Prior Affiliation Research Articles

Assessing Academic Preferential Hiring Practices in Highly Ranked Otolaryngology Departments.

Objective: To assess whether preferential hiring practices, particularly self-hiring, are present in academic otolaryngology departments. Setting: A list of academic Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery (O-HNS) departments ranked #1-40 was generated from the Doximity 2021 rankings. The educational background and training information of clinical faculty members and departmental leadership was extracted from each department's online directories. Methods: Descriptive statistics were used to examine inter/intradepartmental relationships and affiliations of included clinical faculty and departmental leadership based on current employment and medical training sites. A "prior affiliation ratio" was calculated to assess the degree of self-hiring and account for multiple possible prior affiliations (medical school, residency, and fellowship) by dividing all prior self-hired affiliations of faculty by the total number of faculty at each department. Results: A total of 1344 clinical faculty were identified, and 596 (44.35%) had at least 1 prior affiliation with their department. The overall prior affiliation ratio was 0.6, and 7 departments had a value >0.8, with the highest being 1.27 (>1.0 indicating multiple prior affiliations per individual such as both residency and fellowship). A network map of departments #1-10 showed heavy intradepartmental faculty recruitment with 24% of faculty having completed a #1-10 residency, 24% a #11-20 residency, 13% a #21-30 residency, and 11% a #31-40 residency. Totaling this data, 76% of faculty at departments ranked #1-10 had completed training at a program ranked #1-40. Furthermore, our data shows high rates of self-hiring among departmental leadership, (40% of Departmental Chairs and 62.5% of Program Directors) though rates are not significantly higher than self-hiring among faculty overall. Conclusion: The top 40 ranked O-HNS departments have high rates of self-hiring, relying on prestige of training programs and prior affiliation in hiring decisions. The effect on departmental productivity and training is unclear.

‘At the Edge of the Intactile Dark’: Gothic Minimalism in Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger and Stella Maris

ABSTRACT This article explores how Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger (2022) and Stella Maris (2022) cement a reliance on Gothic literary minimalism. Although minimalism and the Gothic are traditionally positioned as aesthetic opposites, with the former orientated toward stylistic sparsity and the latter an art of excess, I examine how both converge in these interconnected novels to further an affective atmosphere of lessness and loss. Recalling McCarthy’s prior affiliation with both aesthetic contexts, I argue that these novels consider the emptiness of genre and event via a pre-established aesthetic of Gothic minimalism borrowed from postwar American literary traditions to expose societal structures of exhaustion. Through a reading of McCarthy’s duology alongside key minimalists from the twentieth century including Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver, I suggest that this attenuation of the Gothic is symptomatic of a significant but unacknowledged affective tonality underpinning American minimalist writing.

Financial fraud and individual investment behavior

We show that, after the revelation of financial fraud in a major pension fund manager, two-thirds of affected investors fail to divest. Inert investors are on average younger, of lower SES and more influenced by default options. The majority of those who divest move their money to the only state-run option on the fund menu. The revelation of fraud also induces a small movement of investors from non-fraudulent private investment funds to the state alternative. We further show that most fraud victims end up in underperforming high-fee funds through their prior affiliation with a subscription-based financial advisor. Our analysis is based on the remarkable events surrounding the expulsion of Allra from the Swedish Premium Pension, and administrative, individual-level data on mutual fund choices and background characteristics. Our results illustrate that fraudulent fund managers may exploit widespread consumer biases in choice-oriented pension plans, and that information interventions by the government are important but far from fully effective in nudging victimized investors to take the right action. Pension plans may be characterized by investor inertia even under extreme circumstances such as fraud.

Determining Factors Affecting Adult Volunteerism in the Texas 4-H Program

Volunteers have always been essential to the success of 4-H youth development programs. However, the number of available volunteers has declined. Although this decline is not new, it is imperative to recruit and retain adult volunteers for youth programming. Researchers sought to describe characteristics of current Texas volunteers and identify motivational functions according to the Volunteer Functions Inventory (VFI). This descriptive study utilized enrolled volunteers in the Texas 4-H program, with responses from 1,225 individuals. Most volunteers were white, college educated, females, and had no prior affiliation with the program. Volunteers were mainly motivated by the values and understanding function. It was recommended information from volunteer demographics and identified motivations be used by extension volunteer administrators to more effectively recruit and retain volunteers for 4-H youth development programing.

Pre-entry Knowledge Context and Post-entry Firm Innovation

Knowledge contexts are the setting where founders develop informational advantages that serve as the basis for the formation of a new venture. When individuals depart an organization, such as incumbent firms or universities, to launch a new venture they are endowed with knowledge that reflects their prior affiliation and shapes the behavior and performance of their startups. Surprisingly, however, it remains unclear whether differences between the academic or industry knowledge context influences heterogeneity in how firms allocate resources to innovation. Using a sample of over 700 firms and 1,400 founders I address this gap using a mediation model. I find that in knowledge-intensive industries, academic and employee entrepreneurs both allocate substantial financial resources to innovation activities. However, I show that for academic spinouts the key driver of R&D expenditure is R&D employment intensity. In other words, academics form startups with more employees engaged in R&D than founders from other contexts. This reflects both their need to further incubate new technologies and their preference for a research-friendly organizational culture.

Do Backer Affiliations Help or Hurt Crowdfunding Success?

