Leeds faculty advance thought leadership in CESR鈥檚 three focus areas: 1) Business solutions to environmental challenges; 2) Diversity, equity and inclusion; and 3) Ethical leadership. Through original research, they are helping define best practices, and influence business and policy conversations, in critically important areas related to environmental sustainability, social impact and governance (ESG).

To read more about their work and impact, please see our Faculty Thought Leadership articles.

CESR Research Grants & Awards

Each year, CESR recognizes Leeds faculty for research that has already been published with two awards: Best Paper and Highest Impact Paper. In addition, CESR names faculty for the CESR Research Fellowship grant to support ongoing research projects.

Award winning papers focus on issues that are timely, impactful and critically important to sustainability. These works not only are cited and used, but also change the way people think and work.

Best Paper Award

  • 2024 (Co-Winner): Wonjae Chang, Michael Damba, Bryce Schonberger, and Inho Suk: Does Sensationalism Affect Executive Compensation? Evidence from Pay Ratio Disclosure Reform, , 2022
  • 2024 (Co-Winner): Dejun Tony Kong, Sanghee Park, and Jian Peng: Appraising and Reacting to Perceived Pay For Performance: Leader Competence and Warmth as Critical Contingencies, , 2023
  • 2023: Beth Embry, Jeff York, Michael Conger, and Sid Vedula,听Green to Gone: Regional Institutional Logics and Firm Survival in Moral Markets,听, 2022
  • 2022: Andrea Pawliczek, Nikki Skinner, and Laura Wellman,听A New Take on Voice: The Influence of BlackRock鈥檚 鈥楧ear CEO鈥� letters,听, 2021, vol. 26, issue 3, No 8, 1088-1136
  • 2021: Emily Gallagher,听Let the Rich Be Flooded: The Distribution of Financial Aid and Distress after Hurricane Harvey,

Highest Impact Paper Award

  • 2024: Emilio Castilla and Ethan Poskanzer, Through the Front Door: Why Do Organizations (Still) Prefer Legacy Applicants? American Sociological Review, September 2022
  • 2023:听David Drake, Gloria Urrea, and听Karthik Balasubramanian,听The Impact of Poverty on Base of the Pyramid Operations: Evidence from Mobile Money in Africa, September 2022
  • 2022: Gloria Urrea and Eunae Yoo,听The Role of Volunteer Experience on Performance on Online Volunteering Platforms, February 2021
  • 2021: David Drake, and Jeff York, Kicking Ash: Who (or What) is Winning the 鈥淲ar on Coal鈥�?, Production and Operations Management,听, July 2021, Pages听2162-2187

CESR Research Fellowship Grants 2024

  • Stephen Billings & Jaehee Song, Declining Homeownership and Wealth in Minority Neighborhoods: The Role of Corporate Buying of Single-Family Homes

  • Dejun "Tony" Kong, 鈥淎 New Way of Seeing鈥� DEI That Guides Better Practices

  • Rebecca Mitchell & Christina Lacerenza, Nurturing the Garden: Team-Level Structures that Promote Female Leadership

  • Levente Szentkir谩lyi, No CSR, No Market: Rejecting the Supererogatory Industry Standard of Sustainable Development Goals听

  • Jeff York, Catching the Wave: The Emergence (or lack thereof) of Marine Energy

CESR Research Fellowship Grants 2023

  • Marcia Kwaramba,听鈥楧oing More With Less鈥�: Securing Food Security Through Frugal Innovations in Developing Economy Markets
  • Liu Liu,听Brand Advertising and Climate Change
  • Austin Moss,听Investment Decisions of Everyday People and Welfare Implications
  • Ethan Poskanzer,听Automation Technology, Diversity and Performance in Innovation
  • Meghan Van Portfliet,听Whistleblowing and the Media
  • Ash Ganzoury and Jeff York,听How Entrepreneurial Ventures Link Business Models to Social and Environmental Impact

CESR Research Fellowship Grants 2022

  • Tony Cookson, Emily Gallagher, and Indeesh Mukhopadhyay Person-to-Person Giving and Inequalities in Post-Disaster Recoveries
  • Eric Alston and Ryan Lewis,听Making Water Markets More Liquid? 鈥� Institutional Resilience to Weather Shocks
  • Sabrina Volpone,听Exploring the Use of Identity Management during the Grief Process in Employees Who Have Experienced Pregnancy Loss

CESR Research Fellowship Grants 2021

  • Sabrina D Volpone, Am I Committed to Addressing Racism? It May Depend on If My Organization Is Sincere about Racial Justice
  • Joshua Steven Nunziato,听The Risks and Rewards of Serotonergic Psychedelics for the Ethical Formation of Business Leaders
  • Tony Cookson,听Love, Politics, and Money: The Consequences of Intra-Family Partisan Disagreement
  • Asaf Bernstein,听Wealth Inequality: The Role of the 鈥淢ortgage Piggy Bank鈥�
  • Jonathan Rogers,听Socially Responsible Investors and Firm Political Contributions 听

Faculty Thought Leadership in CESR Focus Areas

AP Syc Net Logo
How CEOs respond to mortality salience during the COVID-19 pandemic: Integrating terror management theory with regulatory focus theory.

