Research
The Center for Social Value Creation supports high-quality research in both the
private and public sectors, including topics of social entrepreneurship, corporate
social responsibility, environmental sustainability, globalization and international
systems, humanitarian logistics, and nonprofit management. We also develop joint
projects with authors, research institutions and leading organizations. Through
the use of Summer Research Grants we encourage faculty to develop and refine research
related to these topics.
“Evolutions
in Sustainable Investing”
Edited by Cary Krosinsky
John Wiley, & Sons, December 2011
Cary Steven Krosinsky is an adjunct faculty member at the Robert H. Smith School
of Business, and in fall 2011 he taught an MBA course in sustainability and investing.
Smith MBA graduates (2011) Sara Herald and Sam Brownell are contributing authors
to the book. Offering real-world guidance for investment professionals on delivering
attractive risk-adjusted and opportunity-directed returns across asset classes and
regions, this book is filled with interviews with leading practitioners.
Learn more
2012 GRANT RECIPIENTS
Bennet A. Zelner, Kira
Fabrizio (Boston University), "The Effect of “Green” Energy Policies on
Innovation and International Competition"
Siva Viswanathan,
“Tweeting For Good: An Empirical Investigation of Micro-Blogging and Its
Impact on Pro-Social Behaviors.”
2011 GRANT RECIPIENTS
Rachelle Sampson: "Ownership and Organization: Investment Incentives in Pollution
Abatement & Energy Efficiency"
2010 GRANT RECIPIENTS
Leigh Anenson: "Clean Hands and the CEO: Equity as an Antidote for Executive
Compensation”
Faculty Honor, Recently cited by Vice Chancellor Strine of the Delaware Court
of Chancery, the major corporation litigation court in the United States.
Siva Viswanathan: “Networks of Green People: Web 2.0 and Environmental Sustainability”
2009 GRANT RECIPIENTS
Anand Gopal: “The Structure and Performance of Public-Private Alliances: The
Case of Global Development Alliances within USAID”
Sunil Mithas: “Doing Well by Doing Good? Corporate Social Responsibility and
Firm Performance”
Kislaya Prasad: “Corruption in Hierarchies”
Siva Viswanathan and
Mingfeng Lin: “Lending to the Bottom of the Pyramid: Investor
Incentive and Peer to-Peer Micro Lending to Entrepreneurs in Developing Countries”
Yi Xu: “Public Incentives for Pro-Social Innovation”
PhD AWARD
Russ Halper with
S. Raghavan: “Effectively Using Mobile Facilities in Humanitarian
Relief Logistics”
Faculty Publications
LORI KIYATKIN & ROBERT BAUM
"Linking Human Capital and Organizational Performance: The
Performance Implications of Employees' Healthy Behaviors," In
preparation for journal submission. In preparation for journal
submission, submitted for inclusion in the 2012 Academy of Management
Annual Meeting
The authors develop a model that explains how two distinct categories of employees’
healthy behaviors – ‘healthy consumption’ and ‘physical/mental fitness’ importantly
and uniquely impact organizations’ medical costs and productivity.
RUSSELL HALPER & S. RAGHAVAN
"The Mobile Facility Routing Problem," 2011
In many applications, ranging from cellular communications to humanitarian relief
logistics, mobile facilities are used to provide a service to a region with temporal
and spatially distributed demand. The authors describe three heuristics for creating
routes for the fleet of mobile facilities and evaluate their performance.
