Faculty Research Groups - All Research Seminars

Generative AI in Action: Field Experimental Evidence on Worker Performance in E-Commerce Customer Service Operations

Jan 09 2025

Speaker: Lauren Lu: Tuck School of Business

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:30 PM

Location: Volanakis

When do women present themselves as leaders?

Jan 15 2025

Speaker: Alan Benson: University of Minnesota

Time: 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM

Location: Buchanan 151

Opinion Shopping and Auditor Demand: A Novel Framework

Jan 22 2025

Speaker: Aiyong Zhu: Dartmouth College - Visitor

Time: 12:00 PM - 1:15 PM

Location: Volanakis

Semi-Personalized Pricing: Algorithms and Implications

Jan 23 2025

Speaker: Michael Hamilton: Katz School of Science and Health

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:30 PM

Location: Volanakis

Corporate Cash Flow Outcomes Across Presidencies: Still a Presidential Puzzle

Feb 04 2025

Speaker: Kateryna Holland

Time: 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

Location: Volanakis

Finance Brown Bag

Synthetic Potential Outcomes and Causal Mixture Identifiability

Feb 04 2025

Speaker: Bijan H. Mazaheri: Thayer

Time: 12:00 PM - 1:45 PM

Location: Buchanan 151

The Unfulfilled Promise of Meritocracy in Organizations

Feb 05 2025

Speaker: Emilio Castilla: MIT

Time: 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM

Location: Volanakis

Operationalizing Emotional Load: The Human Side of Queueing Systems

Feb 06 2025

Speaker: Galit Yom-Tov: Technion

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:45 PM

Location: Volanakis

TBD

Feb 07 2025

Speaker: Emily Blanchard: Tuck School of Business,
Hart Posen: Tuck School of Business

Time: 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM

Location: Volanakis

Come join us for the winter quarter rapid research event. Emily Blanchard (Economics) and Hart Posen (Strategy) will each give short talks about their research, with drinks and snacks available courtesy of the Dean’s Office. This is a great opportunity to learn about the research that our colleagues in different academic areas are working on.

Justice for Sale: Explaining the Rise in Investor-State Dispute Settlement

Feb 10 2025

Speaker: Emily Blanchard: Tuck School of Business

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:45 PM

Location: Volanakis

Wage Income and Profits, Workers and Owners

Feb 18 2025

Speaker: Peter Morrow: University of Toronto

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM

Location: Volanakis

Setting the Stage: The Interplay of Firm Boundary and Learning at the Opera

Feb 21 2025

Speaker: Carolyn Fu: Harvard Business School

Time: 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM

Location: Volanakis

TBD

Feb 24 2025

Speaker: Simon Fuchs: Visiting Lecturer, Dartmouth Economics

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM

Location: Volanakis

Advertising Securities

Feb 26 2025

Speaker: Alexander Ljungqvist: Stockholm School of Economics

Time: 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

Location: Volanakis

U.S. companies are prohibited from advertising their securities under Section 5 of the Securities Act of 1933. To investigate what might happen if issuers were allowed to market their securities to the public, we study Singapore, a jurisdiction that permits the use of advertising to solicit interest in initial public offerings (IPOs). Using proprietary data on a representative sample of individuals, we show that advertising strongly influences retail investors to apply. IPOs with weaker institutional demand are advertised more heavily to retail investors. Investors who are more responsive to advertising earn significantly lower risk-adjusted returns compared to other IPO investors. Overall, we provide new evidence on the costs and benefits of regulatory limitations placed on issuers of securities.

