The Embedding Project, a sustainability initiative
that has created global communities of practice to
help companies adopt sustainable practices, has
been honored with two awards. In August 2018, the
Academy of Management recognized the project
with its inaugural “International Impactful Collaboration
Award”; and in September, the initiative
was included on Clean50’s 20 Top Projects of the
Year, which honors efforts that inspire Canadians.
The Embedding Project was founded and is led
by Stephanie Bertels, an associate professor
at Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of
Business in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. It
brings together researchers from business schools
at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, the
University of Cambridge in the U.K., HEC Montreal
in Quebec, Erasmus University in the Netherlands,
and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in
Cambridge. Visit www.embeddingproject.org.
Hong Guo has received the Sandy Slaughter Early
Career Award from the Institute for Operations Research
and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).
Guo is the Robert and Sara Lumpkins Associate
Professor in Business Analytics at the University
of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business in
Indiana. Guo studies emerging phenomena in IT
by characterizing key design features of systems
such as mobile platforms, digital games, and
product review systems.
The data research platform Wharton Research
Data Services has announced the recipients of its
WRDS Best Paper Award. They include Jeffrey
R. Brown, the Josef and Margot Lakonishok
Professor of Business and Dean, and Jiekun
Huang, associate professor of finance, both of
Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign. They were recognized for
their April 2017 working paper “All the President’s
Friends: Political Access and Firm Value,” for which
they analyzed data from public sources during
the Obama presidency. Their study indicated that
executives’ White House visits are associated with
positive outcomes for firms in areas such as stock
prices, government contracts, regulatory decisions,
and insights about government policies. However,
such visits also could set up a risky quid pro quo
between firms and elected officials. The paper can
be downloaded at www.nber.org/papers/w23356.
WRDS also has named Nanjing University in
China as the winner of its 2018 WRDS-SSRN Innovation
Award for the Asia-Pacific region. The award
recognizes the efforts of emerging business schools
to improve the impact of their research.