Doctoral Research in Motion Notes

For many entrepreneurs, their business is who they are. In “I am and I am not: Self-verification in the face of role-based image discrepancies,” Bina explores how venture founders view the “entrepreneur” role as part of their identity, as well as when and how they choose to claim this aspect of their identity in social interactions. Bina’s work uses the grounded theory approach, which relies on data collected through semi-structured interviews with research participants and delves deeper into what drives founder behavior. Bina and her co-authors are preparing the manuscript for submission to the Administrative Science Quarterly.

Brittany’s research, entitled “Ultra-high Dimensional Semiparametric Longitudinal Data Analysis,” intends to extract meaningful patterns and relationships from complex longitudinal data in fields such as information systems and public health. Green’s research considers important variables for prediction from high-dimensional big data (e.g., thousands of variables with a small number of important ones). She also considers data in which participants or processes have measurements taken multiple times and ways in which the relationship between the predictor variables and the response variable may be nonlinear in nature. She presents an algorithm to simultaneously handle high dimensionality, dependent data over time and flexibility to capture nonlinearity. Green’s work is in revision at Biometrics, one of the top journals in statistics and analytics.

In “Rainy Day Liquidity,” Xin explores asset pricing for institutional investor trading. Xin’s theoretical model supports his hypothesis that insurance firms may provide liquidity on “rainy days,” or crisis periods, because their cash flow is largely independent of capital market conditions. His empirical analyses revealed that cash flow positions and investment horizons strongly influence insurers’ purchase of low-rating bonds, and that insurers increased their purchase of low-rating bonds during the 2008 financial crisis and after the adoption of the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010. The paper has been accepted by conferences like the Financial Management Association (FMA), and will be submitted to a journal later this year.

David’s research, “Operational Justice: Balancing Equity and Equality in Workforce-Allocation Decisions,” concentrates on accommodating human-induced variability in healthcare systems. His dissertation argues how proactive activation of full-capacity protocols can mitigate crowding in emergency departments, thereby improving patients’ timely access to care. Through a joint-research assistantship with UC’s department of emergency medicine, he developed and implemented an optimization model to allocate physician clinical time across multiple locations in a fair and transparent manner. The resulting manuscript is currently under review at Management Science.