Seminarios de Negocios 2021

El propósito del seminario es convertirse en el lugar donde presentar nuevas investigaciones, así como también, en un foro para aumentar el conocimiento mutuo entre los miembros del profesorado. 

                  Tel.: 5169 7301

Martes 14 de diciembre

Christine Exley | Harvard Business School

Abstract
We run a series of experiments, involving over 4,000 online participants and over 10,000 school-aged youth. When individuals are asked to subjectively describe their performance on a male-typed task relating to math and science, we find a large gender gap in self-evaluations. This gap arises both when self-evaluations are provided to potential employers, and thus measure self-promotion, and when self-evaluations are not driven by incentives to promote. The gender gap in self-evaluations proves persistent and arises as early as the sixth grade. No gender gap arises, however, if individuals are instead asked about their performance on a more female-typed task.

Bio
Christine Exley earned her Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University, and is currently an Associate Professor in the Negotiation, Organizations & Markets Unit at Harvard Business School. Her research focuses on a range of topics related to behavioral and experimental economics: prosocial behavior, the drivers of gender gaps in the labor market, and the drivers of (in)equity.


Jueves 9 de diciembre

Juan Pablo Gorostiaga | Doctorando @ IESE 

Abstract
Consistent with banks internalizing industry spillovers arising from product market competition, I show lenders with multiple interests in the same industry extend loans with stricter covenants, reducing borrowers’ competition appetite and externalities on other loans in bank’s portfolio. Loans have stricter capital-based covenants which deter excessive risk-taking “ex-ante” by requiring more “skin-in-the-game“, are more (less) likely to impose capex (payout) restrictions, be intense in capital covenants and restrain more at mature industries. Exploiting bank mergers, I verify findings are robust to endogeneity concerns or alternative explanations. Altogether, I present an explicit channel through which lenders curb risky investment growth and thus maximize debt value at the industry level.

Bio
Juan Pablo Gorostiaga es estudiante doctoral en Finanzas por la escuela de negocios IESE (Barcelona, España). Actualmente investiga distintos temas relacionados a intermediación financiera y finanzas corporativas, incluidos el efecto de la concentración bancaria sobre la política corporativa de las empresas y el impacto de las garantías gubernamentales sobre los portafolios de préstamos de los bancos.
Licenciado en Economía por la Universidad de San Andrés. Magíster en Finanzas por la Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. Antes de sus estudios doctorales, Juan Pablo trabajó en equity research y riesgo bancario en S&P Global (CRISIL).


Jueves 11 de noviembre

Ernesto Dal Bó | UC, Berkeley

"From Rivals to Partners: The Alignment of Capital and State Coercion in the Rise of Modern Economic Growth."

Abstract
The conventional wisdom on the source of economic growth emphasizes inclusive institutions and technical change: constraints on state elites, which allow open access to political and economic power, as well as protect property rights and investment returns. Yet, in many contexts where economic growth has emerged, we see the partnership of private enterprise and powerful, coercive (often nondemocratic) states with the ability to expropriate: from Industrial Revolution Britain, to the post-WWII Asian economic tigers, to post-Mao China. Focusing on the emergence of modern growth in Britain, we propose a model of a partnership between coercive states and private actors: merchants cooperate with the state, for example by lending money, which helps the state develop coercive capacity, making the state internally and externally stronger. Merchants benefit from expanded trade, which is then taxed. We explore conditions under which good state behavior (non-expropriation of merchants, i.e., “good institutions”) is an equilibrium outcome, rather than a cause of increased economic activity, and the good outcome is driven by aligned incentives, not political inclusion. The source of aligned incentives is the joint surplus made possible when, in a mercantilist world, the state projects violence outward, to create opportunities for private profit. Using secondary evidence as well as original archival research, we illustrate the key conditions for that good equilibrium and show they were met in mercantilist England: a strong commercial orientation in economic activity and in foreign conflict, cooperation by commercial elites who lend to the government, a strong government involvement in conflict, and substantial fiscal returns from war-induced commerce.

