Hey, New York alums!

The Culverhouse College of Business invites you and a guest to the New York Alumni Reception at The Chester Lounge on Wednesday, June 22nd at 7:00 p.m. EST.

Hosted by the Culverhouse Executives Society to network with our students interning in New York this summer.

Spend Your Summer With Culverhouse.

The Marillyn A. Hewson Cybersecurity Summer Camp is designed to expose area high school students to the world of cybersecurity and inspire students to pursue a career in cybersecurity or other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields.

Students can learn the basics of cybersecurity and web infrastructure in the standard camp or take on a more challenging curriculum in the advanced camp.

  • Camp 1: June 6th – 10th, 2022
  • Camp 2: June 13th – 17th, 2022

Spend Your Summer With Culverhouse.

The Diversity in Business Bridge Program (DBBP) provides additional college preparation, with a specific focus on business as a major/career, thereby promoting postsecondary success for underrepresented minority students by helping them make a smoother transition to college. The 2022 DBBP will be held on The University of Alabama campus from June 19th through June 25th.

The Bridge Program gives students interested in business fields the opportunity to gain professional development, attain skills needed for success in college, enhance their critical thinking skills, and be introduced to functional business areas (e.g., marketing, accounting, entrepreneurship). Additionally, students will learn how to set goals and understand financial literacy to become more personally, fiscally, and socially responsible in life and within companies. Students will learn from the world-renowned Culverhouse College of Business faculty. After successful completion of the program, students who are admitted to the University of Alabama will be eligible for financial support at The Culverhouse College of Business.

Spend Your Summer With Culverhouse.

The Minerva Young Women’s Business Summer Program is a week-long residential academic camp for rising female high school seniors to encourage and develop their leadership skills and expose them to business as a major and career path, with an emphasis on areas where women are underrepresented, including leadership. This builds on the Diversity in Business Bridge Program. The Minerva Program will be held June 12-17, 2022 on The University of Alabama campus.

Minerva is designed to introduce young women to the college experience and business career opportunities. During the week, students will participate in informative sessions with Culverhouse College of Business faculty and staff, learn about career opportunities in business, build leadership and communication skills, complete a service project and take field trips for experiential learning. Additionally, students will experience campus life and connect with like-minded women interested in business.

Hey, Montgomery CES members!

The Culverhouse College of Business invites you and a guest to join us for a Culverhouse Executives Society Luncheon at Capital City Club on Wednesday, May 11th from 12:00 p.m. to 1:30 p.m.

RSVP by April 29th to events@culverhouse.ua.edu.

Hey, Tuscaloosa CES members!

The Culverhouse College of Business invites you and a guest to join us for a Culverhouse Executives Society Reception at Session Cocktails on Tuesday, May 24th from 5:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.

RSVP by May 13th to events@culverhouse.ua.edu.

Hey, Birmingham alums!

The Culverhouse College of Business invites you and a guest to the Birmingham Culverhouse Young Alumni Reception at Avondale Brewing Company on Tuesday, May 3rd at 5:30 p.m.

Congratulations, Culverhouse Grads!

Dean Palan invites all graduating Culverhouse students to attend our annual Spring Graduation Picnic.

Hey, Nashville alums!

The Culverhouse College of Business invites you and a guest to the Nashville Culverhouse Young Alumni Reception at Fat Bottom Brewing Company on Tuesday, April 26th at 6:00 p.m.

Congratulations Dr. Anup Agrawal

Dr. Anup Agrawal was selected as the 2021 Burnum Distinguished Faculty Award winner and will be presenting the annual Burnum Distinguished Faculty lecture on April 27, at 4:00 p.m., CST in the Fitzpatrick Auditorium at Hewson Hall.

Congrats Culverhouse Grads!

About the Ceremony

All degree candidates must arrive 90 minutes before the start of their ceremony. More arrival instructions are located under Ceremony Day Instructions.

Face coverings will not be required for fully vaccinated individuals

The candidate processional begins approximately 20-25 minutes prior to the published start time of the ceremony. This processional denotes the start of each commencement ceremony. Family members and guests should be seated at these times and remain seated throughout the ceremony. Each commencement ceremony will be approximately one hour in length.

