PhD students on the academic job market
The following Cambridge Judge Business School PhD students are currently seeking academic positions. Similar recent PhD graduates have taken postdoctoral or faculty positions at leading research institutions such as Erasmus, IESE Business School, London Business School, Warwick Business School, Imperial College Business School, University College London and INSEAD Asia.
Nareuporn Piyasinchai
Research interests
Sustainability; ESG social evaluations; social entrepreneurship; nonmarket strategy.
Publications
Piyasinchai, N. (2021) “Transitioning toward sustainability: how corporate sustainability strategies affect stakeholders’ actions.” (Doctoral thesis) (DOI: 10.17863/CAM.83222)
Piyasinchai, N. (2021) “Corporate sustainability reputation matters most during crises.” Network for Business Sustainability, 22 April 2021
Piyasinchai, N., Grimes, M. and Loch, C. (2021) “How the pursuit of sustainability poses tradeoffs between legitimacy and reputational spillovers.” In: Academy of Management Proceedings, 2021(1) (DOI: 10.5465/AMBPP.2021.16)
Piyasinchai, N. and Grimes, M. (2021) “Reputational imprints: how public criticism during global crises affects sustainability-related innovation.” In: Academy of Management Proceedings, 2021(1) (DOI: 10.5465/AMBPP.2021.13784abstract)
Job market paper
“Falling out of line: when firms benefit from divergent social evaluation ratings.”
Although most research argues that firms benefit from receiving a high social evaluation rating, recent studies have found surprising benefits of being rated in the middle or even toward the lower end of an industry, suggesting other mechanisms are at play. We address this puzzle by examining when firms benefit from being rated high, low, and in the middle compared to their industry peers on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) ratings. Drawing on theory of firm classification, we argue that as new social evaluations are promoted, rating metric uncertainty encourages reliance on prototype- rather than goal-based assessments. Specifically, in the context of such uncertainty, investors tend to reward firms that are most prototypical – those that are rated in line with their industry’s average ESG rating. While firms whose ratings diverge from industry norms are penalised for falling out of line, salient industry legitimacy threats reverse the effect, such that falling out of line (high and low ratings) becomes beneficial. Moreover, we show that while ratings homogeneity within an industry amplifies these effects associated with falling out of line, lower ratings uncertainty encourages investors to shift from prototype- to goal-based evaluation and fine-grained scrutiny of firms. In such cases, investors only reward firms whose ESG ratings positively diverge from the industry average. Our findings contribute to the literature on social evaluation ratings and ongoing theoretical debates regarding prototype- versus goal-based classification of firms.
Yuxia (Sarine) Zou
Research interests
Corporate social responsibility; sustainable and responsible investment; corporate governance; incentive contracts; capital markets; natural language processing.
Job market paper
“Why do investment companies abandon sustainability?”
This study investigates factors that explain why and when investment companies abandon their public commitment to sustainable investment. I employ proprietary records from the United Nations-supported Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) to examine an international sample of mutual fund investment companies that delisted from PRI during 2006–2021 but continued to operate. I find that companies delist earlier when they experience deterioration in risk-adjusted returns, fund flows, and portfolio sustainability scores, especially after they are mandated to provide standardised sustainability disclosures. Companies also delist earlier when they have fewer internal resources or less external support for sustainable investment. Further, I manually collect information from companies’ standardised sustainability disclosures and document that companies with weaker management control systems for sustainable investment delist earlier. Finally, I find that companies recover investment returns after delisting from PRI and do not lose fund flows.