CSB Announces 2018 Faculty Research Grants Awardees

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NYU Stern’s Center for Sustainable Business (CSB) envisions a better world through better business. This year CSB issued a research grant program to complement CSB research and to expand beyond our Center-driven projects, while still adhering to our core mission. CSB offers faculty and Ph.D. research grants related to our mission: to ensure current and future business leaders develop the knowledge and skills to embed sustainability in core business strategy so they can reduce risk; create competitive advantage; develop innovative services, products, and processes; while building value for society and protecting the planet. To learn more about the CSB Research Grant program, click here. Next year’s deadline is January 31, 2019.  We are pleased to announce the following awardees: 
  • Consumer Price Elasticity of Morality, Alixandra Barasch and Raluca Ursu, Assistant Professors, Marketing.
  • Emission abatement vs. lobbying in EU firms, Sinziana Dorobantu, Assistant Professor, Management.
  • Sustainability practices and employee outcomes, Frances Milliken, Professor, Management and Kelly E. See School of Business University of Colorado Denver. 
  • Does investor demand for sustainability drive mutual fund preference for ESG Stocks?, Heebum Lee, Ph.D. Student, Finance. 
Please find the descriptions for the proposals below:

Consumer Price Elasticity of Morality, Alixandra Barasch and Raluca Ursu, Marketing, Assistant Professors.
The authors seek to study how ethical information about companies affects consumers’ purchase and re-purchase decisions. This is an experimental study partnering with a startup called Impakt, which completed a successful Kickstarter campaign with the support of 602 backers in November 2017. Funds will be used to conduct a series of planned studies in laboratory and field settings such as manipulating key aspects of the Impakt platform, to understand how these aspects impact consumer search and purchase behaviors for sustainable products.
 
Emission abatement vs. lobbying in EU firms, Sinziana Dorobantu, Assistant Professor, Management. 
This project aims to investigate how firms respond to changes in environmental regulations. Do they invest in emissions abatement, or do they lobby and use their political connections to increase their emissions allocations? The authors will study the choice between these different strategies and whether it depends on the national institutional context by looking at the strategic responses of European firms to the EU Emissions Trading System. To inform their research, the authors will visit and conduct interviews with 12-15 firms in four European countries (Austria, Germany, Poland and Romania) to get a better understanding of the tradeoffs firms face when deciding how much to focus on emissions reduction and how much on lobbying. The interviews will complement their core research, which will rely on econometric analysis.
 
Sustainability practices and employee outcomes, Frances Milliken, Professor, Management and Kelly E. See School of Business University of Colorado Denver.
This research aims to fill a gap in the literature by exploring how an organization’s sustainability practices directly affect employees (e.g., their involvement, their intentions to stay with their current employer, and their potential productivity). We hypothesize that more embedded sustainability practices may activate a virtuous cycle of inter-connected relational and communication pathways that change the flows of information in organizational hierarchies. The research design and methodology involves a multi-step process. First, we plan to conduct interviews of sustainability managers and potentially of employees within the same organizations. A second part of the research will involve anonymously surveying employees in order to assess impacts of an organization’s sustainability practices on employees focusing on procedural justice (i.e., opportunities for employees to be involved in decisions that affect them), employee voice (i.e., willingness to speak up to one’s manager with problems and concerns), and managerial advice taking (i.e., when employees speak up, do higher ups listen and incorporate their views).

Does investor demand for sustainability drive mutual fund preference for ESG Stocks?, Heebum Lee, Ph.D. Student, Finance. 
Investor demand for sustainability translates into capital allocation to sustainable firms insofar as investors are able to discriminate between truly sustainable funds vs. sustainability as a catering scheme. Our project relates fund flows to sustainability characteristics of the fund, be they portfolio-based or prospectus-based, to tease out whether investors  are demanding sustainability from mutual funds and whether this is indeed leading to sustainable investment by mutual funds