Schulich Research Excellence Fellowship

The establishment and designation of the “Schulich Research Excellence Fellow” is a means of retaining, incentivizing, and recognizing non-chaired tenured faculty members who are achieving research excellence within the parameters of the Schulich’s scholarly plans, mission, and strategy. This Research Excellence Fellowship is for a three-year term, and the fellows receive 1 course release per year to enhance their research productivity. In the 2021 inaugural program, the Office of Associate Dean, Research awarded the

fellowship to 13 candidates.

ADAM DIAMANT

Associate Professor of Operations Management and Information Systems

Adam Diamant

Adam Diamant’s research program intersects with the fields of organizational management, operations research, and artificial intelligence with a specific focus on studying health-related systems. In particular, he develops new techniques in optimization and artificial intelligence (AI) for solving large-scale problems in dynamic and uncertain environments. Adam applies these tools to the study of healthcare systems with the goal of understanding and designing evidence-based approaches for institutional improvements in both service quality and operational efficiency.

Adam is extremely appreciative of the opportunity to be a Schulich Research Excellence Fellow as it will allow him to engage in research that impacts both Toronto and Ontario public health communities. It will also allow him to disseminate his findings to a global network of business researchers and health practitioners. Through partnerships with several medical institutions such as Michael Garron Hospital and The Midwives’ Clinic East York-Don Mills, the fellowship program will allow him to focus on the creation of data-driven tools to aid in the assignment of patients to medical practitioners as well as the management of scarce health resources. The overall objective of these research projects is to create technologies to better support clinical practice so that patients receive the requisite therapeutic attention in a timely and responsive fashion while administrative efficiency is improved, and operational costs are controlled.

These studies contribute to the management, operations research, and AI communities in that new business insight, mathematical theory, and computational models must be developed. Adam’s research program will shed light on how current operational paradigms in the health sector can affect access to care, resource utilization, workload fairness amongst practitioners, and whether certain patient groups face barriers to care provision. These projects will also provide health administrators with high-level managerial insight as to why the proposed AI systems, and the potential changes to operational structures, perform well. Finally, this research will also illustrate how health institutions can efficiently utilize scarce health human resources so as to more effectively provide timely care to their patients.

IRENE HENRIQUES

Professor of Sustainability and Economics

Irene Henriques

Given the realities of an environmental crisis, a global pandemic, and increasing inequality across the globe, management scholars are increasingly attentive to how to apply their toolkit to these pressing problems. Albert Einstein once stated: “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Irene’s research seeks to present new thinking to the management toolkit. More and more firms are seeking to have a substantial impact on a broad swath of social problems. How should managers design their corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives to best achieve their intended impacts? Firms are increasingly expected by their stakeholders to tackle the “wicked problems” of society. These new pressures have created a highly equivocal corporate social responsibility (CSR) environment whereby firms face competing stakeholder perspectives regarding their expected level of financial and social value creation.

The Schulich Research Excellence Fellowship allows Irene to study how firms can optimize their social shared value creation and promote the construction of the intersubjective agreement, which can resolve CSR environmental equivocality. She is working on a framework that explains how the proper alignment of a firm’s level of CSR environmental equivocality, which is comprised of varying amounts of “unknowingness”, entrepreneurial strategy, which encourages and facilitates experimentation, and stakeholder engagement process, which encourages and facilitates information gathering, supports the construction of novel solutions.

The outcome of this research will be a typology of organizational value creation in equivocal CSR environments that firms can employ to increase shared value.

YELENA LARKIN

Associate Professor of Finance

YELENA LARKIN

Associate Professor of Finance

Yelena Larkin

The research that Yelena Larkin conducts falls in the area of empirical corporate finance with a particular focus on two topics: one, product markets and intangible capital; and two, financial and investment policy. Yelena’s interest in the implications of product market characteristics, specifically intangible capital, has led to several projects that have received high visibility. In her 2013 article on brand perception, she challenges the prevailing view that only tangible assets can be used as collateral, and show that brand can be used as collateral, too. Another published article, “The Fading of Investment-Cash Flow Sensitivity and Global Development,” (2018), takes an international view of product markets and analyzed the effect of the country-level economic health on the investment policies of individual firms.

The article “Are U.S. Markets Becoming More Concentrated?” (2019) has been Yelena’s most significant and influential work in the area of product markets. This work formally demonstrates that despite popular belief, U.S. markets have become more concentrated over the past two decades. Firms that operate in industries with the largest increase in concentration enjoy higher profit margins, thereby indicating that product markets have undergone a structural shift that has potentially weakened competition.