How independent creative workers experience the pressures of widespread appeal on digital platforms

Mar 05 2025

Speaker: Julianna Pillemer: NYU Stern School of Business

Time: 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM

Location: Buchanan 151

Creative workers often seek a substantial audience for their work. Our findings reveal a new struggle begins once they attain one. Existing theory fails to account for how creators conceive of and manage the relationship with their audience once their work has gained widespread appeal. In an inductive study of independent creative workers using digital platforms to share their work, we discovered that after attaining a substantial audience, creators experience audience entanglement – a perceived sense of deep interrelatedness between an individual and the audience for their work such that this relationship becomes a persistent consideration in their approach to creating. This entanglement typically begins as dysfunctional entanglement, characterized by oppressive dependence on audience reactions, distressing emotions, and struggling with platform volatility. In this state, creators often question the meaning of their work and deprioritize platform engagement. However, some creators develop audience management strategies – restricting audience access, reinterpreting audience reactions, and reorienting toward personal standards – to effectively shift their interrelatedness with the audience to functional entanglement, characterized by a balanced dependence on audience reactions, uplifting emotions, and accepting platform volatility. Functional entanglement allows creators to capture meaning in their audience interactions and prioritize their work on the platform.

Teaching Business School Students in the 21st Century: data, coding, AI, and more

Mar 06 2025

Speaker: Daniel Guetta: Columbia University

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:30 PM

Location: Volanakis

The world is changing exponentially faster than it once was, and topics that used to be the preserve of engineers alone are now central to many businesses' core strategy. How should we change the way we teach technical topics in business schools in response? In this talk, I will begin by briefly sharing some lessons I have learned in my seven years at Columbia, during which I have had the privilege of teaching 10 distinct classes, with just under 7,000 students enrolled from Columbia Business School's MBA and EMBA programs, and from our joint programs with the engineering school. The bulk of my talk will then focus on five case studies, time permitting, in which I will discuss the tools and cases I use to teach five specific topics: the Lasso, fundamentals of deep learning, coding in Python, large language model embeddings, and market design. I will end with a discussion of what comes next for us as educators in business schools.

Revolving Credit to SMEs: The Role of Business Credit Cards

Mar 06 2025

Speaker: Greg Buchak: Stanford Graduate School of Business

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:45 PM

Location: Buchanan 151

We document that small businesses in the US are frequently excluded from borrowing through traditional term loans or credit lines and rely instead on standardized, high-interest rate business credit cards to meet their financing needs. We develop and estimate a structural model of firms’ card demand, utilization, and default choice, accounting for imperfect competition among lenders and the correlation between utilization and default. We find that high rates are primarily explained by markups rather than lender costs. In counterfactual analyses we study the impact of correlated lender cost shocks as well as proposed capital surcharges on undrawn credit limits.

Import Price Shocks and Heterogeneous Innovation Responses

Mar 31 2025

Speaker: Deniz Atalar: Cambridge

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM

Location: Volanakis

AI/ML Seminar

Apr 01 2025

Speaker: TBD

Time: 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

Location: Buchanan 151

Artificial Intelligence and the Labor Market

Apr 02 2025

Speaker: Lawrence Schmidt: MIT

Time: 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

Location: Volanakis

We leverage recent advances in NLP to construct measures of workers’ task exposure to AI and machine learning technologies over the 2010 to 2023 period, varying across firms and time. Using a theoretical framework that allows for labor-saving technology to affect worker productivity both directly and indirectly, we show that the impact on wage earnings and employment can be summarized by two statistics. First, labor demand decreases in the average exposure of workers’ tasks to AI technologies; second, holding the average exposure constant, labor demand increases in the dispersion of task exposures to AI as workers shift effort to tasks not displaced by AI. Exploiting exogenous variation in our measures based on pre-existing hiring practices across firms, we find empirical support for these predictions, together with a lower demand for skills affected by AI. Overall, we find muted effects of AI on employment due to offsetting effects: occupations high exposed to AI experience relatively lower demand compared to less exposed occupations, but the resulting increase in firm productivity increases overall employment across all occupations.

