Does Water Scarcity Affect Environmental Performance? Evidence from Manufacturing Facilities in Texas

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suresh Muthulingam ◽  
Suvrat Dhanorkar ◽  
Charles J. Corbett
Keyword(s):  
Water Scarcity ◽  
Operations Management ◽  
Environmental Performance ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Full Sample ◽  
Toxic Releases ◽  
Manufacturing Operations ◽  
Toxic Emissions ◽  
Manufacturing Facilities ◽  
The Impact

It is well known that manufacturing operations can affect the environment, but hardly any research explores whether the natural environment shapes manufacturing operations. Specifically, we investigate whether water scarcity, which results from environmental conditions, influences manufacturing firms to lower their toxic releases to the environment. We created a data set that spans 2000–2016 and includes details on the toxic emissions of 3,092 manufacturing facilities in Texas. Additionally, our data set includes measures of the water scarcity experienced by these facilities. Our econometric analysis shows that manufacturing facilities reduce their toxic releases into the environment when they have experienced drought conditions in the previous year. We examine facilities that release toxics to water as well as facilities with no toxic releases to water. We find that the reduction in total releases (to all media) is driven mainly by those facilities that release toxic chemicals to water. Further investigation at a more granular level indicates that water scarcity compels manufacturing facilities to lower their toxic releases into media other than water (i.e., land or air). The impact of water scarcity on toxic releases to water is more nuanced. A full-sample analysis fails to link water scarcity to lower toxic releases to water, but a further breakdown shows that manufacturing facilities in counties with a higher incidence of drought do lower their toxic releases to water. We also find that facilities that release toxics to water undertake more technical and input modifications to their manufacturing processes when they face water scarcity. This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, operations management.

How Price Dispersion Changes When Upgrades Are Introduced: Theory and Empirical Evidence from the Airline Industry

2019 ◽  
Vol 65 (8) ◽  
pp. 3835-3852 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yao Cui ◽  
A. Yeşim Orhun ◽  
Izak Duenyas
Keyword(s):  
Operations Management ◽  
Airline Industry ◽  
Price Dispersion ◽  
Consumer Welfare ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Differentiation Strategy ◽  
Valuation Effect ◽  
Price Distribution ◽  
The One ◽  
The Impact

This paper studies the effect of introducing a new vertical differentiation strategy, paying for an upgrade to a premium product after purchasing the base product, on the price dispersion of the base product arising from existing price discrimination strategies. In particular, we examine how a major U.S. airline’s price dispersion in the coach cabin changes after introducing the option to upgrade to a new type of premium economy seating within the coach cabin. We first provide a theoretical analysis that highlights two competing pressures that the new premium economy seating upgrades created on coach class prices. On the one hand, the airline benefits from lowering its prices because by allowing more customers to purchase in the first place, it increases the probability of selling upgrades (admission effect). On the other hand, for some customers, the value of flying with the airline increases because of the upgrade availability, therefore the airline may find it optimal to increase its prices (valuation effect). In the second part of the paper, we conduct an empirical investigation of the impact of upgrade introduction on coach class prices, based on a proprietary transaction-level data set from a major U.S. airline company. The empirical analysis tests the main predictions of our theoretical model and examines further nuances. The results show that the introduction of the premium economy seating upgrades is associated with an increase in the price dispersion and revenues in the coach class, the admission effect is stronger than the valuation effect on the low end of the price distribution, and the opposite is true on the high end of the price distribution. Finally, we discuss implications of our results for firm revenues and consumer welfare. This paper was accepted by Serguei Netessine, operations management.