Going forward, Yelena would like to use Schulich’s Research Excellence Fellowship to continue investigating the outcomes of product market consolidation. She is currently working on extending this agenda in two directions. First, she expands the study beyond U.S. markets and searches for evidence of international implications. Yelena examines whether the recent U.S. product-market consolidation is echoed in the Canadian economic environment and finds that Canadian stock markets have become more consolidated. This trend, in turn, is consistent with an increase in product markets consolidation and a decline in business dynamism.

The second extension of Yelena’s agenda is examining a link between product market competition and CSR. Consumer demand for green products is considered particularly impactful in competitive product markets. However, in the most polluting industries, consumers cannot differentiate across products, making the channel ineffective. Can competition still improve environmental policy absent consumer differentiation? Yelena’s work shows that competition induces cost-cutting and leads to efficient allocation of production across firms. When cost-cutting measures positively impact the environment, the overall effect on environmental policy is positive.

MOSHE ARYE MILEVSKY

Professor of Finance

Moshe Arye Milevsky

The CFA Research Institute, a global non-profit affiliated with its renowned financial designation, embarked on a project with Mercer Consulting to evaluate and rank national retirement systems all around the world. They quantify and then summarize a country’s pension index score using a variety of metrics, including but not limited to well-known ESG factors. These rankings are updated yearly with much media fanfare, national pride, and occasional consternation. Some countries consistently score highly and others lower, perhaps no different than business school rankings. In 2021 Iceland took the top spot, winning the equivalent of the pension Olympic medal.

But upon carefully examining this data, pension expert and finance Professor Moshe A. Milevsky noticed something rather interesting. Countries that consistently ranked higher in their overall pension index score also happen to be countries in which a larger fraction of their population are affiliated with Protestant Churches, versus other branches of Christianity or religions.

The following figure displays that relationship with a simple regression line, although it’s robust to various controls. And, while religious factors have long been associated with economic behaviour and financial development, this result is a novel twist on Max Weber’s famous Protestant work ethic. Professor Milevsky calls this a Protestant “retirement ethic”, and his article describing the work is currently being revised for submission to a scholarly journal.

Now, while this might be just a curious empirical finding, for now, Professor Milevsky has progressed to focus his research attention on the historical reasons why Protestants might have gotten a head-start on developing better retirement systems. In particular, he has fixated on the surprising role of Presbyterian ministers in the 18th century, who actually pioneered modern actuarial methods for funding pension annuities during the Scottish Enlightenment.

Needless to say, this new and different line of research — far from his original education in stochastic and mathematical modelling — has forced Professor Milevsky back into school in a manner of speaking, to retrain and develop proper historical and archival skills. This is precisely his plan for the next few years as the inaugural recipient of one of the Schulich Research Excellence Fellowships. In addition to the above noted Protestant “retirement ethic”, he plans to leverage other historical lessons that could be applied to the sizeable number of baby boomers who will be retiring in the 21st century, as well as the organizations that currently employ them.

Pension Index Value

95.00

85.00

Netherlands Denmark Iceland

75.00

65.00

55.00

45.00 Israel Australia

Singapore

Canada

Ireland Chile

Belgium

Malaysia Uruguay Spain Peru Germany

Brazil

Japan Indonesia

South Korea

Mexico

India

Philippines

Thailand South Africa Norway

United Kingdom

United States Finland

35.00

0.00 10.00 20.00 30.00 40.00 50.00 60.00 70.00 80.00

Percentage of Population that is Protestant (%)

GRANT PACKARD

Associate Professor of Marketing

Grant Packard

Grant’s research examines how language explains and shapes consumer attitudes and behaviour. He combines methods from computational linguistics, econometrics, and experiments to explore the speech and text of consumers, frontline employees, marketing communications, and other cultural content such as song lyrics. Grant’s recent work demonstrates things like how expression modality (e.g., speech vs. writing) impacts what is said and its persuasive impact, the importance of concrete language among customer service agents, and introduces a modeling approach to identifying the impact of moment-to-moment shifts in conversational language on persuasion outcomes. Grant also publishes work and hosts academic workshops on the use of automated text analysis methods by scholars in management and across the social and behavioural sciences.

The Schulich Research Excellence Fellowship helps Grant continue to develop and expand this line of work. He is presently involved in a large-scale effort to empirically test whether and how writing “style” matters when it comes to the adoption of ideas. While theories about style’s importance are pervasive, there’s surprisingly little hard evidence of its impact. Grant and his collaborators are using natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to isolate style’s effect (from content), and further, to identify the specific language features that can be said to actually contribute to “style.” To do this, they’re using tens of thousands of written works in a context where style is said to matter least: the impact of academic articles.

