Current Projects:
Below are a list of some of the projects that I am currently working on. Please see my vita for detail of other projects.
Human Capital and Strategic Foresight: Evidence from Insider Trading (with Nauman Asghar, Russ Coff, and Philipp Meyer-Doyle)
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Status: Under Review
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We explore how the different types of generalist human capital of managers—industry, firm, and function—shape their strategic foresight about the potential success of new products. In the context of their insider trading prior to product introduction announcements—an important manifestation of strategic foresight—we find that firm generalists on average have superior strategic foresight compared with firm specialists, while industry specialists hold superior strategic foresight compared with industry generalists. We also find that greater environmental uncertainty in financial markets augments these differences in strategic foresight. Finally, managers with marketing backgrounds appear to have greater foresight than their colleagues in predicting the success of new product introductions. Overall, our study offers fresh contributions to the literature on strategic foresight by foregrounding how the type of career experience that shapes the human capital of managers may affect their foresight in predicting the success of new product introductions. We also contribute to the literature on strategic human capital by highlighting that instead of being monolithic concepts, generalist and specialist human capital are nuanced concepts that are composed of different dimensions which can heterogeneously affect the capabilities and behavior of managers, sometimes in opposite ways.
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Intra- and Inter-Group Dynamics and the Market for Quality: Evidence from the Mobility of Elite Professionals (with Claudia Gabbioneta and Daniel Muzio)
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Status: Working Paper
Knowledge-based organizations rely on the knowledge, skills, and relationships of their talented workers to build their competitive advantage. This creates incentives to recruit “the best and the brightest” professionals in their respective fields, with the expectation of improved performance. Prior research, however, challenges the assumption that recruiting talented workers necessarily improves group and firm performance, and has explored several key contingencies affecting this relationship. In this study, we investigate how intra- and inter-group factors moderate the relationship between recruiting a talented individual into a group and that group’s quality-performance. Using a longitudinal panel dataset of the largest UK corporate law firms between 2000 and 2017, we show that while recruiting an elite professional into a group (legal practice) generally reduces group quality, this negative effect is weaker when the average quality of the incumbent professionals in the group is higher, and stronger when the organization comprises a higher number of other high-quality groups. Our study contributes to the strategic human capital, employee mobility, and team dynamics, literatures and has practical implications for managers.
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“I’m not working for you!”: Mitigating stigma-by-association in hiring (with Rodolphe Durand and Lionel Paolella)
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Status: Working Paper
New generations of workers are increasingly conscious of the harmful consequences of business activities on the environment. Firms that fail to align with environment-related imperatives risk censure and stigmatization from current and future employees. Our study examines how elite corporate law firms’ ability to hire entry-level workers is affected when adding stigmatized (fossil fuel) buyers to their portfolio. Our findings suggest that taking on stigmatized buyers handicaps firms from hiring graduates from leading law schools. Thus, these elite firms are subject to negative demand-side externalities in the labor market. However, firms can offset this negative hiring implication and deflect stigma-by-association by allowing workers to engage in more meaningful work and by offering a greater range of services to non-stigmatized buyers.New generations of workers are increasingly conscious of the harmful consequences of business activities on the environment. Firms that fail to align with environment-related imperatives risk censure and stigmatization from current and future employees. Our study examines how elite corporate law firms’ ability to hire entry-level workers is affected when adding stigmatized (fossil fuel) buyers to their portfolio. Our findings suggest that taking on stigmatized buyers handicaps firms from hiring graduates from leading law schools. Thus, these elite firms are subject to negative demand-side externalities in the labor market. However, firms can offset this negative hiring implication and deflect stigma-by-association by allowing workers to engage in more meaningful work and by offering a greater range of services to non-stigmatized buyers.
Supplier Switching and Bargaining Over Value: Competition and Behavioral Uncertainty (with Bertrand Quelin)
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Status: Working Paper
We combine competitive strategy, transaction cost economics, and relational contracting literatures to investigate how exchange price changes when a buyer switches its supplier. Using price as an observable indicator of value appropriation, we develop theory and predictions for how bargaining under competition and behavioral uncertainty influences price in the initial exchange ex-post of supplier switching. We then extend our empirical analysis to examine the evolution of price over repeated buyer-supplier exchange and across supplier strategic groups. Our findings provide insights into how ex-post exchange hazards interact with competition to influence relative bargaining power and price, over time. We also reveal important differences across supplier strategic groups that increase our understanding of how firms with different market power are affected by competitive forces and ex-post risk.