CESB Research

A goal for the Center for Ethical & Sustainable Business (CESB) is to promote research that investigates how to better address ethical, environmental, and social sustainable concerns in business practice.  

 Faculty who do research (or would like to) in the UN's SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) may also wish to make use of the following crowd-sourced spreadsheet on relevant conferences, special issues, and like resources.

The Center has also encouraged LFCoB faculty to write cases and promote their published cases. Here is a list of cases published by LFCoB faculty- and if you've published something, please add your contribution as well.

CESB Research Awards

2023 CESB Research Award Recipients

In our second research award competition in 2023, we once again asked the LFCoB faculty, “Have you recently published a paper that has—or will—make a practical impact in addressing an ethical, environmental or social justice problem?”

Our faculty rose to the challenge yet again, and we are proud to present the 2023 recipients of the CESB Research Awards, in alphabetical order.

Michael Bar, Professor and Chair of Economics

Michael Bar used the 2019 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) dataset to measure racial bias in residential loan approval across the 20 largest mortgage-granting institutions in the US. In stark contrast to previous work, which lumped all lenders together, this paper ranks the top lenders according to the degree of their race “discrimination”, and provides guidance for regulators on how to prioritize their fair-lending reviews.

John Logan, Professor and Chair of Labor & Employment Studies

John Logan’s most recent labor study explores how labor unions may be experiencing a renewal in the post-pandemic economy and has already received numerous mentions in the popular press and media. He was nearly invited by Bernie Sanders’ staffer to testify at a Senate Labor Committee hearing.

  • Logan, John. “A Model for Labor’s Renewal? The Starbucks Campaign,”  New Labor Forum, 32(1), Winter 2023, 87-97: 

Antoaneta Petkova, Professor of Management

Smita Trivedi and Antoaneta Petkova jointly examine the processes and mechanisms through which entrepreneurship leads to the empowerment and emancipation of women living in poverty. They identify specific activities through which emancipatory entrepreneuring manifests itself in the context of women’s entrepreneurship in India.

  • Trivedi, S. K., & Petkova, A. P. 2022. Women Entrepreneur Journeys from Poverty to Emancipation. Journal of Management Inquiry, 31(4): 358–385. 

Smita Trivedi, Associate Professor of Management

Smita Trivedi 's contribution is described above as she has jointly written a paper with Antoaneta Petkova.

Lihua Wang, Professor of International Business

Food safety has been a critical social problem in Mainland China and Taiwan. Lihua Wang and her coauthors study how two social enterprises in the food safety sector gain legitimacy across developmental stages when the institutional environments are underdeveloped.

  • Chen, X., He, Y., Wang, L., Xiong, J., & Jiang, R. (2022). The legitimization process of social enterprises across developmental stages: two case studies. Journal of Business Research, 148, 203–215.

2022 CESB Research Award Recipients

In our inaugural research award competition in 2022, we asked the LFCoB faculty, “Have you recently published a paper that has—or will—make a practical impact in addressing an ethical, environmental or social justice problem?”

Our faculty rose to the challenge, and we are proud to present the 2022 recipients of the CESB Research Awards, in alphabetical order.

Venoo Kakar, Associate Professor of Economics

Professor Venoo Kakar studies the systemic disparities in contraceptive/reproductive health information available to students at their university health centers in the following publication.  Her work reveals important systemic gaps, especially at universities that serve nontraditional or vulnerable groups as well as based on university location, as this seen in this interactive map.

  • Kakar, Venoo, Anagha Kulkarni, Carrie Holschuh, Anastasia Smirnova, and Sepideh Modrek. "Contraception Information on the Websites of Student Health Centers in the United States." Contraception (2022).

John Logan, Professor and Chair of Labor Studies & Employment Studies

Professor John Logan’s labor study has received numerous mentions in the popular press and media, including HBO’s John Oliver Show:

  • Logan, John. "Crushing Unions, by Any Means Necessary: How Amazon’s Blistering Anti-Union Campaign Won in Bessemer, Alabama." New Labor Forum. Vol. 30. No. 3. Sage CA: Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications, 2021.

Sepideh Modrek, Associate Professor of Economics

Professor Sepideh Modrek provided two recent publications that address social justice issues as follows: racial disparities in access to wealth make it more difficult for families of color to absorb the financial shock of taking unpaid time off to care for a newborn. Second, due to the distribution of the types of work by race, families of color may face job insecurity for taking time off to care for a newborn:

  • Irish A, White J, Modrek S, Hamad R. Effects of paid family leave policy on child and parent mental health: A quasi-experimental study. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 2021; 61:182-191.  
  • Lee B, Modrek S, White JS, Batra A, Collin DF, Hamad R. The Effect of California's Paid Family Leave Policy on Parent Health: A Quasi-Experimental Study. Social Science & Medicine, 2020; 251: 112915. 

Lufei Ruan, Associate Professor of Accounting

Professor Lufei Ruan makes a practical impact in addressing an ethical problem in that her publication documents how auditing combats firm-level corruption:

  • Ruan, Lufei, and Haiyan Zhang. "Do auditors consider alleged bribery when accepting clients? Evidence from Chinese non-state-owned enterprises." Accounting and Business Research 51.6-7 (2021): 744-776.

Dayna Walker, Assistant Professor of Management

Professor Dayna Walker’s findings suggest that to build ethical and developmental workplaces, leaders and organizations should pay more attention to implicit assumptions about followership instead of focusing only on explicit leadership behaviors

  • Yip, J., & Walker, D. O. (2021). Leaders mentoring others: the effects of implicit followership theory on leader integrity and mentoring. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, Advance Online Publication.