Research and Publications
At the John Chambers College of Business and Economics, our faculty are shaping the future of business through their research. Every publication reflects our commitment to advancing knowledge, providing insights that drive real-world impact and supporting industry growth locally, nationally and globally.
States commonly rely on occupational licensing laws to protect consumers; however, these laws can have substantial costs. As the recognition of the costs of licensing has grown, many states have been implementing reforms. The most common reform is the universal recognition of out-of-state licenses, which makes it easier to transfer a license from another state. Using spatial econometrics techniques, I examine factors related to a state’s choice to adopt universal recognition, testing whether adoption can be explained by proximity or characteristics within a state. Relying on a spatial autoregressive model, I find evidence that universal recognition adoption can be explained by the tightness of the labor market, economic conservatism, and fewer licensing barriers, suggesting that adoption of the reform is largely driven by characteristics of each state. While the diffusion of policy is usually influenced by the adoption of neighbors, for universal recognition, this does not appear to be the case.
Innovation is a key driver of firm success. To encourage innovation, firms often offer equity‐based compensation, such as stock options, to better align CEOs' personal interests with shareholder value. Drawing on agency theory, we argue that stock options may not always benefit a firm by encouraging innovation. Instead, we demonstrate that CEOs intending to exercise their stock options have the incentive to be myopic in R&D management so that they can temporarily boost the stock price and, thus, increase their personal wealth. Using a unique multi‐source dataset of 335 Standard & Poor 500 companies from 2007 to 2015, we find evidence supporting this argument. Moreover, the findings suggest that factors that can affect the perceived pressure to promote innovation by CEOs might reshape the association between stock option exercise and myopic R&D management. For example, power resulting from CEO duality decreases the perceived pressure to promote innovation, which increases the likelihood of CEOs engaging in myopic R&D management when exercising their stock options. However, when shareholders present a long investment horizon or when firms have high innovativeness, CEOs perceive more pressure to promote innovation and thus are less likely to opt for myopic R&D management while exercising stock options. The findings provide important insights for better understanding and controlling managerial myopia in innovation management.
Literature suggests that chief executive officers (CEOs) often discount long-term returns more than short-term gains, resulting in firm short-termism. However, the findings from previous studies are not conclusive. Drawing on upper echelons theory, we argue that a CEO’s optimism about the firm’s future returns is a critical factor that influences the likelihood of CEO temporal myopia leading to firm short-termism. We further propose that the perceived opportunity costs of being short-term oriented can reshape the role of CEO optimism in converting temporal myopia to firm short-termism. Specifically, when a CEO’s compensation is dependent on the firm’s stock market performance, the perceived opportunity cost of being short-term focused is high, mitigating the negative impact of CEO optimism. However, when the CEO faces high environmental discretion that can help the firm maintain competitive advantage through alternative means, the perceived opportunity cost becomes lower, amplifying the adverse impact of CEO optimism.
The negative correlation between returns and volatility is well known. However, there is no consensus on whether returns cause changes in volatility or vice versa. In this paper, we investigate the contemporaneous relation between the VIX futures and E-mini S&P 500 futures markets with the aim of shedding new light on the relation between market returns and implied volatility. We use the E-mini S&P 500 futures (often referred to as SPX futures) as a proxy for stock market returns and VIX futures as a proxy for expectations of implied volatility. We consistently find that stock returns cause changes in expectations of implied volatility. To estimate the coefficients of interest, we use an identification through heteroskedasticity approach which takes advantage of predictable intraday shifts in volatility in the two futures markets.
When you’re a manager, delivering feedback can feel like walking a tightrope. Whether you’re praising an employee’s accomplishments or addressing a shortfall, how you communicate can have a big impact on how your words are received and acted upon. Using these strategies will help you elevate the feedback process, fostering a more positive and productive work environment.
Occupational licensing laws are designed to improve service quality and protect consumers from harm by establishing entry requirements and oversight of practising professionals. Evidence on the effects of licensing is mixed. The quality of services is difficult to measure objectively, complicating attempts to compare costs and benefits of regulation. A 2017 executive order in the US state of Idaho required licensing boards to report disciplinary actions against professionals. This new source of data provides some insight into the type of enforcement undertaken by licensing boards. We find that disciplinary actions directly related to quality are rare. Between 0.01 and 0.38 per cent of licensees are disciplined for quality-related issues; 36 to 53 per cent of total disciplinary actions are directly related to quality, with the rest covering technical breaches.
