Research projects awarded SSHRC Insight Grants

The Beedie School of Business at Simon Fraser University is pleased to announce that it has been awarded SSHRD Insight Development Grant (IDG) funding for four separate business research initiatives – projects that will bring new understanding and knowledge to the areas of social innovation, capital markets, sustainability and business ethics.

They include research focused on liquidity and market efficiency in Canada conducted by Assistant Professor Karel Hrazdil and Professor Dennis Chung, and a project by Associate Professor Sudheer Gupta focused on inclusive economic development and poverty alleviation.

A research initiative by Assistant Professor Stephanie Bertels aims to help managers and leaders embed environmental and social sustainability into their organizational cultures. Bertels is also a co-applicant on a successful SSHRC Partnership Development Grant with the Network for Business Sustainability, which received $199,800 to build working groups comprised of researchers and business partners to co-create and implement existing sustainability knowledge.

Finally, a research undertaking by Andrew Von Nordenflycht will investigate the nature and consequences of professional misconduct among securities brokers.

The recent Insight Development funding news comes on top of Beedie CNABS Professor of Business and Government Relations Aidan Vining and Associate Professor Andrey Pavlov receiving a SSHRC Insight Grant for their 5 year research program entitled “The Effect of Significant Regulation on Firm Profitability.” Their research seeks to empirically determine the impact of significant government regulation on the economic profits of specific industries and the firms within them.

“This news speaks yet again to our dynamic research environment, the outstanding work of our faculty, and our growing reputation as a top-100 research business school,” said Daniel Shapiro, Dean of the Beedie School of Business. “The breadth of research projects funded truly reflects our strategic priorities as a business school.”

SSHRC is the federal agency that promotes and supports postsecondary research and training in the humanities and social sciences. Through its three funding programs — Talent, Insight and Connection — SSHRC enables the highest levels of research excellence in Canada and facilitates knowledge-sharing and collaboration across research disciplines, universities and all sectors of society.

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Summaries of the awarded IDG projects:

1. Karel Hrazdil and Dennis Chung: Liquidity and Market Efficiency: Canadian Evidence

Very little is currently known about how efficiently prices adjust to new information and to different information environments, and even less is known about these mechanisms in Canadian markets. Research by Hrazdil and Chung will provide direct answers to these in a Canadian context, where the aggregate evidence suggests that Canadian capital markets are less diverse and efficient than their U.S. counterparts, indicating that there is room to improve their efficiency.

2. Sudheer Gupta: Toward a Grounded Theory of Reverse Innovation

The objective of this developmental project is to help stimulate future research in market based approaches to inclusive economic development and poverty alleviation. The research aims to lay the foundation for developing a theory of product, service and business model innovation which allows organizations to meet the needs of BOP (Bottom of the Pyramid) segments profitably, sustainably, and in socially responsible ways.

3. Stephanie Bertels: Measuring Collective Sustainability Efficacy

This research development project engages practitioners in a joint effort to create a tool to assess how well organizations are embedding environmental and social sustainability into their organizational cultures. There are currently no instruments to measure collective efficacy related to sustainability. Therefore, the objective of this project is the development, piloting, and validation of a new instrument.

4. Andrew Von Nordenflycht: Bad Apples or Bad Trees? Patterns of Professional Misconduct Within and Between Firms

The purpose of this research project is to construct a database of the careers of thousands of individual securities brokers that will allow Von Nordenflycht to investigate the nature and consequences of professional misconduct. The principle question I will address is this: is professional misconduct more frequently a product of “bad” firms or “bad” individuals (i.e., “bad apples” or “bad trees”).