Dynamic Matching for Refugee Resettlement: A Case Study

Apr 03 2025

Speaker: Rad Niazadeh: University of Chicago Booth School of Business

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:30 PM

Location: Volanakis

Refugee resettlement is an international effort that aims to provide a durable solution for the current global refugee crisis. The goal is to help refugee families to find a new home in a host country and eventually find a new job to get “resettled”. In this seminar, I will talk about a recent paper in partnership with a major national agency working on refugee resettlement in the United States. In this work, we re-design the core dynamic matching algorithm used by our partner, for sequential yearly assignment of refugee cases to our partner's affiliate locations. These localities should be thought of as service centers providing vocational services or assistance with job search, and many times are short in staff. I discuss various operational intricacies in this dynamic matching problem, such as lack of reliable arrival prior data, predicting employment outcomes of each match, and controlling backlogs in those service centers. I also discuss regulatory constraints imposed on the problem, such as family re-unification ties for refugees and their implications on our algorithm. Then I will introduce a new algorithmic framework to study this problem, through which I show how to design and analyze near-optimal learning-based primal-dual algorithms that aim to maximize employment outcomes while respecting operational and regulatory constraints in this problem. Time permits, I'll discuss a case study for evaluating the empirical performance of our algorithms using our partner's data and discuss some details of our collaboration.

International Cooperation, Trade, and Common-Pool Resources

Apr 07 2025

Speaker: Aaron Berman: MIT

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM

Location: Volanakis

The Power of the Common Task Framework

Apr 09 2025

Speaker: Theis Jensen: Yale University

Time: 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

Location: Volanakis

The “Common Task Framework” (CTF) is a collaborative and competitive process in which researchers solve a task using shared data, a predefined success metric, and a leaderboard. Using an economic model, we show that the CTF incentivizes effort, increases innovation, and curbs misrepresentation by reducing research costs and improving comparability. Historical examples from computer science underscore its effectiveness. To demonstrate its broader applicability, we propose a CTF for financial economics: a platform open to all researchers designed to identify the pricing kernel and systematically evaluate asset pricing models, from traditional factor-based approaches to modern machine learning techniques.

The Discovery of Doubt: A Framework for Organizational Learning from Questionable Ideas

Apr 14 2025

Speaker: David Maslach: Florida State University

Time: 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

Location: Volanakis

Abstract: Organizational life is filled with questionable ideas—beliefs that invoke doubt about whether they will be productive or useful. These ideas are necessary to organizational knowledge and learning. Despite their importance, research on questionable ideas is dispersed across organizational literatures and often lacks depth. This paper consolidates past research to explain why questionable ideas exist, persist, and evolve. Doubt arises about whether outcomes will be positive either based of reason or adherence to doctrine. We introduce the FAIL framework (Flawed, Ambitious, Ignorant, Lurid) to provide a structured understanding of questionable ideas. Questionable ideas are either evaluated positively (because of flaws or being too ambitious) or negatively (because of ignorance or being lurid) based on organizational ideologies of reason or doctrine. Ideologies develop in response to evaluator proximity and perceived social costs off endorsing similar ideas in the past. We discuss when adopting questionable ideas can be beneficial and highlight common SPREAD enablers that moderate the dissemination of questionable ideas: Stories and Gossip, Peer Influence, Reputation and Endorsements, Authority and Institutions, and Digital Platforms and Technologies. This paper advances understanding of organizational learning, creativity and innovation, and addresses some challenges posed by misdirected efforts in organizational science.

TBD

Apr 21 2025

Speaker: Yulu Tang: Dartmouth College

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM

Location: Volanakis

When You Say It: How the Timing of LGBTQ+ Allyship Displays Shapes Evaluations of Organizations