Bio
Ernesto Dal Bó. Phillips Girgich Professor of Business (Haas School of Business). Profesor asociado (Travers Department of Political Science) en la Universidad de California, Berkeley. Licenciado en Economía por la Universidad de Buenos Aires. DPhil en Economía por la Universidad de Oxford. Su investigación se enmarca en el campo de la economía política, con intereses en temas relacionados con negocios, políticas públicas, corrupción e instituciones democráticas.


Martes 5 de octubre

Andrés Gago | UTDT

"La pesada herencia: el impacto de los cambios de gobierno en los planes de ajuste."

Abstract
This paper studies how new governments use previous administrations as scapegoats to implement fiscal adjustment plans. Highly indebted governments often need the intervention of third parties to re-finance their debt. However, these interventions often require the elaboration of a fiscal consolidation program. Ongoing incumbents are tacitly committed to previous fiscal decisions and therefore, may be reluctant to publicly accept the need for an adjustment. Conversely, by virtue of an agreement yielding third-party financing, new governments can carry out a back-loaded adjustment, which results in a smoother transition to fiscal stability. To test this hypothesis, we exploit a policy introduced by the Spanish national government offering indebted municipal governments the possibility of agreeing on an adjustment program and a smoother re-payment profile (vís-a-vís a front-loaded adjustment). Using a close election-regression discontinuity design, we show consistent evidence that ongoing incumbent governments are roughly 30% less likely to agree on a fiscal consolidation program with the national authorities. We explain this difference in terms of electoral incentives and different stigma associated with presenting an adjustment plan for ongoing incumbents and newcomers. We provide evidence on the consequences of such decisions.

Bio
Andrés Gago es profesor investigador asistente en la Escuela de Negocios de la Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. Licenciado en Economía por la UAM, es Ph.D. en Economía por el CEMFI. Su investigación se enmarca en el campo de la economía aplicada, con intereses en la economía experimental y del comportamiento, así como en temas de economía pública.


Jueves 17 de agosto

Emmanuel Iarussi | CONICET

"Herramientas de IA para la manipulación de contenido 2D y 3D."

Abstract
Las herramientas de Inteligencia Artificial (IA), en particular las técnicas de deep learning, están transformando la forma en la que creamos, organizamos, e interpretamos la información. En el campo de las imágenes, lo que originalmente comenzó como una alternativa poderosa para la clasificación y detección de objetos en fotografías, se ha convertido hoy en el estado del arte para tareas de mayor complejidad como la manipulación y síntesis de datos en dos y tres dimensiones. En esta presentación haremos un recorrido por una serie de trabajos de investigación centrados en la aplicación de modelos de redes convolucionales profundas para la generación de imágenes y contenido tridimensional. El foco estará puesto en aplicaciones que van desde la biomedicina, hasta novedosas herramientas de CAD utilizadas en el diseño industrial de productos.

Bio
Emmanuel Iarussi es investigador del CONICET en el área de Computación Gráfica. Es ingeniero en Sistemas por la UNICEN y doctor en Ciencias de la Computación por la Université Nice Sophia Antipolis y el INRIA en Francia. Realizó sus estudios posdoctorales en el Institute of Science and Technology, Austria, donde trabajó en el desarrollo de técnicas de modelado interactivo y fabricación digital. Sus trabajos de investigación hacen foco en el desarrollo de herramientas de IA para la generación y edición interactiva de imágenes y modelos tridimensionales.


Jueves 12 de agosto

Viviana Siless | Postdoc @ Harvard Medical School

"Clustering jerárquico anatómico de conexiones cerebrales (tractografía) de imágenes de difusión de resonancia magnética."

