I’m pleased to announce the 2022 recipients of the Mendoza Mission Research Award, an annual recognition of Mendoza research papers that exemplify the College’s imperative to “Grow the Good in Business.”

This year, five papers were chosen from nominations submitted across the College, with one award winner in each department:

Sandra Vera-Muñoz, Associate Professor of Accountancy, “Climate-Risk Materiality and Firm Risk" (Review of Accounting Studies, in press).

Using the SASB Materiality Map to proxy for market expectations of climate risk materiality, the researchers test whether the association between disclosing climate risk in 10-Ks and firm risk (proxied by cost of equity) varies with market expectations of climate risk materiality.

Huaizhi Chen, Associate Professor of Finance, “Don’t Take Their Word for It: The Misclassification of Bond Mutual Funds” (Journal of Finance, 2021).

The paper demonstrates a significant gap between how bond fund managers classify their credit risks and their actual credit risks. This phenomenon results in the pervasive misclassification of bond mutual funds.

Zifeng Zhao, Assistant Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations, “Modeling the COVID-19 Infection Trajectory: A Piecewise Linear Quantile Trend Model” (Journal of Royal Statistical Society: Series B, 2021).

Zhao and co-authors study multiple change-point estimation in the high-dimensional regression setting. They propose a novel projection-based algorithm and show it achieves minimax optimal localization rate up to a log factor, a significant improvement from state-of-the-art methods in the literature.

Cindy Muir (Zapata), Associate Professor of Management & Organization, “It's Not Only What You Do, But Why You Do It: How Managerial Motives Influence Employees' Fairness Judgments” (Journal of Applied Psychology, 2022). 

Muir (Zapata) and colleagues demonstrate that appearing fair is driven by both a supervisor’s behavior and their underlying motives for said behavior. One of the findings was that, unsurprisingly, supervisors motivated by prosocial concerns (desire to benefit other people) were more likely to adhere to justice rules than those motivated by self-interest (a desire to benefit oneself). However, supervisory motives are also important independent of behavior, as employees pick up and rely on their motive attributions to form fairness judgments.

Frank Germann, Associate Professor of Marketing, “Do Marketers Matter for Entrepreneurs? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Uganda” (Journal of Marketing, 2021).

This article examines the effects of a business support intervention in which international professionals from different functional backgrounds volunteered time to help Ugandan entrepreneurs improve growth. Findings from a multiyear field experiment show that entrepreneurs who were randomly matched with marketers significantly increased firm growth. As small-scale businesses form the commercial backbone of most emerging markets, their performance and development are critically important. Marketers’ positive impact on these businesses highlights the need for the field’s increased presence in emerging markets.

My congratulations to these faculty members for their significant contribution to Mendoza’s research excellence and for their research that sheds light on how business can be used to advance the common good.

In Notre Dame,

Martijn