Xu Niu, assistant professor of Finance and Business Law, recently had two new publications accepted. 

“From tension to trust: The role of corporate culture in easing labor relations,” published in The Journal of Financial Research, offers the first comprehensive empirical analysis of the influence of corporate culture on labor relations. The findings reveal that companies with robust cultures are less likely to face charges of unfair labor practices, receive higher employee satisfaction ratings, and are less prone to unionization efforts, suggesting that a strong corporate culture plays a pivotal role in fostering healthier, more cooperative labor relations.

Forthcoming in the Journal of Banking & Finance, Xu and co-authors examine whether employees trust founders more than professional managers in “Trust in Founders.” Their findings suggest that the predictability of corporate culture under founder management likely explains the lower incidences of unionization and unfair labor practice complaints. 

Raktim Pal, professor of CIS/BSAN and holder of the Kirby L. Cramer Chair in Business Administration and his collaborator, Nezih Altay of DePaul University in Chicago, won the "Best Contribution to Theory Award" at a recent conference hosted by the Northeast Decision Sciences Institute (NEDSI) in Hershey, Pa.

The award recognized Pal and Altay's paper titled "A Comparative Look into Coping and Other Organizational Theories to Explain Organizational Resilience."

Carl Larsson, associate professor of Finance, and Gizem Atav, associate professor of Marketing, had their paper, "How does stereotypic thinking affect the choice of a major for undergraduate business students?," published by the Journal of Education for Business.

In the paper, the co-authors identify common personality stereotypes and examine how such patterns of thinking can affect a student's choice of a major. They also document the gender differences that may arise in connection with stereotypic thinking and find that such differences are a possible source of bias in students' attitudes toward specific academic disciplines.

Associate Professor of Finance and Business Law Carl Ullrich had a paper, "The reliability pricing model and coal-fired generators in PJM," accepted for publication in Energy Economics.

In their paper Carl and his co-authors show that the effects of environmental regulations show up in market prices -- specifically, in the Reliability Pricing Model (RPM) of the Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland (PJM) wholesale electricity market.

Over the past 20 years, there has been a significant decline in the number of coal-fired generators in the United States. Lower natural gas prices, increased environmental regulations, and newer, more efficient generators have all been cited as reasons for this decline.