Candidates will ascend the stairs on the right-hand side of the stage and descend the stairs on the left side of the stage. After crossing the stage, all candidates and guests may leave the Coliseum.

The ceremonies will be webcast live at https://commencement.ua.edu/

A weeklong celebration of MBA students

The Manderson Graduate School of Business from April 18th through 24th will celebrate our current and incoming MBA students through various events and gatherings in Tuscaloosa.

  • April 18, Bowling at Bowlero
  • April 19, Kickball Tournament at the UA Rec Fields
  • April 19, Admitted Students Welcome Event
  • April 20, Spin with Leah Mae at the Rec Spin Studio
  • April 20, Pop-Up Social at Loose Brews
  • April 21, Breakfast in the Loung at the MBA Lounge
  • April 22, Headshots on the Quad outside of Bidgood Hall
  • April 22, SPARK Speaker: Coach Dana Duckworth in Hewson Hall
  • April 22, Formal at The District Room
  • April 24, Daniel Nielsen Memorial Fundraiser at Heat Pizza

Don’t forget to RSVP for our A-Day Alumni Event.

Drop by the Hewson Hall Courtyard to visit with classmates and faculty. Pick up Chick-fil-A sandwiches and snacks before heading over to the Golden Flake A-Day game in Bryant-Denny Stadium!

Interested in a career in tech? Come join AT&T at Hewson hall on April 13th for a fun come-and-go event with prizes, food, and networking.

There will be booths to learn about our different student programs including the B2B Sales Development Program, Technology Development Program, and Financial Leadership Development Program. We will be having short workshops throughout the day with opportunities to ask questions, learn about life in tech, and hear from one of our AT&T executives! See the workshop schedule below for more details.

  • 1:00-1:30- Ask a Recruiter Panel
  • 1:30-2:00- Build Your Brand Workshop
  • 2:00-2:30- A Day in the Life- Leadership Development Program
  • 2:30-3:30- A Day in the Life- Technology Development Program
  • 3:30-4:00-A Day in the Life – B2B Sales Development Program
  • 4:00-5:00-Keynote Speaker

All years and majors are welcome!

Joins us for an afternoon with Vulcan Materials Company! Representatives will present about the company and the various departments that have internship and full-time opportunities. The presentation will be from 4:30 pm-5:00 pm, and dinner will follow.

Business casual dress is strongly recommended. Don’t forget to bring copies of your resume!

Please let us know if you have any dietary restrictions.

Stop by Hewson Hall to meet with OIT and UA Microsoft rep Kristi Collins. Kristi will be demonstrating the most popular O365 tools for student use and answering questions. Pop in for a quick demo of Mover, OneDrive, PowerPoint, Sway, Outlook, Teams.

Mover & OneDrive: 11:00 – 11:15am

PowerPoint: 11:30 – 11:45am

Sway for Portfolios: 12:00 – 12:45pm

Teams: 1:00 – 1:15pm

Outlook tips: 1:15 – 1:30pm

Do you have an idea of how to shake up a stagnant industry? Think healthcare, education, retail, manufacturing, etc. are living in the past? Tell us your idea of how you would revolutionize an industry and pivot it for future success!

  • 1st place: $1,000
  • 2nd place: $500

OTHER INFO:

Friday, April 8th

Eligible participants:

Open to all master’s students, undergraduate juniors, and seniors who are on the master’s track (i.e. STEM MBA)

Details:

  • MainStreet Family Care uses innovation and operational efficiencies to make healthcare feasible in rural areas across the southeast. Have you looked at an industry as a whole, or even a facet of an industry, and thought, “This could be better?” We want to hear your ideas on what should change to make our industry more effective, efficient, or profitable.
  • You will be given 10 minutes to present your idea (+5 for Q&A) and an execution roadmap. Be sure to consider what barriers your idea may face, how you would surmount them, and the impact your change would have. You can use presentation materials of your choice (Powerpoint, handouts, etc.).
  • The title slide should include your name, what degree you are pursuing, and your expected graduation date.