Abstract
Las imágenes de difusión de resonancia magnética producen millones de conexiones cerebrales (tractos) que necesitan ser agrupados para un análisis eficiente. Los neuroanatomistas definen las estructuras cerebrales de la materia blanca manualmente basándose en regiones anatómicas por las que la conexión atraviesa, o es próxima, y no usando coordenadas espaciales.
Las técnicas convencionales de clustering agrupan tractos basados en cercanía espacial (en términos Euclidianos), y estos métodos fallan al discriminar estructuras similares y cercanas que conectan distintas regiones corticales. Desarrollamos AnatomiCuts, un método de clustering jerárquico no supervisado para agrupar tractografías cerebrales, en base a estructuras anatómicas próximas de cada tracto. Nuestra medida de similitud computa la probabilidad conjunta de ser vecino de una misma estructura cortical o subcortical para una misma dirección. Incorporamos esta métrica en un clustering jerárquico espectral, Normalized Cuts, y la comparamos con una métrica en el espacio Euclidiano usando datos de adultos sanos del Human Connectome Project. Nuestra métrica mejora un 20% el solapamiento de los clusters con tractos manualmente etiquetados. En un trabajo posterior utilizamos la misma métrica para identificar correspondencias de clusters entre distintos sujetos y entre distintos hemisferios del mismo sujeto para analizar asimetrías. Nuestra métrica anatómica no requiere una registración previa a un espacio común, con lo cual puede ser utilizada en poblaciones de gran variabilidad considerando su desarrollo cerebral, envejecimiento o desórdenes neurológicos.

Bio
Viviana Siless es Lic. en Ciencias de la Computación, FCEyN, UBA. Realizó su doctorado en la Universidad Paris-Sud XI, INRIA, Commissariat à l’énergie atomique (CEA) y un postdoctorado en el Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School.
Sus intereses de investigación se centran en construir herramientas para mejorar el diagnóstico de enfermedades neurológicas usando imágenes de resonancia magnética cerebrales. Su trabajo en neurociencia computacional se enfocó en métodos de clustering jerárquico no supervisados, métodos de registración no-lineal difeomórfico de imágenes y tractografía, correspondencia de grafos y construcción de superficies cerebrales 3D. Su trabajo fue publicado y presentado en revistas y conferencias internacionales como Neuroimage, Neuron, MRI, Nature, MICCAI, ISMRM, entre otras.


Jueves 8 de julio

Diego Finchelstein | UdeSA

"A Comparative Analysis of the Internationalization of Sub-National and Central State-Owned Enterprises: Shreds of evidence from Latin America."

Abstract
Most of the research conducted to understand state-owned enterprises’ internationalization is geographically focused on Asia and, on firms owned by the central government. In this exploratory multiple case study, we compare the foreign expansion of two SOEs owned by subnational governments with two SOEs owned by central governments in Latin America. The results of this comparison provide a contextualized answer to the question, what are the differences in the internationalization of subnationally owned SOEs compared to central SOEs? We find that the speed, sequence, diversification, and logic of these two types of SOEs’ internationalization differ. Subnationally owned SOEs have a gradual expansion in a diverse set of industries following market rules. Conversely, the central government’s SOEs are more specialized and take more drastic steps in their internationalization, which relates to non-market factors.

Bio
Diego Finchelstein es profesor de la Escuela de Negocios de la Universidad de San Andrés e Investigador del CONICET. Sus áreas de interés e investigación se vinculan a la internacionalización de empresas de países emergentes, gobernanza corporativa, innovación y estrategia de grandes grupos económicos en la Argentina. El resultado de sus investigaciones ha sido publicado en capítulos de libro y diversos journals nacionales e internacionales como el Journal of World Business, Multinational Business Review, Academy of International Business Insights y Desarrollo Económico.