Apr 29 2025

Speaker: James Carter: Cornell University

Time: 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM

Location: Buchanan 151

Organizations frequently aim to display their allyship with the LGBTQ+ community, often through campaigns, advertisements, and statements—particularly during Pride Month. While existing research typically focuses on the content of such allyship displays, we integrate theories of attribution and identity safety in order to demonstrate how the timing of these allyship displays shapes the evaluations observers form about an organization’s authenticity in these efforts. Across field, laboratory, and online samples, five preregistered experiments reveal that both LGBTQ+ observers (Experiment 1) and LGBTQ+ employees (Experiment 2) perceive organizational allyship displays as less authentic when displayed during Pride Month as opposed to other times—even when the content of the allyship display is held constant. We further find that the timing of organizational allyship displays influences perceived authenticity by shaping the extent to which LGBTQ+ evaluators attribute values-driven and strategic-driven motives as underlying the organization’s allyship (Experiment 3). Critically, we find that this effect is unique to LGBTQ+ individuals: non-target groups, such as cis-straight observers, evaluate the authenticity of allyship displays similarly, regardless of timing (Studies 4 and 5). This work makes important and timely contributions to research on allyship and has implications for how perceptions of allyship are influenced by social identity. To be an authentic ally, it is not just what an organization says, but also when an organization says it.

Making Talk Cheap: LLMs and Signaling on Digital Labor Platforms

Apr 29 2025

Speaker: Anais Galdin: Tuck School of Business

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM

Location: Volanakis

Common Investors Across the Capital Structure: Private Debt Funds as Dual Holders

Apr 30 2025

Speaker: Isil Erel: Ohio State University Fisher College of Business

Time: 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

Location: Volanakis

This paper examines the dual role of Business Development Companies (BDCs) as both creditors and shareholders in funding middle-market firms. We first show that BDCs, especially dual holders, serve a distinct market segment typically avoided by traditional bank lenders: mid-sized firms with low (or even negative) cash flows, limited collateral, but high growth potential. Our key finding is that dual-holder BDCs charge loan spreads that are 45 basis points higher than comparable loans extended by pure creditors, controlling for loan characteristics as well as (borrower × quarter) and (BDC × quarter) fixed effects, which account for unobserved and time-varying heterogeneity in both firm credit quality and lender funding conditions. We examine three mechanisms: enhanced monitoring through information access and governance rights of dual-holders; capital injections by dual-holders as a “public good” benefiting all creditors; and hold-up behavior by dual-holders as dominant financiers of their portfolio firms. Differentiating tests indicate that enhanced monitoring is the primary channel driving the loan pricing differential. Our study highlights the real economic impact of private credit, beyond merely filling gaps left by regulation- constrained banks.

Uncertainty Quantification in Digital Twin Simulations

May 01 2025

Speaker: Canan Gunes Corlu: Boston University

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:30 PM

Location: Volanakis

One of the challenges of developing digital twin simulations stems from lacking full information about business process flows and characterizations of their input distributions. This chapter describes how this challenge arises in different phases of digital twin development. We present practitioners an overview of solutions to use for correctly quantifying the overall uncertainty in digital twin simulation development. We accompany the presentation with a supply chain use case.

Growth is Getting Harder to Find, Not Ideas

May 05 2025

Speaker: Teresa Fort: Tuck School of Business

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM

Location: Volanakis

Relatively flat US output growth versus rising numbers of US researchers is often interpreted as evidence that “ideas are getting harder to find.” We build a new 46-year panel tracking the universe of US firms’ patenting to investigate the micro underpinnings of this claim, separately examining the relationships between research inputs and ideas (patents) versus ideas and growth. Over our sample period, we find that researchers’ patenting productivity is increasing, there is little evidence of any secular decline in high-quality patenting common to all firms, and the link between patents and growth is present, differs by type of idea, and is fairly stable. On the other hand, we find strong evidence of secular decreases in output unrelated to patenting, suggesting an important role for other factors. Together, these results invite renewed empirical and theoretical attention to the impact of ideas on growth. To that end, our patent-firm bridge, which will be available to researchers with approved access, is used to produce new, public-use statistics on the Business Dynamics of Patenting Firms (BDS-PF).