Other details:

  • You can enter as a team of 2 people or as an individual. Both team members must participate in the presentation (if entering as a team).
  • If you are on a team, you can also sign up as an individual with a different/separate idea.
  • The deadline to sign up is 11:59 pm Tuesday, April 5th.
  • On Wednesday, April 6th, you will be sent a link for a pre-assessment for the competition. The assessment takes 30-45 minutes. Your assessment results do not influence your score for the presentation, but you must take the assessment to be eligible for the cash prize.

UA Business LEAD welcomes Brad Hayes and Leslie Watts from Progress Bank to share information with students about banking for your own business! Open to all students!

Jay Grinney

Former President and CEO, Encompass Healthcare (formerly HealthSouth)

Jay Grinney served as President and CEO of HealthSouth Corporation from 2004-to 2016, leading the successful turnaround of one of the nation’s largest healthcare companies after a high profile $2.8 billion fraud almost ended one of the nation’s fastest-growing public companies.

After taking the reins at HealthSouth, Grinney recruited a new management team and led a multi-year culture change and company turnaround that included restated financial statements, relisting on the New York Stock Exchange, and negotiated settlements with the Securities and Exchange Commission, U.S. Department of Justice, and class action litigants. After streamlining operations and strengthening internal controls, Grinney repositioned HealthSouth as a preeminent post-acute healthcare provider and grew the company by developing hospitals in new markets and acquiring competitors. These efforts included the $730 million purchase of Reliant Health Partners and expansion into home health and hospice services with the $750 million acquisition of Encompass Home Health and Hospice in 2014. In 2018, HealthSouth rebranded itself as Encompass Health and is today one of the largest post-acute providers in the U.S. with approximately 43,000 employees providing care to more than 364,000 patients annually.

Grinney currently serves as an industry advisor to KKR, a global investment firm, and is chairman of the board of Global Medical Response. He has served on the board of directors at Energen Corporation, Envision Healthcare, and Coca-Cola Bottling Company. He also has been involved with numerous community organizations, including board service at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, the Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham, the Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama, and the United Way of Central Alabama. Grinney earned his bachelor’s degree from St. Olaf College and a Master of Business Administration and Master of Healthcare Administration from Washington University.

He was inducted into the Alabama Business Hall of Fame in October 2021 in recognition of his contributions to free enterprise in the state of Alabama.

About the Lecture

The J. Craig Smith Endowed Chair of Business Integrity was established to support the study of ethics and develop projects to nurture social responsibility and reflective, thoughtful citizenship.

From 1951-to 1970, James Craig Smith was the President and CEO of Avondale Mills, a textile company founded in Birmingham by his grandfather, Braxton Bragg Comer, in 1895. Mr. Smith was considered an innovative leader in the textile industry – the recurring themes throughout his work at Avondale we honestly, integrity, and compassion.

J. Craig Smith’s legacy continued after his death. His daughter, Migion C. Smith, made a generous donation to The University of Alabama in 2005 to establish the J. Craig Smith Endowed Chair of Business Integrity and the Center for Ethics and
Social Responsibility.

Dr. William E. Jackson III, Professor of Management and Professor of Finance, currently holds the Smith Foundation Chair.

Lauren is VP of the Financial and Strategic Investors Group for Goldman Sachs. Come learn how she established herself as a young professional.

John is the founder and CEO of Providence Investments in Birmingham. John has an incredible story to share about the perseverance and resilience it took along the road to founding Providence.