April 13, 2023

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths in the U.S. As chief strategists of their respective firms, how do Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) react to mortality salience associated with the number of new daily COVID deaths in the U.S.? To answer this question, we integrate terror management...

JACR
Does reframing fund carbon emissions to increase their personal relevance boost investment in sustainable funds? Evidence from a discrete choice conjoint experimental design.

Jan. 1, 2023

The market for green investments can be expanded by providing investors with clear information about the environmental impact of their investment options. Using a discrete choice conjoint experimental design with retail investors (Nchoices = 20,874, N = 499), we investigate the impact of presenting environmental information in different formats on...

Sage
Through the Front Door: Why Do Organizations (Still) Prefer Legacy Applicants?

Sept. 21, 2022

When screening candidates, organizations often give preference to certain applicants on the basis of their familial ties. This 鈥渓egacy preference,鈥� particularly widespread in college admissions, has been criticized for contributing to inequality and class reproduction. Despite this, studies continue to report that legacies are persistently admitted at higher rates than...

Journal of Management
(Overcoming) Maternity Bias in the Workplace: A Systematic Review

March 30, 2022

Maternity, a period of transition beginning with prenatal bodily changes and progressing through postnatal lactation, is experienced by up to 66% of working women. Over the past several decades, research on maternity in the workplace has grown exponentially to reveal salient maternity biases that plague women as they navigate their...

Cover of the Handbook on Sustainability
"Entrepreneurs as essential but missing actors in the Sustainable Development Goals" Chapter in "Handbook on the Business of Sustainability"

Feb. 11, 2022

This ground-breaking Handbook uniquely focuses on the business of sustainability, offering a fresh insight and practical solutions to the challenges that businesses face in making human activity sustainable. It is organized into four distinctive themes that cut across levels of analysis and illustrate a rich set of solution contexts that...

Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science cover
"Can Advertising Benefit Women's Development? Preliminary Insights from a Multi-Method Investigation"

Feb. 9, 2022

We examine the interaction effect of country-level aggregate advertising spending and internet access on women鈥檚 development. We explain why this interaction effect either enhances or discourages women鈥檚 development. Our empirical analysis of aggregate advertising spending across forty-eight countries over five years uncovers a conditional effect. Advertising may have adverse consequences...

organization science
Green to Gone? Regional Institutional Logics and Firm Survival in Moral Markets

Jan. 13, 2022

A growing body of scholarship studies the emergence of moral markets鈥攕ectors offering market-based solutions to social and environmental issues. To date, researchers have largely focused on the drivers of firm entry into these values-laden sectors. However, we know comparatively little about postentry dynamics or the determinants of firm survival in...

Research paper cover
The ethics of diversity ideology: Consequences of leader diversity ideology on ethical leadership perception and organizational citizenship behavior. Journal of Applied Psychology.

Jan. 1, 2022

Scholars have suggested that leader diversity ideologies are imbued with ethical or normative content (e.g., Nkomo & Hoobler, 2014). We advance this literature by examining the ethical consequences of leader diversity ideologies. Specifically, we integrate the ethical leadership framework and the theory of recognition to suggest that leaders who communicate...

SSRN
Blood Money

Oct. 11, 2021

We use dramatic growth in plasma centers between 2014 and 2021 to study the causal effect of the ability to donate plasma on household financial well-being. We find that plasma donation absorbs demand for non-bank credit. Plasma donors tend to be younger and less educated with lower incomes, savings, and...

Review of Acct Studies cover
A New Take on Voice: The Influence of BlackRock鈥檚 鈥楧ear CEO鈥� letters

Aug. 27, 2021

We examine whether broad-based public engagement by institutional investors influences the behavior of portfolio firms. We investigate this question in the context of BlackRock鈥檚 annual Dear CEO letter, which in recent years has called for portfolio firms to acknowledge and quantify the impact of environmental and regulatory factors on their...