Looking the Part? How Candidates’ Race and Attire Shape Employer Hiring Decisions in a Low-Wage Labor Market

May 06 2025

Speaker: Tiantian Yang: Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

Time: 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM

Location: Buchanan 151

Racial disparities in employment persist in the United States, particularly in low-wage labor markets. While employers often attribute these disparities to differences in job seekers’ self- presentation—particularly attire—we argue that this explanation obscures demand-side biases. Drawing on labor market discrimination and status characteristics theories, we argue that professional attire acts as a proxy for unobservable worker qualities and that racial stereotypes distort how these signals are interpreted. White candidates might benefit more from professional attire, whereas Black candidates receive weaker returns from employers. To test this argument, we conduct the first large-scale empirical analysis of candidates’ attire and hiring outcomes using a mobile gig-staffing platform (Jobmate), which includes 1,032,496 job applications for 60,636 job seekers, along with their profile photos. Our findings reveal that although professional attire improves hiring outcomes for both Black and White candidates, the effect is significantly weaker for Black job seekers, exacerbating racial hiring disparities. A controlled experiment further demonstrates that professional attire disproportionately benefits White candidates. These findings challenge the prevailing belief that self-presentation strategies can mitigate racial disparities. Our findings suggest that closing racial hiring gaps in low-wage labor markets requires cultural changes in hiring practices rather than individual-level adjustments by job seekers.

The Welfare Benefits of Pay-As-You-Go Financing

May 07 2025

Speaker: David Sraer: UC Berkeley

Time: 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

Location: Volanakis

Pay-as-you-go (PAYGo) financing is a novel contract that has recently become a popular form of credit, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). PAYGo financing relies on lockout technology that enables the lender to remotely disable the flow benefits of collateral when the borrower misses payments. This paper quantifies the welfare implications of PAYGo financing. We develop a dynamic structural model of consumers and estimate the model using a multi-arm, large scale pricing experiment conducted by a fintech lender that offers PAYGo financing for smartphones. We find that the welfare gains from access to PAYGo financing are equivalent to a 3.4% increase in income while remaining highly profitable for the lender. The welfare gains are larger for low-risk consumers and consumers in the middle of the income distribution. Under reasonable assumptions, PAYGo financing outperforms traditional secured loans for all but the riskiest consumers. We explore contract design and identify variations of the PAYGo contract that further improve welfare.

TBD

May 12 2025

Speaker: Deniz Atalar: Cambridge

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM

Location: Volanakis

Security Losses, Interbank Markets, and Monetary Policy Transmission: Evidence from the Eurozone

May 14 2025

Speaker: Mariassunta Giannetti: Stockholm School of Economics

Time: 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

Location: Volanakis

Banks that experienced larger losses in their pledgeable securities portfolios following the July 2022 monetary policy tightening became less able to borrow through the inter- bank market and subsequently reduced their corporate lending, regardless of whether the securities were booked at market or historical value. These effects were less pronounced for banks with abundant collateral and for domestic subsidiaries of banking groups, which received liquidity through their group’s internal capital market. Our results highlight a collateral channel in the bank-based transmission of monetary policy and show how differences in banking structure can contribute to an uneven transmission of monetary policy.

Learning about contingencies: The power of initial simplicity

May 16 2025

Speaker: Nicolaj Siggelkow: Wharton

Time: 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM

Location: Buchanan 151

This paper investigates the performance consequences of how managers update their contingency beliefs in response to feedback, emphasizing the interaction between first-order learning (updating performance expectations) and second-order learning (updating contingency beliefs). Managers often begin tasks with inaccurate contingency assumptions—either overly simple or overly complex—which shape their initial decisions. Our research explores whether starting with simple or complex contingency beliefs is more advantageous when learning occurs in environments characterized by varying degrees of true contingencies. Employing a contextual multi-arm bandit simulation, we reveal nuanced learning dynamics: without second-order learning, complex initial beliefs consistently outperform simpler ones. However, when second-order learning is enabled, initially simple beliefs significantly enhance managerial decision-making over time, even potentially surpassing the performance of managers with initially accurate beliefs. Conversely, those with overly complex initial beliefs demonstrate limited improvement through second-order learning alone. Importantly, this pattern changes substantially when managers have considerable prior information about action outcomes across contexts; under these conditions, complex initial beliefs become advantageous. Thus, the benefits of simplicity versus complexity in contingency beliefs critically depend on the interplay between first- and second-order learning and the availability of prior information, offering actionable insights for managerial decision-making in uncertain environments.