The Bullwhip Effect in Supply Networks

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikolay Osadchiy ◽  
William Schmidt ◽  
Jing Wu
Keyword(s):  
Operations Management ◽  
Aggregate Demand ◽  
Bullwhip Effect ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Supplier Relationships ◽  
Supply Networks ◽  
Customer Base ◽  
Base Management ◽  
Demand Variability ◽  
The Impact

We offer a new network perspective on one of the central topics in operations management—the bullwhip effect (BWE). The topic has both practical and scholarly implications. We start with an observation: the variability of orders placed to suppliers is larger than the variability of sales to customers for most firms, yet the aggregate demand variability felt by suppliers upstream does not amplify commensurably. We hypothesize that changes to the supplier’s customer base can smooth out its aggregate demand. We test the hypothesis with a data set that tracks the evolution of supply relationships over time. We show that the effect of customer base management extends beyond the statistical benefits of aggregation. In particular, both the formation and the dissolution of customer-supplier relationships are associated with the smoothing of the aggregate demand experienced by suppliers. This provides fresh insight into how firms may leverage their customer-supplier relationships to mitigate the impact of the BWE. This paper was accepted by Jay Swaminathan, operations management.

Is Insider Control Good for Environmental Performance? Evidence From Dual-Class Firms

2018 ◽  
Vol 59 (4) ◽  
pp. 716-748
Author(s):  
Paul Seaborn ◽  
Tricia D. Olsen ◽  
Jason Howell
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Performance ◽  
Business Leaders ◽  
Single Class ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Environmental Practice ◽  
Prior Literature ◽  
Environmental Measures ◽  
Dual Class ◽  
The Impact

Corporate environmental performance has become a key focus of business leaders, policy makers, and scholars alike. Today, scholarship on environmental practice increasingly highlights how various aspects of corporate governance can influence environmental performance. However, the prior literature is inconclusive as to whether ownership by insiders (officers and directors) will have positive or negative environmental effects and whether insider voting control or equity control is more salient to environmental outcomes. This article leverages a unique empirical data set of dual-class firms, where insiders have voting rights disproportionate to their equity rights, to shed light on this question. We find that, on average, dual-class firms underperform their single-class peers on environmental measures and that the discrepancy comes from dual-class firms where insiders have more voting control, relative to their equity stake. While small increases in voting control are associated with improved environmental performance, too much (relative to insiders’ equity stake) worsens firms’ environmental performance. Insider equity control alone has no impact on environmental outcomes. Our findings have important implications for agency theory and environmental scholarship by identifying contingencies on the impact of voting and equity-based incentives. This research casts doubt on the idea that providing insiders with significant voting control will aid environmental performance.

The Impact of Workload on Operational Risk: Evidence from a Commercial Bank

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuqian Xu ◽  
Tom Fangyun Tan ◽  
Serguei Netessine
Keyword(s):  
Commercial Bank ◽  
Error Rate ◽  
Operations Management ◽  
Financial Services ◽  
Operational Risk ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Risk Event ◽  
Significant Performance ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Empirical Analysis

Operational risk has been among the three most significant types of risks in the financial services industry, and its management is mandated by Basel II regulations. To inform better labor decisions, this paper studies how workload affects banks’ operational risk event occurrence. To achieve this goal, we use a unique data set from a commercial bank in China that contains 1,441 operational risk events over 16 months. We find that workload has a U-shaped impact on operational risk error rate. More specifically, the error rate of operational risk events decreases first, as workload increases, and then increases. Furthermore, when workload is low, employees tend to make performance-seeking risks; however, when workload is high, employees tend to exhibit quality degradation due to cognitive multitasking. Based on the causal relationship between workload and operational risk events from the empirical analysis, we discuss staffing policies among branches aimed at reducing operational risk losses. We find that employing a flexible staffing rule can significantly reduce the number of operational risk events by 3.2%–10% under different scenarios. In addition, this significant performance improvement can be achieved by adding even a little bit of flexibility to the process by allowing employees to either switch their business lines in the same branch or switch branches within the same business lines on a quarterly basis. This paper was accepted by Vishal Gaur, operations management.

scholarly journals Impact of Environmental Disaster Movies on Corporate Environmental and Financial Performance

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 559
Author(s):  
Hyun-Do Kim ◽  
Kwangwoo Park
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Financial Performance ◽  
Environmental Performance ◽  
The United States ◽  
Environmental Disaster ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Listed Firms ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Impact

Using a unique United States box office data set, we investigate the impact of environmental sentiment on corporate environmental and financial performance of the United States listed firms. The influence of mass media on public and investor sentiments is well documented in the existing literature. However, little is known about the effect of movies, although they may influence the public more than other mass media because people, regardless of age and gender, enjoy watching movies. Using the event study methodology and multivariable regression analysis, we show that the release of anthropogenic environmental disaster movie(s) creates environmental sentiment and influences corporate behaviors. Specifically, firms significantly increase their environmental performance in the subsequent year of strong environmental sentiment after the release of environmental movies. More importantly, the positive effect of corporate environmental performance on financial performance is stronger when the environmental sentiment is stronger.

