureau of Economic Research . picked up the research on account of their conclusion that today鈥檚 financial turmoil, with interest rates rising and a few banks failing, has several of the markers of past systemic crises.
Mary Ellen Carter, professor and Joseph L. Sweeney Chair in accounting, has been named an editor at and a research member at the European Corporate Governance Institute.
Associate Professors of Marketing Gergana Nenkov and Linda Court Salisbury, along with Florida State University colleagues Martin Mende and Maura L. Scott, received the for 鈥淚mproving Financial Inclusion through Communal Financial Orientation: How Financial Service Providers Can Better Engage Consumers in Banking Deserts.鈥� The award honors the best refereed paper published in the journal in the three prior years. The paper also received the 2022 .
Nan Liu, associate professor of business analytics and a William S. McKiernan 鈥�78 Family Faculty Fellow, was a finalist for the of the INFORMs Healthcare Applications Society. The award recognizes mid-career researchers for significant contributions to the field.
has recognized a paper by Jeff Cohen, professor of accounting, as the best it published from 2020鈥�2022. Cohen鈥檚 paper, titled 鈥淎udit Partners鈥� Judgments and Challenges in Audits of Internal Control over Financial Reporting,鈥� was coauthored with Jennifer R. Joe (University of Delaware), Jay C. Thibodeau (Bentley University), and Gregory M. Trompeter (University of Central Florida).
Hristina Nikolova, the Diane Harkins Coughlin and Christopher J. Coughlin Sesquicentennial Assistant Professor of Marketing, received the . The award, bestowed within eight years of honorees鈥� receipt of their doctorates, recognizes emerging researchers in consumer psychology.
Henrik Hagtvedt, associate professor of marketing, has been named an by the Marketing Science Institute. The designation recognizes excellent mid-career scholars, and its recipients, according to MSI, are among 鈥渢he most prominent marketing scholars in the world.鈥�
A Seidner Family Faculty Fellow,听Rui Albuquerque, and a Hillenbrand Family Faculty Fellow,听Vyacheslav (Slava) Fos, both professors of finance, received the editor鈥檚 choice鈥攁long with coauthor Enrique Schroth (EDHEC Business School)鈥攆or their paper, 鈥淰alue Creation in Shareholder Activism.鈥� Albuquerque also won the , given to the best paper on fixed income markets at the of the Spanish Finance Association. The paper, 鈥淧rice elasticity of demand and risk-bearing capacity in sovereign bond auctions,鈥� was written with coauthors Jos茅鈥怣iguel Cardoso鈥怌osta (Nova School of Business and Economics) and Jos茅 Afonso Faias (Catholic University of Portugal).
Livia Yi, assistant professor of finance, won the for the best paper in fixed income at the Society of Financial Studies Cavalcade (Asia Pacific). Her paper is titled 鈥淚ntergenerational Conflict and Education Financing.鈥