The 2008 turmoil in world oil prices was not caused by an imbalance of supply and demand, argues Professor Kenneth Singleton of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Instead there was an "economically and statistically significant effect of investor flows on futures prices."
Young companies that adopt structured systems to run their operations in their early years grow three times faster than competitors and have a lower rate of CEO turnover, according to an award-winning research paper.
Fast fashion-designing products that capture the latest consumer trends, and then spending extra money to get them to market quickly, can be well worth the extra expense, increasing profits exponentially, says Stanford Graduate School of Business Professor Robert Swinney, coauthor of a recent study.
In the business world, women who are aggressive, assertive, and confident but who can turn these traits on and off depending on the social circumstances get more promotions than either men or other women, according to a recent study by Olivia O'Neill and Charles O'Reilly.
Observers of Silicon Valley have always assumed that the most successful companies get their competitive edge by paying their star employees more than the competition to fuel innovation. Now research, co-authored by Professor Kathryn Shaw, and using the academic field of insider econometrics, has been able to prove that this assumption is indeed true.
Permissive bankruptcy laws, not bad business downturns, seem to be the greatest cause of corporate bond defaults, according to Professor Ilya Strebulaev, co-author of a study that researched 150 years of figures.
Medical Technologies with high "social value" can play an important role in helping safety-net providers use their resources more efficiently. However, traditional investors often see the total market potential for such technologies small relative to other, more immediate opportunities, leaving many companies struggling to secure capital, say researchers Stefanos Zenios and Lyn Denend.