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.

Xu Niu, assistant professor of Finance and Business Law, had a paper,"The Evolution of Public Companies' Corporate Social Responsibility, accepted for publication. It will appear in an upcoming issue of the Quarterly Journal of Finance.

The paper examines the path along which companies' corporate social responsibility (CSR) progresses, dating to their debut as public entities. It finds that firms' average CSR score continues to climb the longer they remain publicly traded. Niu also found that the evidence to support this finding is more compelling the more profitable a company is, the greater its cash reserves, the higher its payout ratio, or the greater its number of free cash flows.

Professor of Economics and Academic Unit Head, Charlene Kalenkoski is the co-author of a paper titled "Teen Social Interactions and Well-being during the COVID-19 Pandemic." The paper has now been published online in Review of Economics of the Household.

In it, Kalenkoski and her co-author examine how the time teens spent alone and with parents, friends and others changed during the pandemic. Their research sheds light on how the social isolation of the pandemic disrupted what is for teens a crucial period of development. They also examine the changes that occurred in the time spent on various activities and where those activities took place.

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.

Angela M. Smith, associate professor of Economics, is this year's Madison Scholar. Angela describes her work as falling almost exclusively within the realm of experimental economics -- a field of inquiry that nevertheless affords her great flexibility in terms of the topics and situations which can be explored. She says that one of the most common themes of her experimentation consists of efforts to identify situations in which behavior deviates from theoretical predictions and to develop explanations for the observed deviations.