Jueves 17 de junio

Joaquín Navajas | UTDT

Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has raised complex moral dilemmas that have been the subject of extensive public debate. In this paper, we study the reasoning mechanisms used by individuals when they judge the acceptability of a set of controversial actions: relaxing data privacy standards to allow public control of the pandemic, forbidding public gatherings, denouncing a friend who broke COVID-19 protocols, prioritizing younger over older patients when medical resources are scarce, and reducing animal rights to accelerate vaccine development. We report data from a large-scale study (Study 1, N=15,420) across 10 Latin American countries where the impact of the pandemic has been highly dissimilar. A formal analysis of the intrinsic correlations between responses to different dilemmas suggests that people consistently used two reasoning processes: one that maximizes human life expectancy and one that cares about the health of all sentient lives in an equitable manner. The extent to which people employ these considerations varies across individuals but can be robustly predicted by a standardized moral reasoning scale. These results were replicated in a second independent pre-registered study using a representative sample of the United States (Study 2, N=1,300). Based on the large dataset obtained in Study 1, we show how people’s reliance on these two arguments correlates with personality and contextual variables. Altogether, these findings elucidate the reasoning processes underlying moral reactions to the COVID-19 crisis.

Bio
Joaquín Navajas es director del Laboratorio de Neurociencia y profesor investigador asistente en la Escuela de Negocios de la Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. Licenciado en Ciencias Físicas de la Universidad de Buenos Aires y Ph.D. en Neurociencia de la Universidad de Leicester del Reino Unido. Además, fue investigador postdoctoral en University College London y es, actualmente, investigador del CONICET. Sus líneas de investigación se centran en entender los sesgos en la toma de decisiones, el comportamiento de equipos de trabajo, las decisiones morales y los procesos cognitivos vinculados a la polarización política.


Jueves 6 de mayo

Fei Gao | Bentley University

"Metaphoric Transfer Effect of “Fullness” Reduces Portion Size Choice."

Abstract
Body Mass Indices and obesity rates are increasing worldwide, and one way to reduce caloric intake is to reduce portion size choice. In this research, the authors develop a behavioral intervention aimed at reducing subjective perceptions of hunger (satiation) and portion size choices based on conceptual metaphor theory. In eight experiments, the authors show that the sequential presentation of two food images that move from partial to whole reduces hunger perceptions and portion size choice compared to all other possible sequences. This effect occurs because the partial-to-whole sequence activates the metaphorical concept of filling up to fullness, which transfers to judgments of appetitive fullness (metaphor transfer effect). The effects occur even when the sequential images are unrelated to food, and are robust across languages, age groups, food type, and choice contexts. The effect of image sequence on both hunger perceptions and portion size choice is mediated by the accessibility of the fullness concept, and is attenuated when visualization of the dynamic sequence (partial to whole) is inhibited and when a concrete construal level is primed. The intervention is conducive to implementation in online food-ordering contexts and applicable for both commercial and non-commercial situations (e.g., diet apps, school cafeteria apps).

Bio
Fei Gao is an Assistant Professor at Bentley University. He received his PhD in Marketing at HEC Paris. His research interests focus on how to motivate consumers to make better choices that increase their well-being and communal social welfare in the context of digital marketing. One stream of his research focuses on developing digital marketing “nudges” to increase consumers’ well-being via influencing their judgments and choices. Another stream of his research explores how various aspects of campaigns influence consumers’ prosocial behaviors in online settings such as charitable crowdfunding.


Jueves 22 de abril

Ludovica Cesareo | Lehigh University

"From Conspicuous to Conscientious: When and Why Sustainable Luxury Signals Status."

Abstract
Decades of research on luxury (based on logics of excess, extravagance, and conspicuousness) and sustainability (based on logics of paucity, conservation, and self-restraint) suggest that sustainable luxury is an oxymoron. Yet, luxury brand managers are increasingly making the effortful and expensive commitments to sustainability initiatives. To date, no systematic research articulates when, and why, an individual luxury consumer will prefer sustainable luxury when traditional luxury is also on offer. Across eight studies (in the lab and in the field) that use different luxury product and service brands, we find that consumers who are high in self-accountability are drawn to, prefer, and choose sustainable, over traditional, luxury. We show that Millennial/Gen Z consumers tend to be higher in self-accountability relative to older generations. Since sustainable luxury reflects their values, they are more willing to purchase sustainable luxury and view sustainable luxury brands as symbols of status amongst their peer groups. Consequently, these consumers are also more likely to signal their sustainable luxury purchases in online (i.e. post on social media) and offline channels (i.e., share positive word-of-mouth). We discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of our novel finding that for high-self-accountability consumers (e.g. Millennial/Gen Z) sustainable luxury is both compatible and desirable, and outline directions for future research.