How do employees form their perceptions of supportiveness and competence of their organization? These organizational perceptions could be based on their experiences with their supervisor with whom they spend the most time. This research question builds off work on the concept of the supervisor’s organizational embodiment (SOE), “the extent to which employees identify their supervisor with the organization” (Eisenberger et al., 2010, p. 1185). Currently, little is known about which organizational characteristics, as perceived by employees, influence the extent to which employees generalize experiences with the supervisor to management as a whole or the organization at large. This is an important research question because employees’ perceptions of organizational supportiveness and competence are known to be strong predictors of their attitudinal and behavioral outcomes (Kim et al., 2016; Kurtessis et al., 2017). This research has implications for perceptions of organization’s supportiveness (i.e., perceived organizational support, POS; Eisenberger et al., 1986) and competence (i.e., perceived organizational competence, POC; Kim et al., 2016), which reflect the employee’s view of theentire organization. To address this research question, I draw on the concept of group entitativity (Campbell, 1958; Lickel et al., 2000) to suggest that employees develop a perception of the degree to which their supervisors are similar or interdependent with the management as a whole and the degree to which employees perceive the supervisors and middle- and upper-management as a coherent unit (I refer this to as vertical entitativity). Furthermore, I hypothesize that employees’ perceptions of their supervisors’ relations-oriented, task-oriented and change-oriented behaviors are likely to generalize into their perceptions of the managements’ warmth and competence, influencing POS and POC and subsequent attitudes and behaviors toward the organization. I also hypothesized that this generalization will be especially strong when there is a high level of vertical entitativity. To examine these research hypotheses, I performed three studies. Study 1 (a scale development study) was performed to develop and validate scales for the predictors of vertical entitativity (surface-level, deep-level similarity, and interdependence between the supervisor and management) as well as validate the vertical entitativity scale. Study 1 results indicated that vertical entitativity is perceived by employees as a distinct construct from its relevant constructs (e.g., supervisor’s organizational embodiment, organizational identification). Based on the scales developed in Study 1, Study 2 (a multi-wave survey study) was performed to test a) the effects of the surface- and deep-level similarity and interdependence on vertical entitativity, b) the moderating effects of vertical entitativity on the relationship between the supervisor’s behaviors and employees’ perceptions of the management’s warmth and competence, c) the effects of the perceptions of the management’s warmth and competence on POS and POC, and d) the effects of POS and POC on affective organizational commitment, task performance, organizational citizenship behavior toward the organization, and turnover intentions. Study 2 results showed some support for the research hypotheses. Finally, a third Study (a supervisor-subordinate dyad survey study) was been performed, but the results cannot be interpreted as strong evidence because of the small sample size. The program of research has critical implications for how employees’ view of their organization develops as a result of their experiences with organizational agents (e.g., the supervisor) and how this view in turn influences employees’ attitudes and behaviors toward the organization.

An opportunity for CIMG members to showcase their work to investment professionals from all over the country.

Client meeting to close out Sprint 1 of UA/Protective project

Speaker:

  • Kevin W. Walker, Associate Professor and Head of Assessment and Government Information with the The University of Alabama Libraries

Please join us for a talk with John A. List, the Kenneth C. Griffin Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, Chief Economist at Walmart, and internationally best-selling co-author of The Why Axis, as he discusses his newest bestseller, The Voltage Effect, in the Auditorium of Hewson Hall on April 13, 2022.

Event Details

Date: April 13, 2022

Location: Hewson Hall: Room 002

Cost: Free (please register)

Reception & Book Signing: 5:00pm – 6:00pm

Book Discussion: 6:00pm

Here are some ideas from this New York Times Bestseller, The Voltage Effect:

“Be it a medical breakthrough, a policy initiative, a product innovation, or a social movement, translating an idea into widespread impact depends on one thing only: whether it can be replicated at scale.”

While “scale” has become a favored buzzword in the startup world, the concept extends beyond just accumulating more users or capturing more market share; rather than an art, scaling is a science. “Scalability is critical to everything from expanding a small business, to narrowing the national achievement gap, to delivering billions of doses of a vaccine, to making a new technology widely affordable—and much more.”

This is the foundational idea behind John A. List’s newly released book, The Voltage Effect which examines the science of scaling and how, “by understanding the science of scaling, we can drive change in our schools, workplaces, communities, and society at large.”

Speaker:

Andreas Georgiou, Former President of the Hellenic Statistical Authority

Speaker:

  • Tanta Myles, Director & Research Compliance Officer, Office for Research Compliance

Speakers:

  • Laura Starks, Charles E. and Sarah M. Seay Regents Chair in Finance and co-Executive Director of Social Innovation Initiative at McCombs College of Business, University of Texas

Speakers:

  • Dan Blakley, Associate Vice President for Economic and Business Engagement
  • Lauren Wilson, Assistant Vice President for Research Agreements and Commercialization
  • Colin Rich, Director of the Office for Research & Technology Agreements

The department of Information Systems, Statistics, and Management Science will host a short reception for its parents and honorees after its Honor’s Day ceremony on Friday, April 8th.

