Mendoza Exchange

Research Roundup

Martijn Cremers

Martijn Cremers

Monday, 21 March 2022
The following are highlights of recently published papers:
Sriram Somanchi, Assistant Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations
"To Predict or Not to Predict: The Case of the Emergency Department" (Production and Operations Management)
We develop a novel two-stage prediction framework that improves the efficiency of hospital operations in terms of handoff from an Emergency Department (ED) to an inpatient facility. Working with a healthcare startup, we show that our method identifies subgroups of patients for whom we can send early signals to an inpatient facility about an admitting patient with limited information while still maintaining high accuracy. Our work has significant potential value to healthcare entities and contributes to a growing stream of work on how to best realize the value of healthcare analytics efforts.
John Costello, Assistant Professor of Marketing
Why Are Donors More Generous with Time than Money? The Role of Perceived Control Over Donations on Charitable Giving“ (Journal of Consumer Research)
Although nonprofits like charities tend to prefer money, experimental and field data demonstrate that donors prefer to donate time, even when doing so does less good for the cause. In this research, we demonstrate that this preference emerges because potential donors feel more personal control over their time (vs. money) donations. We use our conceptual model to design and test several interventions that nonprofits can use to more effectively generate donations of these two resources.
Ben Matthies, Assistant Professor of Finance
Long-run risk: Is it there?” (Journal of Finance)
This paper documents the existence of a persistent component in consumption growth. We take a novel approach using news coverage to capture investor concern about economic growth prospects. We provide evidence that consumption growth is highly predictable over long horizons – our measure explains between 23% and 38% of cumulative future consumption growth at the five-year horizon and beyond. Furthermore, we show a strong connection between this predictability and asset prices. Innovations to our measure price 51 standard portfolios in the cross-section and our one-factor model outperforms many benchmark macro- and return-based multi-factor models.
Mike Mannor, John F. O'Shaughnessy Associate Professor of Family Enterprise
Keep Your Eye on the Ball or on the Field? Exploring the Performance Implications of Executive Strategic Attention” (Academy of Management Journal)
Should CEOs focus on a wide set of strategic issues or just a few key issues? In this paper, my co-author and I develop a new textual analysis tool that shows how CEOs improve firm performance in most cases by focusing on a smaller number of strategic issues (ie. focus, focus, focus). However, broader attention is better when firms face weak market opportunities or are very efficient in using their current resources.
Sandra Vera-Muñoz, Associate Professor of Accountancy
Climate Risk Materiality and Firm Risk” (Review of Accounting Studies)
Using the SASB Materiality Map to proxy for market expectations of climate risk materiality, we 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. We find that the market rewards (penalizes) the firms for disclosing (not disclosing) climate risk in their 10-K filings. However, the penalty for nondisclosure is twice as large when the market expects climate risk to be material as compared to when the market does not expect climate risk to be material. Our results indicate that markets use expectations of climate risk materiality to infer the credibility of managers’ climate risk disclosure decisions. 
Congratulations, Sriram, John, Ben, Mike and Sandra on your publication success.
In Notre Dame,
Martijn