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Item Reserved employment: can global policies to improve employment opportunity for people with disabilities work in the United States?(Wiley, 2023-05-09) Chang, KabrinaReserved Employment: Can Global Policies to Improve Employment Opportunity for People with Disabilities Work in the United States? (Could Gender Quotas Lead the Way to Quotas for Disabled Persons?) Kabrina Krebel Chang Clinical Associate Professor Business Law and Ethics Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Questrom School of Business Boston University California is testing the limits of diversity quotas for boards of publicly listed companies. SB 826 was passed to address gender inequity on corporate boards in the state by establishing a qutoa system depending on the number of directors. Nationally, only 28% of corporate board members are women. A conservative activist group sued alleging the law violated the equal protection clause of the California constitution because it unlawfully relied on gender-based classifications. The court held that California failed to meet its burden to identify a compelling state interest served by the law. Specifically, the court held that the connection between women on boards and improved corporate performance was inconclusive and that the state legislature could amend existing laws to focus on diversifying corporate boardrooms more narrowly. California has appealed. Despite the law being struck down, the average share of women on boards in California rose from 12.9% in 2016 to 23.2% in 2020 . In Europe, eight countries have adopted mandatory gender quotas for boards, while ten more have taken a more liberal approach using a range of measures and initiatives. Since 2011, the share of women on company boards has risen by over 36% in those countries with mandatory quotas, and just over 30% in those countries taking a more liberal approach. In January, 2022, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced an effort to unblock legislation from 2012 that would require 40% of non-executive board seats be filled by women. Gender isn’t the only identity supported by employment quotas in the EU and beyond. Globally, the employment ratio of people over 15 years old with a disability is almost half of that of persons without a disability. To improve employment for disabled people, 99 countries have adopted a quota system: depending on their size, employers must employ a certain number or percentage of persons with a disability. Typically, the percentage ranges from 1%-15%. Often a quota is combined with a levy system for companies that do not comply. The funds collected finance measures used to promote employment of those with disabilities . Like the US, in many other countries national constitutions guarantee the right of disabled persons to work, and the majority have laws prohibiting discrimination in employment and pay. Is it time for private sector business in the US to try a quota system for disabled workers? In the US, across all age groups and education levels people with disabilities are much less likely to be employed than those without a disability. The jobless rate for people with a disability is twice as high as the rate for able-bodied workers. Those that are employed are more likely to be self-employed than those without a disability. This, despite the existence of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Would a quota for disabled workers pass constitutional scrutiny in the United States? Unlike gender, under the 14th amendment disability related discrimination remains the weakest of all protected classes. In City of Cleburn, Texas v Cleburn Living Center, the US Supreme Court held that a mental disability is not a quasi-suspect class requiring heightened scrutiny. According to the Court, a state statute related to mental disability need only be rationally related to a legitimate state interest to pass constitutional scrutiny . Even if a law establishing a disabled worker quota could pass constitutional muster, what social and ethical barriers would such a bill face in the United States? Examination of stakeholders at an individual level (disabled workers), group level (team dynamics at work), organizational level (structural issues in a business that might disadvantage disabled workers), and a macro level (do we struggle to see disabled workers as leaders?) may indicate why there is a lack of progress. Several countries have decided to change behavior first and hope that inclusion follows.Item Evidence in practice: how structural and programmatic scaffolds enable knowledge transfer in international development(SAGE Publications (UK and US)) Canales, Rodrigo; Bradbury, Mikaela; Sheldon, TonyThis inductive study of eight international development interventions across four countries analyzes the mechanisms that enable effective integration of evidence in practice, as an enduring challenge of learning and coordination across occupational and organizational boundaries. We identify how a set of critical, complementary structural and programmatic scaffolding practices, jointly provided a shared architecture for actors across organizations and communities of practice to collaborate and learn within the uncertainty and complexity inherent in the international development context. Scaffolding practices offered modular, temporary counter-balancing stabilizing and extending support that enabled the unusual and counter normative behaviors and mindsets required for continuous learning and adaptive coordination. Through 226 in-depth interviews with a range of international development experts, including practitioners engaged in eight matched interventions in India, Mexico, South Africa, and Ghana,we identified and analyzed the mechanisms that explain the varying degrees of effectiveness with which rigorous evidence