Another new effort the Schulich Fellowship will help support is testing the potential for automated text analysis as a measurement approach in surveys and experiments. Today, firms often use text posted online to understand consumer sentiment, and scholars tend to use text from field settings to understand things about the writer or audience. Grant and his colleagues predict that using NLP methods to process naturally produced text (e.g., short answers or “thought listings”) may provide new and less biased insights relative to traditional scale measures or interpretative analysis.

PERRY SADORSKY

Professor of Sustainability and Economics

Perry Sadorsky

Climate change, green consumers, energy security, fossil fuel divestment, and technological innovation are powerful forces shaping a transition to a low carbon economy. Renewable energy, defined as energy produced from renewable energy sources like biomass, geothermal, hydro, wind, wave, and solar plays an important part in this socio-economic transition. The importance of renewable energy is established in The United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goal #7 which states “Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all.” Through technological innovation, the levelized cost of electricity is falling for renewables and onshore wind is now less costly than coal. Future increases in renewable energy consumption are going to depend upon the continued increase in the share of renewable energy in the fuel mix.

Technological innovation and financial development are important factors behind the production and consumption of renewable energy. Recently, FinTech (broadly defined as the intersection of financial services and technology) has emerged as an important contributor to renewable energy adoption. FinTechs like cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and crowdfunding have the potential to greatly increase the usage of renewable energy. Examples of FinTech applied to renewable energy include the cryptocurrency NRGcoin which monetarizes transactions by smart meters, the blockchain Origin which is used to issue and trade renewable energy certificates on a blockchain credit market, and the usage of crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo to raise funds for new renewable and cleantech projects.

There are many interesting aspects regarding the relationship between FinTech and cleantech like energy efficiency, eco-efficiency, the drivers of renewable energy, and investment and risk management trends in clean energy. The Schulich Research Excellence Fellowship provides the opportunity for Perry to study these relationships. Since some of the research is data-intensive, machine learning methods are used to conduct the empirical analysis. The time is right for the development of new sustainable technology-driven business models.

GREGORY SAXTON

Associate Professor of Accounting

Gregory Saxton

Gregory Saxton is an accounting scholar who conducts Big Data-driven and data analytics-focused research chiefly in the area of social responsibility and societal impact. He specifically conducts research in three different contexts: 1) non-profit accounting; 2) social media, social networks, and the capital markets; and 3) social accountability, business ethics, and corporate social responsibility (CSR). His recent studies have explored such issues as the determinants and outcomes of organizational financial and CSR disclosure, the use of social media by Big 4 accounting firms, accounting-focused social movement discussions on Twitter, and the relationship between social media use and donations to nonprofit organizations.

The Fellowship has given him time to focus, first, on his longest-running stream of research on nonprofit accounting. Here, he applies economic and behavioural theories in quantitative examinations of phenomena central to the understanding of accounting in nonprofit organizations. This stream of research has been published in, among other outlets, the Journal of Accounting and Public Policy, Journal of Business Ethics, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Annals of Operations Research and, most recently, the Review of Accounting Studies. He strongly believes there is great potential to publish this research in top-tier accounting journals. He has used the time given by the fellowship to develop several working papers to submit to these journals in 2022, including studies on the US federal government’s Paycheck Protection Program loans, the determinants and outcomes of management outsourcing, the effects of an excise tax on CEO compensation, and the relationship between accounting firm expertise and reporting quality.

The fellowship has also allowed him to devote energy to a third (and newest) stream of research at the nexus of social media, social network analysis, and capital markets. A first working paper tests the capital market consequences of Twitter bot activity around earnings announcement events.

Other in-progress studies leverage social network analysis techniques to explore the effects that ego network characteristics, network density, and network centrality have on the financial markets. Overall, the fellowship is allowing him to focus on several high-risk/high-reward projects that he hopes will make an impact in his area of expertise. In the third year of the fellowship, he intends to use the time granted to apply for a SSHRC Insight Grant.

