Faculty and Research

Ciao‐Wei Chen, Frank Heflin, Patrick Ryu, Jasmine Wang. Right on Target: Is Public Disclosure of Non-GAAP Earnings Associated with M&A Efficiency? Contemporary Accounting Research, 2025.    

New research shows that when companies being acquired share non-standard earnings information beyond standard accounting numbers (known as non-GAAP earnings), it helps buyers make smarter deals. Buyers with access to this information tend to see better stock market reactions, fewer post-deal write-downs, and stronger performance after the acquisition. The findings suggest that non-GAAP metrics, often debated by regulators, can actually improve transparency and decision-making in mergers and acquisitions.

Patrick Bayer, Marcus Casey, W. Ben McCartney, John Orellana-Li, Calvin Zhang. Distinguishing Causes of Neighborhood Racial Change: A Nearest Neighbor Design. American Economic Review, 2025.

Our research suggests that homeowners—both Black and White—are more likely to move after a neighbor of a different race moves in next door. The effect is especially pronounced in densely populated areas, offering new insights into the dynamics of neighborhood change. These findings deepen our understanding of the challenges in fostering stable, integrated communities and highlight the subtle ways social preferences shape housing decisions.

Rong Liu, Jingjing Li, Marko Zivkovic, Ahmed Abbasi. Automating in High-Expertise, Low-Label Environments: Evidence-Based Medicine by Expert-Augmented Few-Shot Learning. Management Information Systems Quarterly, 2025.

A new study introduces FastSR, a cutting-edge AI tool that significantly accelerates the process of reviewing medical literature—an essential yet time-consuming step in evidence-based medicine. By mimicking how humans learn from limited examples, FastSR uses few-shot learning to automate expert-level tasks with minimal training data, outperforming existing solutions and cutting review time by up to 65%. In real-world terms, that means transforming what often takes months into a significantly faster workflow, enabling research teams to launch studies sooner, update clinical guidelines more quickly, and reduce labor costs associated with manual literature screening—freeing up budget for experiments, patient recruitment, and data collection. This innovation offers a powerful blueprint for automating complex processes in fields where expertise is high but labeled data is scarce.

Christi Lockwood, Jean-Francois Soubliere, Joel Gehman. The Cogs and Wheels of Cultural Entrepreneurship: The Becoming of New Possibilities. Academy of Management Annals. In press, 2025.

Cultural entrepreneurship—that is, the cultural dynamics of entrepreneurship, innovation, and change—has attracted significant interest across business, sociology, and creative industries scholarship. However, these disciplines have evolved along separate trajectories, each establishing its own distinct research tradition. This fragmentation has hindered the development of an integrative understanding of how culture shapes, and is shaped by, entrepreneurial action. Drawing on 301 publications spanning over 40 years, we develop a framework that unites three distinct traditions of cultural entrepreneurship research focused on the mobilization, production, and expression of culture.

Chiraag Mittal, Reza Mousavi, K. L. Haws. Healthy Relationships and Healthy Eating: How Stressful Events and Social Support Affect Indulgence. Journal of Marketing. Accepted 2025.        

Our research reveals that stress can lead to more indulgent food choices, but strong social support helps counteract this effect. In a series of lab experiments, we show that individuals who feel greater social support are less likely to turn to unhealthy foods under stress. Complementing these findings, an analysis of real-world purchase data before and after Hurricane Sandy, a major stressor, shows that communities with higher levels of social support exhibited smaller increases in unhealthy food purchases. Together, these findings highlight the powerful role of support networks in shaping stress-related consumption and offer novel insights for researchers and policy-makers.