Research Roundup
Awards, appointments and recognition
Senior Lecturer Promotions
Congratulations to Sami Bensassi, Andy Hodder, David Houghton and Liza Jabbour who will all be promoted to Senior Lecturer from 1 August 2018.
Siddhartha Bandyopadhyay (PI) has been commissioned by the Garda Representative Association to provide an in depth evidence review of the challenges facing a 21st century police force, including a discussion of the role changes in police culture face. He has been awarded £8657 along with CI Jessica Woodhams.
Siddhartha Bandyopadhyay has had his research featured in the Economist and was interviewed for the following article: https://www.economist.com/news/britain/21732548-crooks-are-stealing-fewer-cars-and-burgling-fewer-homes-making-pricier-swag-how
Amy Fraher was invited by Prof Karlene Roberts to spend a week in December 2017 at the Center for Catastrophic Risk Mitigation at the University California Berkeley USA. Having met at the Academy of Management conference in Vancouver a working relationship was established. As part of her visit, Amy gave a presentation based on her recent paper published in the Academy of Management-Discoveries entitled paper “Mindfulness in Action: Discovering How U.S. Navy SEALs Build Capacity for Mindfulness in High-Reliability Organizations (HROs)”. In sum, based on mutual research interests and past publication success, there is the potential for a very fruitful collaboration and exchange of knowledge between “The Center for Catastrophic Risk Mitigation” at Berkeley and the BirminghamBusinessSchool.
Geraint Harvey was invited to participate in the closing debate at the European Aviation Conference, in November 2017 at Dublin College University, Ireland
Rebecca McDonald has been awarded an ESRC New Investigator award (£230,000) to study "discounting and the value of a life year lost to air pollution", beginning April 2018. The New Investigator awards are an ESRC initiative providing funding for promising early career researchers to undertake their first major research project as PI.
Rebecca McDonald also featured on BBC Radio 4's MoneyBox program, discussing behavioural economics as it relates to Price Comparison Websites. The link is here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09jxkv8
Stan Seibert is working with a team in the Dept of Economics at LingnanUniversity, Hong Kong to look at the economics of education for young school children (6-9 years) in rural central China where there are many left-behind children. We have devised a simple feedback assessment form which the teacher regularly discusses with learners, and then sends on to the (often absent) parents to enable them to better support their children. This method is cheaper than increasing staff-student ratios for example, and we find gives good improvement in exam results. The paper has been given to the Econometric Society Asia meetings (June 2017) and the Asian and Australasian Society of Labour Economists conference (December 2017).
Stan Siebert is also working with John Addison in the Dept of Economics at the Darla Moore School of Business to look at the economics of the minimum wage in the UK and US, and also in Europe, particularly Germany (where there is a new MW law) and France (which has one of the highest MWs). Stan visited South Carolina in November, and gave a paper surveying UK research at the Southern Economic Association meetings (November 2017), and met German and French experts. John Addison returned the visit in December to build on his knowledge of the US evidence on minimum wages and alternative policies such as tax credits for working.
Vivek Soundararajan has been invited to join the Editorial Board of Journal of Business Ethics. This journal is one of the 50 journals used by the Financial Times in compiling the prestigious BusinessSchool research rank.
Publications
Siddhartha Bandyopadhyay has had the following paper accepted for publication:
Bandyopadhyay, S. and McCannon, M. (2017) 'Flying Blind: Voter Information and Prosecutor Behavior: A Comment on Ronald Wright's "Prosecutor Institutions and Incentives" Criminology', Criminal Justice, Law & Society, 18(3): 101-4
The paper does not have an abstract but is available via open access: https://ccjls.scholasticahq.com/article/2720-flying-blind-voter-information-and-prosecutor-behavior
Cathy Cassell has had the following paper accepted for publication:
Cassell, C.M. and Bishop, V. (2018). Analysing qualitative data: exploring themes, metaphors and stories. European Management Review. In Press.
Abstract:
This paper explores the processes and outcomes of using three different forms of data analytic processes to analyse the same set of qualitative data. The dataset are 24 in-depth qualitative interviews with taxi drivers about their experiences of dignity at work. To enable an effective comparison of techniques, three types of analysis are used which rely on similar categorization processes: template analysis; story analysis; and metaphor analysis. In presenting the analysis the aims are to draw attention to the research questions and opportunities for theorising that might be enabled by a given analytic approach and highlight some of the rich variety of analytic approaches available to the qualitative management researcher. Hence we offer a novel, empirical account of the practical use of these three approaches with the intention of potentially expanding the analytic toolkit of other qualitative researchers and promoting the use of a range of different forms of qualitative data analysis. It is argued that given the increasing trend towards standardisation in qualitative management research, it is important to promote alternatives within the qualitative researcher’s analytic toolkit.