MING-HUI HUANG & ROLAND T. RUST
"Sustainability and Consumption," Journal of the
Academy of Marketing Science, 39(1), 40-54. (2011)
We consider the implications of the three pillars of sustainability (environment,
economy and social justice) on consumption in a wealthy country. Building a theoretical
model that includes consumers, business, government, the environment, and economic
and political relations between nations, we explore how sustainability should affect
the consumption behavior of consumers, charitable aid to poorer countries, and responsible
environmental practices by businesses. Our model enables us to provide normative
implications for consumers, society and business. Importantly, we assume that all
stakeholders will optimize their self-interest, and that altruism will only partly
explain behavior consistent with sustainability. Among the more non-obvious findings
are that (1) the poorer the poor countries are, the less the rich countries should
consume, (2) the more sensitive the global political climate is to economic inequity
between the rich and poor nations, the less the rich countries should consume, and
(3) if aid to poor countries is effective enough, then the more materialistic the
society is, the more charitable aid it should give. We also confirm a number of
more intuitive findings, such as that business should use more green technology
as the taxes on pollution and/or efficiency of green technology increase, and the
more resource-intensive consumption is, the less consumers should consume. Taken
as a whole, the findings imply that societal consumption patterns should be sensitive
to aspects of environmental impact and social justice, even if altruistic motivations
are absent.
DOBIN YIM & SIVA VISWANATHAN
"Networks of Green People: Dynamic Network Closure and Prosocial Behaviors in
Online Communities," Presented at CIST 2010: Conference on
Information Systems and Technology, INFORMS Annual Meeting Austin, Texas
November 6-7, 2010.
There is a growing interest in designing incentives to foster “green” or prosocial
behavior in environment sustainability. We show that online social network is conducive
to energy saving behavior through social influence. Using data collected from online
community Carbonrally.com, we show that slower growing groups perform better in
energy reduction. In addition, we also show that the strength of ties and group
characteristics that individuals belong to are important predictors of prosocial
outcome. We present results and implication of our study.
RUSSELL HALPER & S. RAGHAVAN
"Efficient Utilization of Mobile Facilities in Humanitarian
Logistics," 2009
The management of humanitarian relief is increasingly complex. Relief requests
are diverse and varied; they occur across different sectors including educational
activities, health, disaster relief, refugee assistance, poverty eradication, etc.
The authors’ research develops algorithms for the efficient routing and utilization
of mobile facilities.
LORI KIYATKIN & ROBERT BAUM
"Employee Health: A Value Creating Organizational Resource,"
Presented at the 2009 Academy of Management Annual Meeting in
Chicago, Illinois, August 2009
Draws upon the resource-based view and past research on health promotion and
health care cost management to examine the implications of employee health and its
underlying components as organizational level constructs. The authors develop a
model that explains the process by which the components (health motivation, health
risk, and healthy behaviors) impact organizational outcomes
LORI KIYATKIN, RHONDA REGER & ROBERT BAUM
"The Purpose of Business: Corporations Are More Progressive
than U.S. Business Schools," Working paper presented at three
conferences. Selected for inclusion in the poster session and Virtual
Global Forum at the 2009 Global Forum for Business as an Agent of World
Benefit: "Manage by Designing in an Era of Massive Innovation," held
June 2-5, 2009, in Cleveland.
Examines how leading corporations and U.S. business schools are differently characterizing
the purpose of business on their organizational websites, and what needs to change
in order for U.S. business schools to assume their proper role as thought leaders
for social progress.
MINGFENG LIN, NAGPURNANAND PRABHALA & SIVA VISWANATHAN
"Judging Borrowers by the Company They Keep: Social Networks and Adverse Selection
in Online Peer-to-Peer Lending," Presented
at the Western Finance Association 2009 Annual Meeting.
The authors study the online market for peer-to-peer (P2P) lending, in which
individuals bid on unsecured microloans sought by other individual borrowers. Using
a large sample of consummated and failed listings from the largest online P2P lending
marketplace - Prosper.com, the authors test whether social networks lead to better
lending outcomes, focusing on the distinction between the structural and relational
aspects of networks. While the structural aspects have limited to no significance,
the relational aspects are consistently significant predictors of lending outcomes,
with a striking gradation based on the verifiability and visibility of a borrower's
social capital.
ROBERT M. SHEEHAN
“Mission Gap: The Missing Driver for Nonprofit Strategy,”
paper presented for Academy of Management, International
Conference, August 10, 2009, Chicago, IL.
Examines the differing purposes of for profits and nonprofits, and the implications
of those differences for strategy development. The concept of “mission gap” is offered
as a tool for translating notions of competitive strategy into the nonprofit environment.