RUODAN SHAO

Associate Professor of Organization Studies

Ruodan Shao

Ruodan Shao’s research interests lie in corporate social responsibility, cross-cultural management, business ethics/ethical decision-making, and organizational justice. Currently, Ruodan is working on multiple research projects investigating employees’ attitudes, emotions, and behaviours as a result of organizations’ socially responsible actions and the ethicality and fairness of the managers. With the support of the Schulich Research Excellence Fellowship, Ruodan has planned to work on several projects. First, Ruodan is working on a project examining how call center service employees respond to the newly introduced artificial intelligence system at work. Specifically, in this research, she and her collaborators have drawn on cognitive load theory to identify the cognitive demands call center employees may experience when they utilize AI-based information tools at work. They argue that using AI-based information tools on a daily basis can impose substantial cognitive loads on service employees, which manifest as their experienced information overload on a daily basis. Their experienced information overload has great implications for their daily job performance and psychological well-being. The team has completed the initial draft of the manuscript and is planning to submit this manuscript to a FT 50 journal soon. Second, Ruodan and her collaborators are working on a project investigating how the social distancing practices in the call center context can influence service employees’ psychological and behavioural responses at work. Specifically, they take the social reconnection perspective to explain the potential positive impact of employees’ social distancing practices on their prosocial behaviours at work. They have completed the first draft of the manuscript and are planning to submit this manuscript to a FT 50 journal. In addition to working on these projects, Ruodan also plans to submit grant applications to SSHRC Insight Grants and Insight Development Grants to support new research initiatives extending her current line of research. She also plans to disseminate their research findings to both academic and non-academic communities through conference presentations, research reports, and research talks to researchers and practitioners.

WINNY SHEN

Associate Professor of Organization Studies

Winny Shen

In her program of research, Winny Shen seeks to uncover how we can create inclusive, productive, and healthy work organizations. In one research stream, she focuses on the critical role of leaders. In particular, her recent work has focused on abusive behaviours by leaders toward their followers, seeking to understand why leaders can fall prey to these negative actions and how we can curb their occurrence. In the second stream of research, she explores the challenges and rewards of diversity and inclusion at work. Much of this work has tried to uncover why certain groups (e.g., women, racial minorities) continue to be underrepresented in leadership roles and what can be done to promote a more diverse leadership landscape. In her final research stream, she investigates workplace factors that affect workers’ health and wellbeing. She is especially interested in how workers simultaneously manage their work and family responsibilities, as well as the impacts of workplace understaffing, which has become increasingly prevalent during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

With the support of the Research Excellence Fellowship, Winny plans to extend her work at the intersection of diversity/inclusion and leadership in several directions. First, building upon her prior work examining the dearth of Asian leaders in North American workplaces, she is interested in understanding the unique intersectional barriers faced by Asian women in attaining and succeeding in leadership roles. Second, she is honing in on how leaders themselves (vs. observers) think about how their various identities (e.g., gender) influence their practice of leadership — do they see them as sources of strength or weakness? Lastly, she will explore how leader demographics (e.g., gender, race, disability) may colour how others perceive changes in leaders’ behaviours. For example, this change may be perceived positively as adaptability among some leaders, whereas it may be construed negatively as unpredictability among other leaders. Altogether, this work will help to facilitate the creation of more welcoming workplaces.

LINDA THORNE

Professor of Accounting

Linda Thorne

Linda does research on ethical influences on the decision-making of accountants and accounting information. The Schulich fellowship has provided Linda with the ability to focus on her research and most specifically, on two projects that evaluate how ethical aspects of decision-making of professional accountants and taxpayers are affected by recent events. The first project evaluates the degree to which taxpayers’ compliance is influenced by their identification with political affiliation and perceptions of political leaders’ tax-paying behaviour. They have surveyed 600 American taxpayers, and the results suggest that taxpayers will model their own taxpaying behaviour based on their perceptions of that of the behaviour of their affiliated political leader. The second project considers how major changes to the International Code of Ethics of Professional Accountants affect the professional responsibility of accountants in Canada and the U.S. More specifically, this project considers the extent to which the change in the Code of Ethics influences the reporting of fraud and illegal acts to an external authority. They examined 73 comment letters received by the International Ethics Standards Board of Accountants (IESBA) in response to the proposed change to the Code of Ethics. Their analysis shows that the majority of those that responded opposed the proposed requirement that professional accountants must report fraud and illegal acts to an external authority, and as a result, the enacted change to the Code of Ethics was revised and softened so professional accountants have the “right” to report to an external authority. The final step in the research is to experimentally evaluate how CPAs behave when subject to the original and revised Code of Ethics.

MAXIM VORONOV

Professor of Organization Studies and Sustainability

Maxim Voronov

Maxim Voronov studies the dynamics of social change at organizational, industry and societal levels. He has studied the role of emotions in social change, the role of social movements in creating popular support for local products, and organizations’ efforts to promote new ideas.

