Research

Working papers

[1]  Ghosh S, Singh J (2024). Eliciting Supplier Cooperation for Value Chain Decarbonization: A Field Experiment with Smallholder Farmers in India. (link)

  • Job Market Paper, revise and resubmit Management Science
  • Nominated for SMS Annual Conference (2023) Best Responsible Research Paper Prize & PhD Paper Prize Competition.

Abstract: Firms are increasingly under pressure to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions not just within their operations but across their value chains. However, value chain decarbonization is typically not a priority for suppliers, and aligning their goals through formal contracts is often also impractical. This study examines the effectiveness of a firm employing relational strategies as a way to address this dual challenge. In a research collaboration with a Fortune 500 firm seeking to reduce GHG emissions in its agricultural supply chain in India, we designed a field experiment to examine the effectiveness of combining decarbonization training for the firm’s supplier farmers with personalized agricultural support to boost the economic value that they derived from their relationship with the firm. Specifically, we examined two interventions that differed in the nature and extent of this personalized support: a lower investment intervention that provided personalized support only for the crop the supplier farmers grew specifically for the firm’s value chain, and a higher investment intervention that additionally provided personalized support for broader agricultural practices relevant for the other crops the farmers grew. Relative to a control group that was only exposed to decarbonization training and not given any personalized support, both interventions improved the farmers’ adoption of the firm-recommended climate-friendly practices. The higher investment intervention produced greater environmental impact in terms of emissions reduction per farmer as well as emissions reduction per dollar invested, while also leading to better business outcomes in terms of expected retention of farmers in the sourcing program.

[2] Ghosh S, Sevcenko V, Singh J (2024). Interdependent Agendas in Sustainability: Analyzing the Trade-offs in Firm Decarbonization and Workforce Diversity. (link)

Image source: FT, 2023

Abstract: Firms are increasingly expected to attend to diverse stakeholder groups with competing preferences and in response integrate a variety of societal priorities within their business activities. We study and show how making progress on one dimension of sustainability or societal priority may have undesirable effects on another dimension and thus highlight potential trade-offs among different dimensions within sustainability. We show the nature of these trade-offs in the context of green jobs and the associated negative effects on workforce gender diversity. We further explore micro-level mechanisms of individual’s job position features, specifically the locational feature associated with green jobs as potentially driving these effects while ruling out alternative mechanisms at play. Our study uses detailed online individual job profile data on over 28 million unique individual employee job positions in 5,848 firms across a wide range of industries in the US between 2011 and 2022 to test our predictions. We contribute to the emerging literature in management discussing the multiplicity of dimensions within sustainability and the potential trade-offs resulting from these.

[3]  Marchetti A, Sevcenko V, Ghosh S (2024). Organizational Culture, Firm-Specific Human Capital, and Employee Turnover: Evidence from a Large-Scale Study of Employer Reviews and Online Resumes. (link)

  • Nominated for SMS Annual Conference (2021) Research Methods Paper Prize & Best Paper Prize Competition.

Abstract: Extensive literature documents the central role that firm-specific human capital plays in employee turnover. However, the questions of how workers develop firm-specific human capital and why they do so despite the potential limitations on subsequent employment opportunities continue to be debated. We attempt to address both questions by proposing a novel mechanism through which workers may develop firm-specific skills: socialization in strong cultures. Building on prior work on human capital and organizational culture, we argue that working in strong cultures may lead workers to acquire knowledge of specific cultural elements and develop informal relationships with colleagues that are challenging to transfer across organizations. We test these predictions on a sample of 16,668,259 employees working for 4,396 firms in the US between 2013 and 2018. We measure organizational turnover using online employee profiles and cultural strength using 640,783 employees’ company reviews on Glassdoor. We rely on an exogenous shock to the enforceability of formal employment contracts – a 2015 Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling that weakened barriers to employee mobility – and explore its impact on organizations with stronger and weaker cultures. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that following the shock, turnover increased significantly in organizations with weaker cultures but remained constant in organizations with stronger cultures. We further find that conditional on mobility, workers departing organizations with stronger cultures experienced lower increases in salary and seniority in their next role than employees departing organizations with weaker cultures. Finally, both results are driven by organizations requiring more informal integration of effort.

Research in Progress

  • It Takes a Village to…: Role of Community Level Stakeholder Engagement and Firm Effectiveness in Addressing Grand Challenges. [with Ilze Kivleniece (INSEAD)].
  • Scaling-up Programs for Firm Value Chain Decarbonization: The Relative Effectiveness of Digital Interventions and Peer-to-Peer Learning. [with Jasjit Singh (INSEAD)].
  • Evaluating the Role of Digital Tools in Scaling-up Women Owned Micro-entrepreneurial Ventures in Rural India. [with Leena Kinger Hans (ISB) and Jasjit Singh (INSEAD)].

Image source: www.agritalent.com

  • The Role of Technology Interventions in Driving Sustainability in Agricultural Value Chain. [with Rupali Kaul (INSEAD)].