Research takes center stage at Kellogg’s inaugural Faculty Research Conference

This past November, Kellogg faculty convened at the Global Hub for the school’s inaugural Faculty Research Conference — a celebration of the research fundamental to Kellogg’s mission as an elite research institution. The event brought faculty from all departments together to share recent work and inspire new collaborations.

Senior Associate Dean Timothy Feddersen, who hosted the conference, framed its significance: “We celebrate a lot of teaching; we celebrate many things we do at Kellogg, but research is at the heart of what we’re doing as a school.” The presentations spanned diverse terrain — from post-natural disaster supply chain disruptions to the politics of research funding to the “pink tax.”

Seven faculty speakers presented recent publications and their real-world impact. Read on for highlights from the conference. 

Legal ties? 

Professor of Accounting Information and Management Sugata Roychowdury kicked off the day’s proceedings with a presentation of his 2024 Journal of Accounting article, “Just Friends? Managers’ Connections to Judges.” Do social ties between judges and defendants make a difference in court? Roychowdury’s research offers strong evidence that they do, and Roychowdhury gave an inside look at what can drive favorable legal outcomes. 

Studying patience 

Patience isn’t just a virtue; it’s essential to business strategies. Professor of Operations Achal Bassamboo offered a discussion on “Service System with Dependent Service and Patience Times,” his 2019 Management Science article studying dependencies — like expected waiting times and average queue length — to gauge impact on business performance and optimize revenue. 

Delayed retirement’s downside 

According to research from Associate Professor of Strategy Nicola Bianchi, in firms where older workers had to postpone retirement, younger colleagues’ wages grew more slowly, and they got fewer promotions. Bianchi presented these findings from his 2023 Review of Economic Studies paper “Career Spillovers in Internal Labor Markets,” sharing insights on what this means for workers, along with anecdotes from his native Italy. 

Natural disasters’ impact on economies 

After a break, Professor of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences Alireza Tahbaz-Salehi spoke on “Supply Chain Disruptions: Evidence from the Great East Japan Earthquake,” published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2021. Tahbaz-Salehi and colleagues examined the economic ripple effects of Japan’s 2011 earthquake.

Their key finding: disruption spread through supply chain connections to firms outside the affected regions that did business with disaster-struck firms. Ultimately, the earthquake and its aftermath resulted in a 0.47% decline in Japan’s real GDP growth in the year following the disaster. Understanding how shocks propagate through interconnected supply chains can help policymakers better prepare for and respond to future disasters. 

A “pink tax”? 

Professor of Marketing Anna Tuchman took to the stage next to highlight findings from “Gender-Based Pricing in Consumer Packaged Goods: A Pink Tax?,” originally published in 2023 in Marketing Science. The paper asks: how prevalent gender-based price discrimination is in personal care categories like deodorant and razors and how firms implement such price discrimination. Tuchman finds women’s products are more expensive than men’s, but the products themselves are different. And the paper was just a start. Tuchman’s new research studies the impact of New York’s pink tax ban, the first of its kind in the country. 

Policy and science 

U.S. congressional committees and think tanks have been using more science in their policy documents over the past 25 years. According to Dashun Wang’s 2025 study in Science, “Partisan disparities in the use of science in policy,” Wang and coauthors found that only about five percent of the science in these documents was cited by both Republicans and Democrats, underscoring a partisan divide between the type of science they rely on. 

A Q+ framework 

Rounding out the day’s talks, Associate Professor of Finance Nicolas Crouzet shared findings from his 2023 article in The Journal of Finance, “Rents and Intangible Capital: A Q+ Framework.” Coauthored with James R. and Helen D. Russell Professor of Finance Janice Eberly, the paper sought to develop a way to understand lackluster U.S. investment in recent years. Together, their work captured the effects of unmeasured capital, such as intangibles, and also the effect of rents.

Learn more from the conference by watching each presentation available online via YouTube.   

Read next: Kellogg Insight’s collection of stories based on presented papers.