was integrated in each case. Our findings have implications for interorganizational innovation and collaboration under conditions of complexity and uncertainty, as well as the dynamic interactions between individuals, their organizations, and their communities of practice when attempting to bring about systemic change.Item The stranger as friend: loan officers and positive deviance in microfinance(Routledge, 2012-08-21) Canales, Rodrigo; Golden Biddle, Karen; Dutton, JaneThis chapter explores positive deviance in the context of microfinance. Some loan officers frequently bend or choose not to enforce written rules in an effort to better address client needs, while others enforce the rules strictly. These differences in enforcement styles are analyzed to explore the structural characteristics that generate and sustain rule-bending behavior. In microfinance, the pressures to standardize and automate lending decisions challenge loan officers’ ability to manage clients because context uncertainty cannot be fully captured by centralized policies. The chapter explores the structural conditions that lead to positive deviance with productive outcomes by the organization’s own criteria. The paper unveils two inherent tensions in microfinance. First, increased efforts to centralize and enforce policies in fact only increase the pressures for loan officers to work outside the organizations’ regulations. Second, this type of positive deviance keeps the organizations connected to their core, social missions.Item Do startup employees earn more in the long run?(Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), 2021-05) Sorenson, Olav; Dahl, Michael S.; Canales, Rodrigo; Burton, M. DianeEvaluating the attractiveness of startup employment requires an understanding of both what startups pay and the implications of these jobs for earnings trajectories. Analyzing Danish registry data, we find that employees hired by startups earn roughly 17% less over the next 10 years than those hired by large, established firms. About half of this earnings differential stems from sorting—from the fact that startup employees have less human capital. Long-term earnings also vary depending on when individuals are hired. Although the earliest employees of startups suffer an earnings penalty, those hired by already-successful startups earn a small premium. Two factors appear to account for the earnings penalties for the early employees: Startups fail at high rates, creating costly spells of unemployment for their (former) employees. Job-mobility patterns also diverge: After being employed by a small startup, individuals rarely return to the large employers that pay more.Item A darker side to decentralized banks: market power and credit rationing in SME lending(Elsevier BV, 2012-08) Canales, Rodrigo; Nanda, RamanaWe use loan-level data to study how the organizational structure of banks impacts small business lending. We find that decentralized banks — where branch managers have greater autonomy over lending decisions — give larger loans to small firms and those with "soft information". However, decentralized banks are also more responsive to their own competitive environment. They are more likely to expand credit when faced with competition but also cherry pick customers and restrict credit when they have market power. This "darker side" to decentralized banks in concentrated markets highlights that the level of local banking competition is key to determining which organizational structure provides better lending terms for small businesses.Item OvoAMtht from Methyloversatilis thermotolerans ovothiol biosynthesis is a bifunction enzyme: thiol oxygenase and sulfoxide synthase activities(Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), 2022-03-24) Cheng, Ronghai; Weitz, Andrew C.; Paris, Jared; Tang, Yijie; Zhang, Jingyu; Song, Heng; Naowarojna, Nathchar; Li, Kelin; Qiao, Lu; Lopez, Juan; Grinstaff, Mark W.; Zhang, Lixin; Guo, Yisong; Elliott, Sean; Liu, PinghuaMononuclear non-heme iron enzymes are a large class of enzymes catalyzing a wide-range of reactions. In this work, we report that a non-heme iron enzyme in Methyloversatilis thermotolerans, OvoAMtht, has two different activities, as a thiol oxygenase and a sulfoxide synthase. When cysteine is presented as the only substrate, OvoAMtht is a thiol oxygenase. In the presence of both histidine and cysteine as substrates, OvoAMtht catalyzes the oxidative coupling between histidine and cysteine (a sulfoxide synthase). Additionally, we demonstrate that both substrates and the active site iron's secondary coordination shell residues exert exquisite control over the dual activities of OvoAMtht (sulfoxide synthase vs. thiol oxygenase activities). OvoAMtht is an excellent system for future detailed mechanistic investigation on how metal ligands and secondary coordination shell residues fine-tune the iron-center electronic properties to achieve different reactivities.Item When salespeople manage customer relationships: multidimensional incentives and private information(SAGE Publications, 2019-10) Kim, Minkyung; Sudhir, K.; Uetake, Kosuke; Canales, RodrigoAt many firms, incentivized salespeople with private information about customers are responsible for customer relationship management. Although incentives motivate sales performance, private information can induce moral hazard by salespeople to gain compensation at the expense of the firm. The authors investigate the sales performance–moral hazard trade-off in response to multidimensional performance (acquisition and maintenance) incentives in the presence of private information. Using unique panel data on customer loan acquisition and repayments linked to salespeople from a microfinance bank, the authors detect evidence of salesperson private information. Acquisition incentives induce salesperson moral hazard, leading