Is the U.S. in Recession? CBS Experts Weigh in on the Economic Outlook
New data has sparked a debate about the state of the economy. Here’s what some of our faculty members had to say.
New data has sparked a debate about the state of the economy. Here’s what some of our faculty members had to say.
There is perhaps no topic that is more important for the functioning of a market economy than competition policy. The theorems and analyses stating that market economies deliver benefits in the form of higher living standards and lower prices are all based on the assumption that there is effective competition in the market. At the same time when Adam Smith emphasised that competitive markets deliver enormous benefits, he also emphasised the tendency of firms to suppress competition.
The veteran economist and CBS professor joined Professor Brett House to explore how erratic policymaking, rising tariffs, and politicized institutions are shaking global confidence in the U.S. economy.
During a recent Distinguished Speakers Series event, the Senior Partner and Chair of North America at McKinsey shared leadership insights on AI business strategy, climate innovation, and the future of work.
Insights from Columbia Business School faculty explain how the president’s “Liberation Day” tariffs are fueling market volatility, undermining global economic stability, and impacting the Fed's ability to lower interest rates.
A Columbia Business School study shows that experiencing a recession in young adulthood leads to lasting support for wealth redistribution—but mostly for one’s own group.
A principal often needs to match agents to perform coordinated tasks, but agents can quit or slack off if they dislike their match. We study two prevalent approaches for matching within organizations: centralized assignment by firm leaders and self-organization through market-like mechanisms. We provide a formal model of the strengths and weaknesses of both methods under different settings, incentives, and production technologies. The model highlights trade-offs between match-specific productivity and job satisfaction.
We develop a financial-economic model for carbon pricing with an explicit representation of decision making under risk and uncertainty that is consistent with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth assessment report. We show that risk associated with high damages in the long term leads to stringent mitigation of carbon dioxide emissions in the near term, and find that this approach provides economic support for stringent warming targets across a variety of specifications.
Whether speaking, writing, or thinking, almost everything humans do involves language. But can the semantic structure behind how people express their ideas shed light on their future success? Natural language processing of over 40,000 college application essays finds that students whose writing covers more semantic ground, while moving more slowly (i.e. moving between more semantically similar ideas), end up doing better academically (i.e. have a higher college grade point average). These relationships hold controlling for dozens of other factors (e.g.
In this paper, we develop a computational measure of the firm-level rhetorical nationalism. We first review the literature and develop a four-dimensional theoretical framework of nationalism relevant to firms: national pride, anti-foreign, dominant agenda, and corporate role. We then use machine-learning-based text analysis of over 41,000 annual reports of Chinese public firms from 2000 to 2020 and identify a dictionary of words for each dimension.
Using publicly available data from 299 pre-registered replications from the social sciences, we find that the language used to describe a study can predict its replicability above and beyond a large set of controls related to the paper characteristics, study design and results, author information, and replication effort. To understand why, we analyze the textual differences between replicable and nonreplicable studies.