Bio
Ludovica Cesareo is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Lehigh University. Prior to joining Lehigh, she was a post-doctoral research fellow in marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Ludovica’s research interests include the psychological underpinnings of luxury and counterfeit luxury consumption, the role of affect in consumer behavior, and moral decision-making.
Ludovica received her Ph.D from Sapienza University of Rome (Italy). During the last year of her Ph.D, she was a visiting scholar at Villanova School of Business (PA, USA).


Viernes 16 de abril

Rocío Madera | Southern Methodist University

"Urban Welfare: Tourism in Barcelona."

Abstract
Is tourism good for locals? We embed a Ricardo-Viner framework into a rich urban geography and show that the welfare impact of shocks depends only on (1) the spatial patterns of consumption and income; and (2) the price and wage effects of the shock throughout the city. We use spatially disaggregated consumption and income data to estimate the price and wage effects of Barcelona’s tourist boom. We identify these effects using an identification strategy based on monthly variation in the aggregate composition of tourists’ origin. We find that, on average, local workers suffer slightly from tourism, but these average effects mask substantial heterogeneity across space, ranging from a -19 to a +4 percent welfare change between low and high tourist seasons. The inner city residents bear the largest price changes but enjoy substantial income gains, whereas peripheric neighborhoods suffer lower but sizable price changes with none to moderate income benefits.

Bio
Dr. Rocio Madera ‘s research interests lie at the intersection of Macroeconomics, Consumption, and Labor Economics. She combines quantitative models with micro-data to measure the sources of income volatility, as well as its consequences for the welfare of households and individuals. As part of this agenda, she has studied the ability of government policy to smooth these fluctuations in recessions, households’ durable and non-durable consumption decisions after large shocks, and, more recently, how the spatial distribution of consumption determines the propagation of income shocks within a city.


Jueves 18 de marzo

Mansur Khamitov | Indiana University

"Helping Customers Make Sense of their Service Failures: The Novel Attenuation Effect of Answering Multiple Surveys on Customer Revenge and Forgiveness."

Abstract
This research shows that different organizations (firms, consumer agencies) can reduce customers’ desire for revenge after major service failures by sending them a series of surveys. We show that the attenuation effect of completing multiple surveys helps customers make sense of the underlying failure. This sensemaking process, in turn, helps reduce customers’ transgression-related motivations (i.e., avoidance, revenge and lack of reconciliation). By using three longitudinal experiments—lasting between one and two month(s) each—we make the following contributions. First, we show that an attenuation effect is caused by answering a series of surveys over time, rather than by the passing of time on its own. This effect is robust regardless of the survey sender (firm vs. third-party), the presence of a recovery, and the type of studies (field vs. lab-style). Second, we identify a relevant boundary condition: the attenuation process is less pronounced as the quality of the prior relationship increases. Finally, we document the process at play by showing the mediation role of personal sensemaking in the attenuation effect. We conclude by highlighting that the suggested attenuation effect is as important as the effect of receiving a recovery, and that managers can simultaneously use both tactics to appease customers.

Bio
Dr. Mansur Khamitov is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University and a Vice-Chair of American Marketing Association’s CBSIG. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Ivey Business School, University of Western Ontario (Canada).
His research stream focuses on consumer information processing particularly in relation to branding (brand transgressions, brand relationships, brand loyalty) and financial decision-making (money, saving, gambling). His works have been published in the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Consumer Psychology, the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Harvard Business Review, among others.