to adverse customer selection, but maintenance incentives moderate it as salespeople recognize the negative effects of acquiring low-quality customers on future payoffs. Critically, without the moderating effect of maintenance incentives, the adverse selection effect of acquisition incentives overwhelms the sales-enhancing effects, clarifying the importance of multidimensional incentives for customer relationship management. Reducing private information (through job transfers) hurts customer maintenance but has greater impact on productivity by moderating adverse selection at acquisition. This article also contributes to the recent literature on detecting and disentangling customer adverse selection and customer moral hazard (defaults) with a new identification strategy that exploits the time-varying effects of salesperson incentives.Item Fourier Analysis-based Iterative Combinatorial Auctions(International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization, 2022-07-23) Weissteiner, Jakob; Wendler, Chris; Seuken, Sven; Lubin, Benjamin; Puschel, MarkusRecent advances in Fourier analysis have brought new tools to efficiently represent and learn set functions. In this paper, we bring the power of Fourier analysis to the design of combinatorial auctions (CAs). The key idea is to approximate bidders' value functions using Fourier-sparse set functions, which can be computed using a relatively small number of queries. Since this number is still too large for practical CAs, we propose a new hybrid design: we first use neural networks (NNs) to learn bidders’ values and then apply Fourier analysis to the learned representations. On a technical level, we formulate a Fourier transform-based winner determination problem and derive its mixed integer program formulation. Based on this, we devise an iterative CA that asks Fourier-based queries. We experimentally show that our hybrid ICA achieves higher efficiency than prior auction designs, leads to a fairer distribution of social welfare, and significantly reduces runtime. With this paper, we are the first to leverage Fourier analysis in CA design and lay the foundation for future work in this area. Our code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/marketdesignresearch/FA-based-ICAs.Item Designing core-selecting payment rules: a computational search approach(INFORMS, 2022-12-05) Buenz, B.; Lubin, Benjamin; Seuken, S.Item Economics of NFTs: The Value of Creator Royalties(Elsevier BV, 2022-12-22) Hemenway Falk, Brett; Tsoukalas, Gerry; Zhang, NiuniuItem Privacy-preserving network analytics(Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), 2022-12-21) Hastings, Marcella; Falk, Brett Hemenway; Tsoukalas, GerryWe develop a new privacy-preserving framework for a general class of financial network models, leveraging cryptographic principles from secure multiparty computation and decentralized systems. We show how aggregate-level network statistics required for stability assessment and stress testing can be derived from real data without any individual node revealing its private information to any outside party, be it other nodes in the network, or even a central agent. Our work bridges the gap between established theories of financial network contagion and systemic risk that assume agents have full network information and the real world where information sharing is hindered by privacy and security concerns. This paper was accepted by Agostino Capponi, finance. Supplemental Material: The data files and online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4582 .Item Reprint of “The startup cartography project: measuring and mapping entrepreneurial ecosystems”(Elsevier BV, 2022-11) Andrews, R.J.; Fazio, Catherine; Guzman, Jorge; Liu, Yupeng; Stern, ScottItem Pick the right tactics when online sales go live: an empirical analysis of livestreaming for Amazon sellers(2023-01-03) Soltanieh Ha, Mohammad; Seidmann, Abraham; Xu, LingyiItem Uncertainty and dispersion of opinionsKim, Min; Zapatero, FernandoItem Fire sale risk and expected stock returnsKim, Min; Aragon, GeorgeItem Scaling blockchains: can committee-based consensus help?(Elsevier BV, 2022-11-23) Benhaim, Alon; Hemenway Falk, Brett; Tsoukalas, GerryItem How does the introduction of hidden orders affect limit order markets?(Wiley) Kou, StevenItem Global rush to produce Covid-19 vaccine(Boston University Questrom OMBA, 2022-03-11) Kim, JayCase study written primarily for Questrom OMBA 2022Item Calyx cafe clinical supply chain(Calyx Cafe, 2022-11-18) Sweet, KyleInterview with Calyx Cafe on clinical supply chainItem Team formation and performance: evidence from healthcare referral networks(INFORMS, 2022-05) Agha, Leila; Ericson, Keith M. Marzilli; Geissler, Kimberley; Rebitzer, James B.We examine the teams that emerge when a primary care physician (PCP) refers patients to specialists. When PCPs concentrate their specialist referrals — for instance, sending their cardiology patients to fewer distinct cardiologists — this encourages repeat interactions between PCPs and specialists. Repeated interactions provide more opportunities and incentives to develop productive team relationships. Using data from the Massachusetts All Payer Claims Database, we construct a new measure of PCP team referral concentration and document that it varies widely across PCPs, even among PCPs in the same organization. Chronically ill patients treated by PCPs with 1 standard deviation higher team referral concentration have 4% lower health care utilization on average, with no discernible reduction in quality. We corroborate this finding using a national sample of Medicare claims, and show that it holds under various identification strategies that account for observed and unobserved patient and physician characteristics. The results suggest that repeated PCP-specialist interactions improve team performance.