When You Work with a Superman, Will You Also Fly? An Empirical Study of the Impact of Coworkers on Performance

2019 ◽  
Vol 65 (8) ◽  
pp. 3495-3517 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Fangyun Tan ◽  
Serguei Netessine
Keyword(s):  
Operations Management ◽  
Peer Effects ◽  
Sales Performance ◽  
Sales Managers ◽  
Ability Level ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Ability Levels ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Total Sales ◽  
Operational Data

We examine a large operational data set in a casual restaurant setting to study how coworkers’ sales ability level affects other workers’ sales performance. We find that waiters react nonlinearly to their coworkers’ ability. In particular, when coworkers’ overall sales ability is low, increasing this ability may prompt waiters to redouble both upselling and cross-selling efforts. When overall coworkers’ ability is high, however, further increasing their ability may trigger waiters to reduce sales efforts. Our empirical findings imply that, to maximize sales, managers should mix waiters with heterogeneous ability levels during the same shift. Through a counterfactual analysis, we find that considering the inverted U-shaped peer effects when optimizing current waiters’ schedules without changing their utilization may increase total sales by approximately 2.48% at no extra cost. This paper was accepted by Vishal Gaur, operations management.

Testing at the Source: Analytics-Enabled Risk-Based Sampling of Food Supply Chains in China

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cangyu Jin ◽  
Retsef Levi ◽  
Qiao Liang ◽  
Nicholas Renegar ◽  
Stacy Springs ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Food Safety ◽  
Operations Management ◽  
Important Application ◽  
Structured Data ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Food Supply Chains ◽  
Aquatic Products ◽  
Current Test ◽  
Operational Decision Making ◽  
The Impact

This paper illustrates how supply chain (SC) analytics could provide strategic and operational insights to evaluate the risk-based allocation of regulatory resources in food SCs, for management of food safety and adulteration risks. This paper leverages data on 89,970 tests of aquatic products extracted from a self-constructed data set of 2.6 million food safety tests conducted by the China Food and Drug Administration (CFDA) organizations. The integrated and structured data set is used to conduct innovative analysis that identifies the sources of adulteration risks in China’s food SCs and contrasts them with the current test resource allocations of the CFDA. The analysis highlights multiple strategic insights. Particularly, it suggests potential gaps in the current CFDA testing allocation by SC location, which is heavily focused on retail and supermarkets. Instead, the analysis indicates that high-risk parts of the SC, such as wholesale and wet markets, are undersampled. Additionally, the paper highlights the impact that SC analytics could have on policy-level operational decision making to regulate food SCs and manage food safety. The hope is that the paper will stimulate the interest of academics with expertise in these areas to conduct more work in this important application domain. This paper was accepted by Charles Corbett, operations management.

Age at Exposure to Parental Suicide and the Subsequent Risk of Suicide in Young People

Crisis ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kuan-Ying Lee ◽  
Chung-Yi Li ◽  
Kun-Chia Chang ◽  
Tsung-Hsueh Lu ◽  
Ying-Yeh Chen
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Proportional Hazards ◽  
Proportional Hazards Model ◽  
Cox Proportional Hazards ◽  
Cox Proportional Hazards Model ◽  
Birth Registry ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Parental Suicide ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Age At Exposure