TBD

May 19 2025

Speaker: Aaron Berman: MIT

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM

Location: Volanakis

TBD

May 21 2025

Speaker: Constantine Yannelis: University of Chicago Booth School of Business

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:45 PM

Location: TBD

Operations Spring Conference

May 22 2025

Speaker: TBD

Time: 12:00 PM - 5:00 PM

Location: Volanakis

Operations Seminar Conference

May 23 2025

Speaker: TBD

Time: 8:00 AM - 1:00 PM

Location: Volanakis

TBD

May 29 2025

Speaker: Christine Laudenbach: Goethe University, Leibniz Institute SAFE

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:45 PM

Location: Buchanan 151

Marketing Camp

May 30 2025

Speaker: TBD

Time: 8:00 AM - 5:00 PM

Location: Alperin

Lightening Talks - End of year celebration!

May 30 2025

Speaker: Raghav Singal,
Michelle Kinch,
Julia Melin,
Giovanni Gavetti,
Emily Blanchard

Time: 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM

Location: Volanakis

Come join us for an end-of-year celebration featuring lightening talks (2-3 minutes each) by Raghav Singal, Michelle Kinch, Laurens Debo, Julia Melin, and hopefully Giovanni Gavetti and Emily Blanchard. Drinks and snacks will be provided courtesy of the Dean’s Office.

All Research Seminars

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Generative AI in Action: Field Experimental Evidence on Worker Performance in E-Commerce Customer Service Operations

When do women present themselves as leaders?

Opinion Shopping and Auditor Demand: A Novel Framework

Semi-Personalized Pricing: Algorithms and Implications

Corporate Cash Flow Outcomes Across Presidencies: Still a Presidential Puzzle

Synthetic Potential Outcomes and Causal Mixture Identifiability

The Unfulfilled Promise of Meritocracy in Organizations

Operationalizing Emotional Load: The Human Side of Queueing Systems

TBD

Justice for Sale: Explaining the Rise in Investor-State Dispute Settlement

Wage Income and Profits, Workers and Owners

Setting the Stage: The Interplay of Firm Boundary and Learning at the Opera

TBD

Advertising Securities

How independent creative workers experience the pressures of widespread appeal on digital platforms

Teaching Business School Students in the 21st Century: data, coding, AI, and more

Revolving Credit to SMEs: The Role of Business Credit Cards

Import Price Shocks and Heterogeneous Innovation Responses

AI/ML Seminar

Artificial Intelligence and the Labor Market

Dynamic Matching for Refugee Resettlement: A Case Study

International Cooperation, Trade, and Common-Pool Resources

The Power of the Common Task Framework

The Discovery of Doubt: A Framework for Organizational Learning from Questionable Ideas

TBD

When You Say It: How the Timing of LGBTQ+ Allyship Displays Shapes Evaluations of Organizations

Making Talk Cheap: LLMs and Signaling on Digital Labor Platforms

Common Investors Across the Capital Structure: Private Debt Funds as Dual Holders

Uncertainty Quantification in Digital Twin Simulations

Growth is Getting Harder to Find, Not Ideas

Looking the Part? How Candidates’ Race and Attire Shape Employer Hiring Decisions in a Low-Wage Labor Market

The Welfare Benefits of Pay-As-You-Go Financing

TBD

Security Losses, Interbank Markets, and Monetary Policy Transmission: Evidence from the Eurozone

Learning about contingencies: The power of initial simplicity

TBD

TBD

Operations Spring Conference

Operations Seminar Conference

TBD

Marketing Camp

Lightening Talks - End of year celebration!

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Seminars