VOJISLAV MAKSIMOVIC
"How Well Do Institutional Theories Explain Firms’
Perceptions of Property Rights?" Review of Financial Studies,
2008, 1831-1871
How do firms in different countries perceive the protection of property rights?
The author examines the effect on institutions and the legal system, as well as
the effect of ethnic differences on property rights.
"Financing Patterns Around the World: The Role of
Institutions," Journal of Financial Economics, 2008, 467-487
Is small firms’ access to capital different than large firms, especially in developing
countries? Do institutions matter?
LEMMA SENBET
"Bank
Incentives, Economic Specialization, and Financial Crises in Emerging
Economies," Journal of International Money
and Finance, 27 (5), Sept 2008, pp. 707-732
The author models the vulnerability of an economy to a financial crisis as arising
from the interaction of the degree of economic specialization and bank debt financing.
IOANNIS GAMVROS, RICHARD NIDEL & S. RAGHAVAN
"Investment Analysis and Budget Allocation at Catholic Relief Services,"
Interfaces, Vol. 36, No. 5, September–October 2006, pp. 400–406
Catholic Relief Services, a not-for-profit agency that funds development programs
and humanitarian relief efforts throughout the world, faces a challenging budget-allocation
problem annually. The authors developed a mathematical model and a spreadsheet tool
that allocates available funds based on the impact these investments will have in
different countries.
LOUIQA RASCHID
"Sahana: Overview of a Disaster Management System,"
Proceedings of the International Conference on Information and
Automation, December 15-17, 2006, Colombo, Sri Lanka
Sahana is a Free and Open Source Disaster Management system. It is a web based
collaboration tool that addresses the common coordination problems during a disaster
from finding missing people, managing aid, managing volunteers, tracking camps effectively
between Government groups, the civil society (NGOs) and the victims themselves.
DAVID M. WAGUESPEACK
"Technological development and political stability: Patenting
in Latin America and the Caribbean," Research Policy, 2005,
34(10): 1570-1590
The author examines the effect of national political institutions on patent application
rates, using a 27-year panel of Latin American and Caribbean nations, estimating
U.S. patent applications and domestic patent applications by local inventors for
each observation, and holding other economic and technological inputs to innovation
constant.
SUSAN WHITE
"Sulfur Dioxide Allowances: The Price of Pollution,"
Journal of Financial Education, Vol. 31, Winter 2005, pages 118-125
This case discusses a method for enforcing the Clean Air Act's acid rain provisions.
Utilities may purchase sulfur dioxide allowances, which give them permission to
emit a certain amount of the pollutant, or they may install pollution control equipment
or use low sulfur fuel. Which alternative is more cost-effective for a utility at
a given point in time? This case gives students the opportunity to apply option
pricing principles to a company’s decision to purchase clean air equipment versus
buying the right to pollute.
YI XU
"Public
Incentives for Green Innovation"
The author presents a model of firms developing and selling green, nonpolluting
technologies. The firms pursuing green technologies choose their innovation investments
and prices as they compete for market share among each other as well as with an
incumbent producer using a traditional technology which causes pollution. More innovation
efforts lead to more attractive green technologies that are appreciated by a set
of utility maximizing consumers, who can purchase any of the green technologies,
the incumbent technology, or nothing at all.
KISLAYA PRASAD
"Corruption in Hierarchies"
Corruption is a widespread phenomenon and the cause of great social harm. The
author investigates how corruption spreads within organizations, and what can be
done to root it out. The distinctive feature of this study is a focus on organization
level variables as determinants of behavior. The approach to the study of the problem
is computational. An agent-based model was developed for the study of the phenomenon
which is used to address the following questions:
- What steady states emerge during the evolution of the system?
- Does organization form matter for the amount of corruption?
- Specifically, do recruitment, promotion and retirement rules matter?
- Do the number of layers in the hierarchy matter?
- What is the optimal set of policies to control corruption?
The study deepens the understanding of how corruption takes root, how it spreads,
and what can be done to control it.