We investigate whether having a CEO with an international background affects U.S. firms’ cross-border merger and acquisition (M&A) activities. By defining international background as having either non-U.S. nationality, overseas education, or foreign work experience, we provide robust evidence that when a CEO possesses these characteristics, a firm is more likely to acquire international targets, and these deals are more value-enhancing. Moreover, our results indicate that when a firm’s CEO has all of these international characteristics (compared to just one), both the likelihood of cross-border deals and announcement returns increase. The observed gains are related, at least in part, to CEOs with this background being associated with lower acquisition premium and mitigating the negative impact of paying for these deals with equity.
This paper examines the effect of National Football League games on traffic congestion in Cincinnati, Ohio; Seattle, Washington; and Santa Clara, California during the 2018 and 2019 seasons. Building on current literature linking sporting events to traffic congestion, this paper utilizes Uber’s high-frequency vehicle movement speed data at the hourly level on individual road segments. This paper finds traffic speed declines range from 0.32 to 4 miles per hour, up to 7-miles from a stadium. Converting the average speed decline into a time delay, and utilizing the average city wage provides a congestion cost estimate ranging from $37,881 to $19 million per NFL home game. The results suggest wide-ranging spatial congestion externalities, representing up to 5% of public contributions to stadium construction. These findings have important implications for urban transportation policy, and subsidies to professional sporting facilities, particularly for cities with large sports stadiums.
The year 2024 marks the 30-years anniversary since the concept of dynamic capabilities has been introduced to the field of management. Dynamic capabilities are organizational routines and processes that help companies adapt and strategize in volatile and changing environments. Today, changes driven by technological innovations (e.g., AI, gene therapy), along with political and economic tensions both nationally and internationally, elevate the importance of dynamic capabilities in achieving a competitive advantage. But how can companies identify and estimate their dynamic capabilities, which are intangible and thus difficult to measure directly? Olga Bruyaka and her co-authors address this question in their comprehensive review of existing measurement models of dynamic capabilities in management literature, identifying best practices and offering recommendations for both scholars and practitioners.
This paper develops and presents a model of the relationships among emotional intelligence, self-leadership, and stress coping among management students. In short, our model suggests that effective emotion regulation and self-leadership, as mediated through positive affect and self-efficacy, has the potential to facilitate stress coping among students. A primary implication of our model is that basic emotion regulation and self-leadership strategies could be included in introductory management courses in order to potentially increase management students’ abilities to cope with stress. Furthermore, because our model has the potential to generalize to the workplace, management students exposed to emotion regulation and self-leadership strategies may be better equipped to effectively manage stress in their future careers. Originally published in 2012, this paper was recognized by the Journal of Management Education for its long-term impact in 2024.
Thirty-five U.S. states currently have Certificate-of-Need (CON) laws, which require health care providers to prove their “economic necessity” to a state board before they can legally open or expand. While dozens of articles have evaluated the effect of CON on hospitals and consumers, no published article has evaluated its effect on health care workers. We argue that the sign of the effect of CON on both the wages and employment is theoretically ambiguous. We conduct an empirical analysis of CON laws using 1979–2019 data from the Current Population Survey. We find that CON does not significantly affect the employment or wages of health care workers.
Mental health has grown increasingly important as an aspect of employee well-being, with organizations expected to address these needs through offerings to support employee mental health. Broad societal forces like stigma and low levels of literacy surrounding mental health make it challenging for many people to understand these offerings. As the marketplace for these offerings grows to meet this demand, employees, HR professionals, and business leaders need better resources to understand, organize, and distinguish among their choices. The current research offers a 3-dimensional taxonomy for organizing these offerings, distinguishing them according to their (a). Primary Purpose-To Restore or Enrich; (b). Delivery Agent Location-External or Internal; (c). Latitude in Providing-Legally Required or Voluntary Provided. We provide theoretical approaches for scholars to consider these offerings’ impact in workplaces, and briefly demonstrate the taxonomy’s value in organizing some of the commonly available offerings in many modern workplaces. Finally, we provide two attainable research avenues for researchers to explore to inform organizational stakeholders on the (1). prevalence, costs, outcomes of these offerings in the workforce and (2). helpers and hurdles to employees' using these offerings.