The Edward K. Aldag, Jr. Business Plan Competition has returned!

On March 28th, you can compete for up to $50,000 in prize money in the 2022 Edward K. Aldag Jr., Business Plan Competition. Students can prepare for the upcoming competition through various events and sessions hosted by the Alabama Entrepreneurship Institute designed to get you ready to pitch your plan.

The Summer Excellence in Research Program for Faculty (SEiR-F) promotes high-quality research efforts for Culverhouse faculty by providing funding for their summer research. Funds may be taken as a summer stipend and/or used to reduce the costs of the proposed research.

In order to be awarded a SEiR-F grant, the faculty must engage in research efforts that:

1. Have clear potential for high impact on business and/or society

2. Result in the submission of a manuscript to a high-quality, peer-reviewed academic journal and/or submission of a proposal for research funding to a recognized grant agency (federal, state, foundation, or private industry).

Each semester, the faculty members who received grants through the SEiR-F program will give presentations of their supported research.


About the session

Gender and Managerial Job Mobility: Career Prospects for Executives Displaced by Acquisitions

We investigate how men and women fare in the managerial labor market in the plausibly exogenous circumstance of their firms being acquired when most target-firm managers (about 90%) are displaced. These career disruptions result in a larger drop in rank and compensation for female managers, despite similar job-search attributes. Gender differences are mitigated when hiring firms have more women in upper-echelon positions. Rich managerial experience and external board service also reduce gender-related differences. Overall, results point to a (implicit) ‘gender-penalty’ in terms of managerial job mobility, but also indicate contexts in which penalty is alleviated, and even reversed.

The Summer Excellence in Research Program for Faculty (SEiR-F) promotes high-quality research efforts for Culverhouse faculty by providing funding for their summer research. Funds may be taken as a summer stipend and/or used to reduce the costs of the proposed research.

In order to be awarded a SEiR-F grant, the faculty must engage in research efforts that:

1. Have clear potential for high impact on business and/or society

2. Result in the submission of a manuscript to a high-quality, peer-reviewed academic journal and/or submission of a proposal for research funding to a recognized grant agency (federal, state, foundation, or private industry).

Each semester, the faculty members who received grants through the SEiR-F program will give presentations of their supported research.


About the session

Managing the Benefits and Risks of Services and Solutions Across Operational Processes in Manufacturing

Fueled by the increasing digitalization of manufacturing such as ‘industry 4.0’, suppliers of production, assembly, and logistics equipment increasingly shift to services and solution business models. While the positive aspects of such service infusion for providers have been well researched, it remains less clear what the benefits, as well as potential costs and risks, are for the manufacturer, that is the recipients of service-infused offerings, in particular in cases of higher-level services and solutions. This is problematic, as such a perspective may in fact best explain when service infusion is successful and when it is not. For example, manufacturing companies have voiced concerns about data confidentiality or security issues, increased dependence on the provider, loss of core capabilities, and uncertainty about the offered service quality. This research expects that the benefits and risks of the services and solutions are weighed differentially by manufacturers based on the characteristics of the operational processes these services and solutions relate to, an issue that was corroborated with participating manufacturing firms during the Thought Leadership Forum on Services and Solutions held at Culverhouse in 2019. The resulting process typology and its implications for the success and failure of service infusion are developed and investigated in collaboration with key players of the Alabama manufacturing industry.

The Summer Excellence in Research Program for Faculty (SEiR-F) promotes high-quality research efforts for Culverhouse faculty by providing funding for their summer research. Funds may be taken as a summer stipend and/or used to reduce the costs of the proposed research.

In order to be awarded a SEiR-F grant, the faculty must engage in research efforts that:

1. Have clear potential for high impact on business and/or society

2. Result in the submission of a manuscript to a high-quality, peer-reviewed academic journal and/or submission of a proposal for research funding to a recognized grant agency (federal, state, foundation, or private industry).