He is currently conducting a study with Robin Burrow (Cardiff University) that seeks to understand what sustains extreme devotion to professional excellence among Michelin chefs, to understand the origins of what Voronov calls “uber-professionalism”. Even as society has recognized work-life balance as important for individuals, families and organizations, there are many professionals who are fanatically devoted to their career pursuits, shun work-life balance, and embrace the toll that the 24/7 work lifestyle takes on their physical and mental health as badges of honour. Driven to an extreme by a desire for perfection, uber-professionalism plays a key role in hindering social change aimed to introduce greater work-life balance and greater equality. Voronov chose to study elite chefs because this field encourages uber-professionalism, as aspiring chefs undergo brutal socialization and even mental and physical abuse. Uberprofessionalism is exhibited by many employees in other fields, such as consulting and investment banking. Voronov aims to understand how the negative social impact of uber-professionalism can be mitigated.

Another research project will examine how organizations manage competing logics of action when their activities are unsettled by a crisis. As the Covid-19 pandemic continues, the need to balance between public health and economic prosperity has become especially salient for public sector organizations. How they strike this balance has important social consequences, and the tension between these imperatives is contentious and emotionally laden. Voronov and his collaborators will examine how emotion-laden rhetoric is used by provincial authorities to guide the public sector’s responses, and how these efforts are interpreted and felt by the decisionmakers on the receiving end. The study will use topic modelling to analyze the directives that provincial authorities issued and conduct interviews to understand the lived experiences and on-the-ground practices of public sector organizations.

JULIAN SCOTT YEOMANS

Professor of Operations Management and Information Systems

Julian Scott Yeomans

For the past year, Julian’s research has focused on the development of a newly created computational “trick” referred to as simulation-decomposition (SimDec). SimDec is a technique that can be appended to any simulation model (or to raw data) to provide an analytical evaluation of its impacts and interactions that can be easily understood by even non-technical specialists. At its core, SimDec enhances the explanatory capabilities of Monte Carlo simulation methods by visually “teasing out” and uncovering inherent cause-and-effect relationships between groups of input and output parameters. While straightforward and elegant, this novel approach significantly enhances the analytical capabilities of users by readily exposing seemingly, a priori, counter-intuitive behaviour. Together with Finnish colleague Maria Kozlova, this productive research stream has already generated 6 journal articles, 1 book, and 3 patent filings.

Over the past 20 years, Julian has published more than 100 journal papers on the development of simulation-optimization, population-based metaheuristics, machine learning, and modelling-to-generate-alternatives with applications to such diverse areas as sustainability, waste management, empirical finance, healthcare, and agriculture. With support from the Schulich Research Fellowship, he plans to conduct a study that leverages SimDec’s visual analytics capabilities with the combined processing power of simulation optimization and the decision-making benefits provided by modelling-to-generate-alternatives. If this approach proves successful, it could be reasonably anticipated that SimDec will directly channel how practitioners can conduct future analytical studies, leading to numerous spillovers into the corporate decision-making, strategic management, financial, and operations realms. Julian’s research team will explore all of these avenues in this upcoming project.

LUKE ZHU

Associate Professor of Organization Studies

Luke Zhu

The issue of ethical leader behaviour has increasingly taken center stage in light of numerous ethical scandals over the past two decades, including Enron and Worldcom in the early 2000s and the BP oil spill and Theranos, more recently. In response, we have rightfully spent years encouraging leaders to place ethics front-and-center, but we have not made them aware of the potential social risks when they do so. The purpose of Luke’s research is to inform leaders that attempting to act ethically can sometimes lead to undesirable consequences that are frequently overlooked.

First, the right decisions aren’t always ethical decisions. Organizations are bound by a triple bottom line: profit, people, and the planet. Ethical leaders may at times struggle addressing all three bottom lines. For example, when forming moral judgments, people not only examine the permissibility of an act in question but also what the act signals about the character of the person who carries out the act. Sometimes decisions that focus on maximizing positive material outcomes at the expense of one or few individuals (i.e., right decisions in many business contexts) may lead to negative inferences about the leader’s moral character (for lack of important human virtues, such as, empathy and integrity). For example, one study has found that a hospital administrator who decided not to fund an expensive operation to save a child (instead of buying the needed hospital equipment that can save many more lives) was seen as making a right and pragmatic decision but also demonstrates a deficiency in empathy and moral character compared to a hospital administrator who did the opposite.

Second, ethical leadership does not guarantee ethical followership. Being in a position of power and status, ethical leaders may be predisposed to tell followers what and how they should do to be more ethical. However, that may not be true, as years of research have shown that people prefer to be in control of their own lives, especially in the moral domain. As a result, by telling people to behave ethically, ethical leaders may be perceived as moral proselytizers — individuals who exhort others to become better persons. Consistent with this view, one research has found that people do not model after an ethical individual when they perceive the ethical individual as a moral proselytizer, as moral proselytizers are perceived as intruders of personal freedom.