Research & Insights

When Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) installed intelligent deposit machines (IDMs) it did so to make banking more convenient and save time for customers. Cash deposited was counted automatically and instantly available for domestic or interna…

When Archegos, a low-profile family office, lost money on its holding of ViacomCBS shares in March 2021, it faced margin calls it could not meet, forcing it to unwind its positions. Banks with $50 billion credit exposure to the firm scrambled to s…

During the financial crisis of 2007-2008, Barclays manipulated LIBOR down by submitting artificially low rates to make itself look less risky. Traders also manipulated the rate for personal gain. This ultimately proved costly to Barclays’ sharehol…

When former Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf pushed his employees to sell eight Wells Fargo products per customer through cross-selling – he no doubt assumed it would be done with customers’ consent. Instead, under pressure to meet aggressive and unrea…

A friend, who is a board member of Emirates Group (Emirates), tells you about a heated exchange in her board room about Emirates planes depreciation. Your friend asks you for your advice as you have been nominated to the audit committee of a promi…

Matt Barrett, CEO of Barclays, joined the bank in 1999 and had been assigned a mission to transform the bank from “a big UK bank dabbling overseas to a global bank which happens to have a strong UK franchise”. The bank “lost its way”, after years …

Combining research that examines the effect of performance feedback and available slack on firms’ innovation efforts with research on board ethnic diversity, we theorize that board ethnic diversity alters how firms adjust their innovation efforts …

Do women directors make firms more risk-averse or more innovative? We theorize that boards with more women can make firms both, but which one depends on the firm’s attainment discrepancy. Specifically, when performance is poor relative to aspirati…

In contrast to previous research arguing that “talk is cheap,” we predict that disingenuous ethical communication from managers can be indicative of agency costs. We test this prediction by inductively creating a dictionary of cheap talk words usi…

Despite the growing importance of firm stakeholder strategy, key stakeholders continue to criticize firms for failing to keep their commitments. Here, we theorize that due to their long-term nature, consistency is particularly important for stakeh…

Despite the growing interest in understanding what affects a firm’s stakeholder strategy, key stakeholders continue to criticize firms for failing to keep their commitments. Indeed, while strategic consistency has been shown to a key driver of com…

Previous research has examined both the effect of demographic diversity, and performance relative to aspirations (PRA), on innovation intensity. We begin to integrate these two different lines of research by showing how demographically diverse boa…

While commentators have long decried managerial short-termism, no prior research has examined the deleterious effects of managerial short-termism on corporate social performance (CSP), nor how to ameliorate that negative effect. Moreover, due to t…

While agency theory assumes that shareholders need to align managers’ interests with their own through the use of monitoring and incentives, stewardship theory argues that managers can behave as stewards, whose motives are already aligned with the…