Abstract. Background: We investigated the age at exposure to parental suicide and the risk of subsequent suicide completion in young people. The impact of parental and offspring sex was also examined. Method: Using a cohort study design, we linked Taiwan's Birth Registry (1978–1997) with Taiwan's Death Registry (1985–2009) and identified 40,249 children who had experienced maternal suicide (n = 14,431), paternal suicide (n = 26,887), or the suicide of both parents (n = 281). Each exposed child was matched to 10 children of the same sex and birth year whose parents were still alive. This yielded a total of 398,081 children for our non-exposed cohort. A Cox proportional hazards model was used to compare the suicide risk of the exposed and non-exposed groups. Results: Compared with the non-exposed group, offspring who were exposed to parental suicide were 3.91 times (95% confidence interval [CI] = 3.10–4.92 more likely to die by suicide after adjusting for baseline characteristics. The risk of suicide seemed to be lower in older male offspring (HR = 3.94, 95% CI = 2.57–6.06), but higher in older female offspring (HR = 5.30, 95% CI = 3.05–9.22). Stratified analyses based on parental sex revealed similar patterns as the combined analysis. Limitations: As only register-­based data were used, we were not able to explore the impact of variables not contained in the data set, such as the role of mental illness. Conclusion: Our findings suggest a prominent elevation in the risk of suicide among offspring who lost their parents to suicide. The risk elevation differed according to the sex of the afflicted offspring as well as to their age at exposure.

State Medical Boards' Perceptions of a Minimum Data Set and Current Practices for Collecting Physician Information

2013 ◽  
Vol 99 (4) ◽  
pp. 40-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron Young ◽  
Philip Davignon ◽  
Margaret B. Hansen ◽  
Mark A. Eggen
Keyword(s):  
Media Coverage ◽  
The United States ◽  
Minimum Data Set ◽  
Direct Patient Care ◽  
Physician Workforce ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Minimum Data ◽  
State Medical Boards ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Current Practices

ABSTRACT Recent media coverage has focused on the supply of physicians in the United States, especially with the impact of a growing physician shortage and the Affordable Care Act. State medical boards and other entities maintain data on physician licensure and discipline, as well as some biographical data describing their physician populations. However, there are gaps of workforce information in these sources. The Federation of State Medical Boards' (FSMB) Census of Licensed Physicians and the AMA Masterfile, for example, offer valuable information, but they provide a limited picture of the physician workforce. Furthermore, they are unable to shed light on some of the nuances in physician availability, such as how much time physicians spend providing direct patient care. In response to these gaps, policymakers and regulators have in recent years discussed the creation of a physician minimum data set (MDS), which would be gathered periodically and would provide key physician workforce information. While proponents of an MDS believe it would provide benefits to a variety of stakeholders, an effort has not been attempted to determine whether state medical boards think it is important to collect physician workforce data and if they currently collect workforce information from licensed physicians. To learn more, the FSMB sent surveys to the executive directors at state medical boards to determine their perceptions of collecting workforce data and current practices regarding their collection of such data. The purpose of this article is to convey results from this effort. Survey findings indicate that the vast majority of boards view physician workforce information as valuable in the determination of health care needs within their state, and that various boards are already collecting some data elements. Analysis of the data confirms the potential benefits of a physician minimum data set (MDS) and why state medical boards are in a unique position to collect MDS information from physicians.

The Impact of Green Labels on U.S. Hotel Net Operating Income: Operating Statements Analyses

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 156-173
Author(s):  
Spenser Robinson ◽  
A.J. Singh
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Design ◽  
Green Buildings ◽  
Small Sample ◽  
Sample Survey ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Operating Income ◽  
Energy Star ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Industry Professionals

This paper shows Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certified hospitality properties exhibit increased expenses and earn lower net operating income (NOI) than non-certified buildings. ENERGY STAR certified properties demonstrate lower overall expenses than non-certified buildings with statistically neutral NOI effects. Using a custom sample of all green buildings and their competitive data set as of 2013 provided by Smith Travel Research (STR), the paper documents potential reasons for this result including increased operational expenses, potential confusion with certified and registered LEED projects in the data, and qualitative input. The qualitative input comes from a small sample survey of five industry professionals. The paper provides one of the only analyses on operating efficiencies with LEED and ENERGY STAR hospitality properties.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document