Dr. Xu Niu, Assistant Professor of Finance, had a paper featured on The CLS Blue Sky Blog, Columbia Law School’s blog on corporations and the capital markets. His co-authored paper, “Hedge Fund Activism and Value Creation in Family Firms,” serves as the basis for the blog post and looks at what happens when activist hedge funds take an interest in family-controlled companies. 

The paper was published in Social Science Research Network (SSRN) and shows that investors respond more positively to activist campaigns involving family firms, suggesting they see more potential for improvement. The analysis also finds that these interventions lead to stronger gains in areas like operating performance, takeover activity and transparency.

Assistant Professors Ali Anwar and Carissa Kim of the Department of Marketing, and a co-author from U. of Alabama, had their article: “Leveraging coping flexibility to ease emotional exhaustion in salespeople” published in the Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management.

This study explores how coping flexibility, the ability to adapt coping strategies to changing demands, impacts sales professionals’ emotional exhaustion and performance. Using data from 241 salespeople across multiple sectors, findings show that, on average, greater coping flexibility is linked to lower emotional exhaustion and better performance. However, short-term increases in coping flexibility can temporarily raise emotional exhaustion, even though overall higher levels reduce it over time. These results highlight the complex relationship between coping behaviors and workplace conditions, offering insights for managers on supporting salesperson well-being and performance.

Assistant Professor of Economics, Sayahnika Basu, had her article, “Environmental regulation, residential sorting, and pollution exposure among senior Americans” published in the Journal of Environment Economics and Management.

Sayahnika and co-authors explored the impact of the U.S. Superfund program and Clean Air Act on exposure to fine particulate air pollution and hazardous waste among Americans aged 65 and older during the 2000s. Their study leverages quasi-random elements in how these programs enforce rules and disseminate information to estimate their causal effects on both migration and pollution exposure. The findings reveal a significant decline in average pollution exposure for seniors.

Josh Bacon, academic advisor in the Advising and Support Center, recently published a chapter on restorative self-care in the 2024 edition of “Restorative Justice and Practice in US Education.”

Josh, a former Dean of Students at JMU, outlines seven restorative principles that helped college students overcome personal struggles. The focus isn’t on the nature of the struggle, but on how students make meaning from it. Through restorative journaling, mentoring and group work, students learn to share their authentic selves, which helps reshape their internal narratives and self-talk. This process builds resilience, GRIT, and self-care habits, enabling them to better manage anxiety and face future challenges.

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."