Each semester, the faculty members who received grants through the SEiR-F program will give presentations of their supported research.


About the session

Constructing Strong Networks Among Data Potentially Related to Sex Trafficking

Online advertisements for sexual services (sex ads) have been shown to facilitate sex trafficking and are commonly used by law enforcement as a source of data for investigations. However, in recent years, the number of sites hosting sex ads has grown. Also, an increase in the use of electronic payment means has led to a surge in the number of scam ads, which try to secure an electronic deposit from customers with no intention of service provision. The increased number of sites and the increased prevalence of scam ads have made it more difficult for law enforcement agencies to utilize ads for operations. This research focuses on developing analytical methods to identify groups of related ad data across sites, which may correspond to posts by an individual or criminal organization. Identifying such groups is a necessary first step for more advanced techniques aimed at understanding historical spatiotemporal patterns and predicting future target locations. We utilize a data set of text and image data collected from a set of popular websites hosting sex ads for this research. The developed approach is currently used by several task forces aimed at reducing sex trafficking activity in the U.S.

The Summer Excellence in Research Program for Faculty (SEiR-F) promotes high-quality research efforts for Culverhouse faculty by providing funding for their summer research. Funds may be taken as a summer stipend and/or used to reduce the costs of the proposed research.

In order to be awarded a SEiR-F grant, the faculty must engage in research efforts that:

1. Have clear potential for high impact on business and/or society

2. Result in the submission of a manuscript to a high-quality, peer-reviewed academic journal and/or submission of a proposal for research funding to a recognized grant agency (federal, state, foundation, or private industry).

Each semester, the faculty members who received grants through the SEiR-F program will give presentations of their supported research.


About the session

Impact of Ransomware on Healthcare Systems

Advances in information systems and cloud services have helped the healthcare industry to replace paper-based operations with electronic health record systems, which paved the way for easier and more accessible patient treatment. However, as technology evolves, the present-day healthcare industry has also become one of the main victims of cyberattacks called ransomware, which is malware that blocks a user’s access to infected devices. In particular, ransomware can severely disrupt patient care processes, posing nontrivial challenges for healthcare organizations. Utilizing a unique dataset that captures two ransomware attacks experienced by large hospitals in Alabama, we empirically examine the impact of ransomware on ambulance performance measures for patients involved in emergency incidents. Specifically, using a difference-in-differences regression design, we find that the ransomware security breach can significantly deteriorate ambulance performance measures in terms of transport, response, and on-scene times. However, we also find that the adverse effects of ransomware can substantially vary depending on the network of hospitals surrounding the breached hospital. Overall, our findings can inform policymakers or healthcare administrators on the adverse effects of ransomware and the role of decentralized hospital network in mitigating the impacts of such disruption.

The Summer Excellence in Research Program for Faculty (SEiR-F) promotes high-quality research efforts for Culverhouse faculty by providing funding for their summer research. Funds may be taken as a summer stipend and/or used to reduce the costs of the proposed research.

In order to be awarded a SEiR-F grant, the faculty must engage in research efforts that:

1. Have clear potential for high impact on business and/or society

2. Result in the submission of a manuscript to a high-quality, peer-reviewed academic journal and/or submission of a proposal for research funding to a recognized grant agency (federal, state, foundation, or private industry).

Each semester, the faculty members who received grants through the SEiR-F program will give presentations of their supported research.


About the session

Title and Abstract to be announced

The Summer Excellence in Research Program for Faculty (SEiR-F) promotes high-quality research efforts for Culverhouse faculty by providing funding for their summer research. Funds may be taken as a summer stipend and/or used to reduce the costs of the proposed research.

In order to be awarded a SEiR-F grant, the faculty must engage in research efforts that:

1. Have clear potential for high impact on business and/or society

2. Result in the submission of a manuscript to a high-quality, peer-reviewed academic journal and/or submission of a proposal for research funding to a recognized grant agency (federal, state, foundation, or private industry).

Each semester, the faculty members who received grants through the SEiR-F program will give presentations of their supported research.


