SURF Mentoring
Potential projects/topics: Over the past decade, companies have increasingly been reporting on their social activities. For example, NIKE releases an annual Social Impact report. Various forces seem to have propelled such reports such as pressures from employees, customers, activists, and in certain places government (e.g., the EU mandates certain social reports). However, these reports sit outside of the conventional financial statement reporting (such as Annual Reports, 10-K reports). As such, they don’t automatically flow into the conventional accounting metrics that companies report.
Outside of reporting, the academic and consulting fields are mixed on the effects of such corporate social programs on various measures of social and financial performance. For example, do the companies that produce these reports or make claims in certain social spaces (say their hiring practices or supplier relations) realize higher or lower financial returns? Do they make higher margins than competitors not doing such things? Do their claims match third-party measures of social outputs? Do they achieve social gains, such as more equity in employment or supply chains. Etc.
We will be using both inductive and abductive methods. First, collecting and analyzing data to see what types of patterns emerge and what this might mean for conceptualizing relationships between social reporting and these outcomes. Second, thinking about plausible explanations of “surprising” patterns (if found) of the data for more theoretical refinement.
Potential skills gained: Business research and analysis (finding reports, data sets); Literature Search: Corporate Purpose; Corporations and Public and Private Outcomes; Content Analysis/Language analysis software; Statistical analysis.
Required qualifications:
- Requirement: Software skills to scrape databases/reports (like Python, others) and to organize such data (like Excel).
- Preference: Familiarity/Proficiency with content analysis software like LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) Familiarity/proficiency with statistical packages like Stata.
No requirement to conduct research in person. Remote work is OK. Most of your interactions with me will be via zoom and email as I’ll be away for much of the summer.
Direct mentor: Faculty/P.I.
Student Project Titles List
Green Initiatives, Red Ink? Evaluating Stock Market Reactions to CSR Reports