Current Projects

Listed below are the titles and brief descriptions of a number of my current research projects. These papers are either under review or in the process of being revised. If you are interested in knowing more about any of these papers, please feel free to email me at akaul@umn.edu

Gotta serve somebody: The elitist nature of U.S. corporate philanthropy

(with Jiao Luo, University of Minnesota, and Haram Seo, Texas A&M)

Is corporate philanthropy responsive to the needs of society? In this abductive study, we use detailed grant-level data on corporate giving by the foundations of 2,958 firms from 2005 to 2018 in the United States to examine where corporate donations go. We develop a framework of four potential roles for corporate giving in society—progressive, exclusive, altruistic, and elitist—based on whether or not corporate giving is responsive to socio-economic needs across and within communities. We find that corporate philanthropy is primarily elitist: it goes disproportionately to prosperous urban communities (even after accounting for the underlying distribution of potential recipients) and seems largely unresponsive to changing needs within communities. We further explore whether this result varies across firms, showing that it holds across firms of different performance level, ownership, and philanthropic focus. We do, however, find that firms that prioritize a cause area are responsive to changing community needs related to that cause. We also find that the responsiveness of such firms comes from unique and non-repeat donations, suggesting that attention to a cause helps firms move past institutional pressures and inertia in their philanthropic efforts.

Strategic search: Organizational adaptation with competitive positioning

(with Gianluigi Giustiziero, Frankfurt School and Dirk Martignoni, USI)

In this paper, we study how demand heterogeneity shapes organizational adaptation in complex environments. To do so, we combine a standard NK simulation with a differentiated duopoly competition game to model firms simultaneously engaging in an internal search for superior technical proficiency and an external search for horizontally differentiated competitive positions. We show that such ‘strategic search’ limits innovation in low complexity environments, as firms sacrifice technical proficiency in order to differentiate from each other, but boosts it in high complexity environments. We also show how these findings are moderated by the extent of demand heterogeneity, as well as asymmetric exposure to competition among firms. Our study integrates research on competitive positioning and organizational adaptation, contributing insights to organizational shaping, innovation, and competitive advantage 

Limits to stakeholder management

(with Kate Odziemkowska, University of Toronto & Jiao Luo, University of Minnesota)

Stakeholder theorists contend that firms can boost their value creation by enfranchising key stakeholders, implicitly assuming that stakeholders have agency, i.e., they can recognize and reciprocate the value being shared with them. In this paper, we interrogate that assumption, arguing that stakeholders are often heedless, powerless, or absent, and laying out the conditions under which firms’ attempts to enfranchise stakeholders may go unrewarded—conditions we collectively define as missing agent problems. Profit-maximizing firms will avoid enfranchising stakeholders who lack agency, and firms that do enfranchise such stakeholders are likely to see their profits decline. Our study thus highlights an important but largely unexamined boundary condition of stakeholder theory, while offering a fresh perspective on the social impact of stakeholder management.

From social responsibility to social impact: An analytical approach

(with Jiao Luo, University of Minnesota, & Jasjit Singh, INSEAD)

While corporate social responsibility (CSR) has received increasing attention in the management literature, the focus of most prior work has been on the financial implications of CSR activities for firms, rather than on their consequences for social welfare. We contend that this relative neglect stems from the lack of a conceptual framework to evaluate social impact, and offer such a framework in this study. Specifically, we identify four criteria that an activity must meet in order to have an unambiguously positive effect on social welfare: it must be substantive, meaning that it delivers meaningful benefits to those it claims to serve; it must be unequivocal, meaning that these benefits must not be offset by harmful actions by the firm elsewhere; it must be inclusive, meaning that those that do not benefit from the firm’s actions are not left worse off; and it must be comparatively efficient, meaning that the same activity could not be carried out more effectively or efficiently under a different organizational form. By developing a coherent and rigorous framework to assess social impact systematically, our study offers both a research agenda for future scholars, and a useful tool for managers seeking to design more effective CSR initiatives. 

A current version of this paper can be found at: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3575027

Cooperativeness, heterogeneity, and the structure of collective action

(with Farzam Boroomand, University of Minnesota)

We examine how successful collective action among heterogeneous actors may be achieved. Using a simulation-based approach, we explore the effect of three parameters—cooperativeness, heterogeneity of benefits, and heterogeneity of capabilities—on the extent to which actors in a population contribute towards a collective good in the long run. Our results show that cooperativeness is neither necessary nor sufficient for collective action; where actors are heterogeneous, collective action may fail even with full cooperativeness. We then offer two solutions to this problem: a meritocratic solution that relies on motivating high capability rational egoists to contribute more to the common good by aligning their benefits with their capabilities; and a locally transparent solution that relies on motivating high capability conditional cooperators to contribute more to the common good by making them aware of others’ constraints. We show that together these approaches can help sustain moderate to high levels of collective action even in highly heterogeneous populations.   

Other people's children: Racial diversity and community support for public schools

(with Farzam Boroomand, University of Minnesota)

Can communities be both inclusive and high performing? In this study we argue that there is a potential tension between community inclusion and community performance because increasing diversity makes it harder for the community to organize and engage in collective action, but these effects may be ameliorated by the presence of bridging ties, i.e., in communities where members of different groups interact with each other on a regular basis. We test these arguments in the context of local spending on US public schools, showing that increasing racial diversity in a school district tends to lower support for funding of local schools, but only for districts where local schools are relatively segregated. Where children of different races attend school together we see no significant impact of increasing diversity on local school funding. Supplementary analyses shows that these effects are stronger in low income districts and in districts with greater racial education disparities, consistent with the trade-off between inclusion and collective action being stronger in the presence of resource constraints and the absence of shared values. We also show that lower local spending is associated with weaker educational outcomes in public schools, and that increasing racial diversity in a school district is associated with a greater probability of redrawing district boundaries to create more homogenous districts. Our study thus sheds new light on the drivers of community performance while also addressing a key societal grand challenge: equitable access to quality education for all children. 

Neither too close nor too far: Cross-regional intra-firm collaborations as drivers of radical innovation

(with Sohyun Park and Aks Zaheer, University of Minnesota)

In this study, we examine the relationship between two distinct forms of boundary-spanning knowledge recombination: across geographies and across knowledge domains. We contend that cross-regional collaborations between inventors within firms enable the successful spanning of technological boundaries to produce new-to-the-world recombinations. They do so, moreover, both by connecting geographically separated bodies of within-industry knowledge to eliminate inventions that are too incremental, and by screening out recombinations of knowledge across industries that might prove too radical. Results from a study of 27,833 medical device patents in the U.S. from 1981 to 2005 show support for these arguments, even after accounting for the endogeneity of cross-regional collaboration. Supplementary analyses show that cross-regional collaborations enhance the impact of firm patents, and that effects are stronger for close vs. distant collaborations. Our study offers a nuanced examination of the ways in which firms benefit from internal collaborations across locations, while also contributing to research on knowledge agglomeration and organizational innovation.