Research Interests: Stakeholder management; Organizational impression; Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG); Strategic communication; Non-market strategy
Working Papers
Word-Deed Alignment and Firm Value: Evidence From Firms' Diversity Efforts
Companies often make public claims about diversity, but we rarely get to see how those claims compare to their actual workforce data. I study this gap using a natural experiment: new federal rules that forced many public companies to disclose detailed workforce diversity data for the first time. Using an event study of 346 public firms, I find that companies whose prior diversity claims matched their revealed workforce data saw positive stock returns, while companies whose claims didn't match saw negative returns. Firms that hadn't made diversity claims in the first place saw no effect either way. This "word-deed alignment" premium was strongest for firms that investors previously knew little about, suggesting that consistency between what companies say and what they do serves as a valuable trust signal, especially when other information is scarce.
Job-market paper; Under review at Organization Science
Board Diversity and Nonprofit Fundraising (with Daniel Elfenbein and Ming zhu Wang)
Do more diverse nonprofit boards raise more money? We study this using IRS tax filings from over a decade of U.S. nonprofits (2010-2024), measuring board diversity in three ways: how close boards are to gender parity, how racially and ethnically diverse they are, and how well a board's racial makeup matches its local community. Comparing changes within the same nonprofits over time, we find that increases in board gender parity and racial diversity are strongly linked to increases in fundraising. This relationship is stronger for larger nonprofits and in states that are wealthier and more politically liberal, and weaker in states with a larger White population share. We also examine how much of this relationship might be explained by other factors, like whether more successful nonprofits simply tend to attract more diverse boards in the first place, rather than diversity causing the fundraising gains.
Preparing for submission to Administrative Science Quarterly
How Should Firms Communicate ESG Motives? Evidence From a Job Choice Experiment
Companies talk about their ESG efforts differently — some frame it as "doing the right thing," others as "good for business," some do both, and some say nothing at all. I study how these different framings affect job seekers using an experiment that measures how much pay people are willing to trade off to work for a company based on how it talks about its ESG efforts. I find that framing ESG as purely values-driven makes a company more attractive to job seekers, while framing it as purely profit-driven makes it less attractive. Combining both framings performs no better than saying nothing at all on average. However, highly educated workers stand out as the exception, responding more positively to the combined framing than to no framing at all. Overall, how a company explains its ESG motives is a real strategic choice with measurable effects on its ability to attract talent.