About the session

Equitable Workload Allocation in Crowdsourced Last-mile Delivery

Efficient solutions are not necessarily equitable. Maximizing the sum of utilities of all the players might not result in a sufficiently fair distribution of resources, responsibilities, and benefits among different stakeholders. Fairness considerations that capture non-monetary performance requirements including equitable service provision to external stakeholders have a long history in routing applications in the public/nonprofit sector. In the private logistics service sector, however, such considerations are new and growing due to public or governmental pressures to improve equity in workload allocation among internal stakeholders, i.e., the drivers or other personnel providing the service. This is more crucial when employing crowdsourced workforce considering their inherent heterogeneity in terms of skills, availability, and productivity levels. This research aims at creating a decision-support tool to strike a balance between efficiency and equitable workload allocation goals that ensures acceptance of operational plans, maintains employee satisfaction, and reduces bottlenecks in resource utilization.

The Summer Excellence in Research Program for Faculty (SEiR-F) promotes high-quality research efforts for Culverhouse faculty by providing funding for their summer research. Funds may be taken as a summer stipend and/or used to reduce the costs of the proposed research.

In order to be awarded a SEiR-F grant, the faculty must engage in research efforts that:

1. Have clear potential for high impact on business and/or society

2. Result in the submission of a manuscript to a high-quality, peer-reviewed academic journal and/or submission of a proposal for research funding to a recognized grant agency (federal, state, foundation, or private industry).

Each semester, the faculty members who received grants through the SEiR-F program will give presentations of their supported research.


About the session

A general proposal for model-free difference-in-differences

We propose a general framework for model-free difference-in-differences analysis with confounders. Following the natural steps in practice, we start by searching for the preferred data setup, namely the simultaneous selection of confounders and potential data (outcome) transformations. We then offer a test for the credibility of identification assumptions. The treatment effects themselves are estimated in two steps: first, the heterogeneous effects stratified along the confounders, then second, the average treatment effect(s) for the population(s) of interest. We suggest bootstrap procedures to calculate the standard errors of these estimates, as well as for significance tests. We study the asymptotic statistics as well as the finite sample behavior (via simulations) of our tests and estimators. We address practical issues that arise such as bandwidth selection, incorporating sample weights, and dealing with discrete data in both the outcome variable and set of confounders. These are addressed in a setting whereby we look at the impact of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program on the human capital responses of non-citizen immigrants. We find that past (linear parametric) estimates are similar regarding (albeit underestimating) the positive impact of DACA on school attendance (for individuals aged 14-18) and the positive impact on high school completion, but at the same time, fail to identify the negative impact of DACA on school attendance for college-aged individuals.

The Summer Excellence in Research Program for Faculty (SEiR-F) promotes high-quality research efforts for Culverhouse faculty by providing funding for their summer research. Funds may be taken as a summer stipend and/or used to reduce the costs of the proposed research.

In order to be awarded a SEiR-F grant, the faculty must engage in research efforts that:

1. Have clear potential for high impact on business and/or society

2. Result in the submission of a manuscript to a high-quality, peer-reviewed academic journal and/or submission of a proposal for research funding to a recognized grant agency (federal, state, foundation, or private industry).

Each semester, the faculty members who received grants through the SEiR-F program will give presentations of their supported research.


About the session

Independent Boards and Workplace

Many countries require boards of directors in public firms to be majority independent. While the effects of board independence on shareholders are well studied, little is known about its impact on other stakeholders. In this paper, we fill this gap by studying its effect on important employee welfare: employee safety and health. Using the regulatory reform in the U.S. that increased board independence as an exogenous shock, we find that the workplace injury rate declines significantly in establishments of firms that were forced to increase board independence. The decline is more pronounced for firms with a less diligent board, in less competitive industries, with low ownership by long-term institutional investors, and having lower information costs. Safety improvements occur through at least two channels: an increase in safety inputs and the inclusion of safety metrics in CEO compensation. Overall, we find that board independence improves workplace safety. Our finding supports the view that maximizing shareholder value can take care of employees to the extent that doing so increases shareholder value.

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