Cathy has also published a two volume edition of a handbook which currently adorns the fireplace shelf in the Dean’s office:
Cassell, C.M., Cunliffe, A. and Grandy, G. (2018). The Sage Handbook of qualitative methods in business and management research. Volumes One and Two. Sage Publications.
Sajid Chaudhry has had the following papers accepted for publication:
Navqi, B., Rizvi, S., Uqaili, H. and Chaudhry, S. (2017) 'What enables Islamic banks to contribute in global financial reintermediation?', Pacific-Basic Finance Journal, In Press.
Abstract:
Conventional banks which once were competing with non-banking financial institutions and capital markets today face the new challenge of being reintermediated by Islamic banks. Earlier academic research has been debating over disintermediation and reintermediation of conventional banks, but consistently failed to address reintermediation through Islamic banks as a possibility. This study, however, fills the void by addressing the novel possibility of reintermediation “within” the banking sector and is the first attempt to analyze and compare Islamic and conventional banks from the perspective of reintermediated financial markets.
After identifying the reintermediation trends led by Islamic banks we investigate several bank specific financial and non-financial characteristics that might have enabled Islamic banks to emerge as an important player in reintermediated financial markets. By keeping our focus on slightly modified version of CAMELS framework where ‘S’ represents “Service Quality” we find that along with better capitalization (C) and improved liquidity (L), better service quality (S) is another distinguished feature of Islamic banks that might be linked with their high degree of intermediation.
Chaudry, S., Bajoori, E. and Nandeibam, S. (2018) 'Clustered Pricing in the Corporate Loan Market: Theory and Empirical Evidence', Journal of Economic Behaviour & Organization, In Press.
Abstract:
Existing theories explaining security price clustering as well as clustering in the retail deposit and mortgage markets are incompatible with the clustering in the corporate loan market. We develop a new theoretical model that the attitude of the lender toward the uncertainty about the quality of the borrower leads to the clustering of spreads. Our empirical results support our theoretical model and we find that clustering increases with the degree of uncertainty between the lender and the borrower. In contrast, clustering is less likely when the uncertainty about the quality of the borrower has been reduced through repeated access and through prior interactions of the lender and the borrower.
Geraint Harvey and Daniel Wintersberger have had the following paper accepted for publication:
Harvey, G., Turnbull, P., and Wintersberger, D. (forthcoming) ‘Speaking of contradiction’, Work, Employment and Society, In Press.
Abstract:
Whereas McGovern (2014) calls for a moratorium on the ever increasing (ab)use of the word ‘contradiction’, principally because scholars of work and employment fail to connect different levels of analysis and/or demonstrate how and why contradiction(s) lead to widespread instability and upheaval, it can be demonstrated how both can be achieved through the ‘system, society, dominance’ framework proposed by Smith and Meiksins (1995). In what follows, the empirical focus is on the safety-critical work of airport ground service providers (GSPs), where key elements of the employment relationship embody contradictions that can be traced to the (sub-)system (mode of production) of a Single European Aviation Market (SEAM) that is now dominated by low fares airlines (LFAs). Instead of a moratorium, scholars of work and employment need to reconnect with society and theoretically ground their analysis in a (capitalist) system beset with contradictions between the forces and relations of production.
Christina Niforou and Andy Hodder have had the following paper accepted for publication:
Niforou, C. and Hodder, A. (2018) ‘Trade Union Pedagogy and Cross Border Action’, Global Networks: A Journal of Transnational Affairs, In Press.
Abstract:
This article examines the potential of global union pedagogy to address the structural and political challenges of cross-border trade union action. It does so by proposing an analytical framework that draws from labour relations, political sociology and education in order to explain education processes and outcomes as responses to the pitfalls of global labour campaigns and the inadequacy of global and local labour institutions. We proceed to assess the value of our framework by elaborating on its different dimensions -framing, synthesizing, connecting and regenerating in relation to the education work of a Global Union Federation, namely the International Transport workers’ Federation. We find that an actor-centred approach that combines top-down, bottom-up as well as horizontal processes of collecting knowledge from different contexts and making links between different countries, industries and parts of supply chains can help actors realise that their seemingly very diverse concerns are essentially different manifestations of the same problem.
Frank Strobel has had the following paper accepted for publication:
Lepetit, L., Meslier, C., Strobel, F. and Wardhana, L. (2018) 'Bank dividends, agency costs and shareholder and creditor rights', International Review of Financial Analysis, In Press.
Abstract:
Using data on listed banks in 51 countries, we analyze whether banks' dividend payouts are influenced by the relative strengths of the agency conflicts faced by their shareholders and creditors. We show that dividend policy depends on the relative strengths of these agency conflicts, but with a more decisive role played by the agency cost of equity than the one of debt, in contrast to results found in the literature on non-financial firms. We then further investigate whether those relationships are shaped by differences in funding structure, levels of capitalization and capital stringency, and potential differences in external corporate governance mechanisms.