Crowdfunding has emerged as a mechanism to raise funds for entrepreneurial ideas. On crowdfunding platforms, backers (i.e., individuals who fund ideas) jointly fund the same idea, leading to affiliations, or overlaps, within the community. The authors find that while an increase in the total number of backers may positively affect funding behavior, the resulting affiliations affect funding negatively. They reason that when affiliated others fund a new idea, individuals may feel less of a need to fund, a process known as “vicarious moral licensing.” Drawing on data collected from 2,021 ideas on a prominent crowdfunding platform, the authors show that prior affiliation among backers negatively affects an idea’s funding amount and eventual funding success. Creator engagement (i.e., idea description and updates) and backer engagement (i.e., Facebook shares) moderate this negative effect. The effect of affiliation is robust across several instrumental variables, model specifications, measures of affiliation, and multiple crowdfunding outcomes. Results from three experiments, a survey, and interviews with backers support the negative effect of affiliation and show that it can be explained by vicarious moral licensing. The authors develop actionable insights for creators to mitigate the negative effects of affiliation with the language used in idea descriptions and updates.

Understanding knowledge brokerage and its transformative potential: a Bourdieusian perspective

Background:Knowledge brokering is promoted as a means of enabling exchange between fields and closer collaboration across institutional boundaries. Yet examples of its success in fostering collaboration and reconfiguring boundaries remain few. Aims and objectives:We consider the introduction of a dedicated knowledge-brokering role in a partnership across healthcare research and practice, with a view to examining the interaction between knowledge brokers’ location and attributes and the characteristics of the fields across which they work. Methods:We use qualitative data from a four-year ethnographic study, including observations, interviews, focus groups, reflective diaries and other documentary sources. Our analysis draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptual framework. Findings:In efforts to transform the boundaries between related but disjointed fields, a feature posited as advantageous – knowledge brokers’ liminality – may in practice work to their disadvantage. An unequal partnership between two fields, where the capitals (the resources, relationships, markers of prestige and forms of knowledge) valued in one are privileged over the other, left knowledge brokers without a prior affiliation to either field adrift between the two. Discussion and conclusions:Lacking legitimacy to act across fields and bridge the gap between them, knowledge brokers are likely to seek to develop their skills on one side of the boundary, focusing on more limited and conservative activities, rather than advance the value of a distinctive array of capitals in mediating between fields. We identify implications for the construction and deployment of knowledge-brokering interventions towards collaborative objectives.

45022 Exploring Career Development Needs of Junior Investigators in Clinical Translational Science

ABSTRACT IMPACT: By understanding Junior investigator characteristics and CTSA support services which strongly influence scientific productivity and impact, we will inform and improve research training and enhance the career development of future generations of clinical and translational science researchers. OBJECTIVES/GOALS: In the field of clinical and translational science, the career trajectory and definition of Junior Investigators (JIs) vary greatly. This study aims to investigate JI characteristics, training, and support that contribute to career development at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) Clinical and Translation Science Institute (CTSI). METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: Every 18 months, the UCLA CTSI administers the Longitudinal Scientific Achievement Survey, which collects information on the predictors of scientific productivity and impact. In 2018, a special supplement was added to survey JIs who received CTSA support between 2011 and 2017 (n=305), including questions on knowledge, use, and effectiveness of CTSA specific support, barriers and facilitators of research, scientific productivity, and perceived scientific impact. A literary analysis was conducted to explore previous categorizations of JIs. The JIs in our sample conducted bench to bedside, population and policy research at our four partner sites. Bivariate and logistic regression analysis were conducted to examine the significant predictors of a new grant award attributed to the CTSA support/services. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: The survey response rate was 82% (n=250). Respondents include core voucher co-investigators, enrollees in the Training Program in Translational Science, and K- and K-to-R workshop participants. Bivariate results showed new grant awardees significantly more likely to have the following characteristics: physician scientist with an MD and PhD (47%), pilot grant awardee (42%), core voucher awardee (49%), four or more types of CTSI support (48%), prior affiliation with an NIH institute/center other than NCATS (42%), and reported at least one impact in science, health, and/or the community (72%). Multivariate results showed that investigators with a prior core voucher award, a prior NIH affiliation, or reported one or more impacts were the strongest predictors of obtaining a new grant (each with OR>=4.0). DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF FINDINGS: The most successful investigators consulted with NIH program officers and received feedback on their research plans and methods. Sufficient funding is crucially important to research progression. In our CTSA hub, vouchers and grants to initiate new studies or offset costs of existing research are consistent predictors of new extramural funding.

Board members' influence on resource investments to start-ups and IPO outcomes: Does prior affiliation matter?

Using data that contains career paths of start-up board members, we examine how their prior affiliations with various types of venture capital (VC) firms promote financial and human resource investments from the affiliated VC firm. We find that the likelihood of affiliation-based resource investments such as financing and board member engagement depends on the type of VC firms (e.g., bank-affiliated, corporate). Meanwhile, we find little evidence that affiliation-based resource investments lead to lower IPO costs and better post-IPO performances (i.e., return on assets, buy-and-hold abnormal returns, and failure rate). While prior affiliation could improve the inflow of resources, it might worsen screening and monitoring activities.

Totally alive: the Wisconsin Uprising and the source of collective effervescence

Collective effervescence plays a foundational role in the generation of society. Both the canonical explication of this concept, Emile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life, and current literature on the topic, are unable to distinguish between two plausible causes of effervescence: shared affiliation or collective action. This study reports a case of collective effervescence in which much of the assembled group had no prior affiliation. This finding proves that shared affiliation is not a necessary condition for effervescence, and supplies evidence for the hypothesis that collective action, not shared affiliation per se, is the source of effervescence in general. The evidence is a detailed ethnographic and in-depth interview study of the Wisconsin Uprising of 2011.

Are all regulatory compliant independent director appointments the same? An analysis of Taiwanese board appointments

Globally many regulators adopted a rules-based approach to independent director appointments stipulating ‘independence’ criteria. This paper investigates whether partitioning a regulatory compliant sample of independent director appointments by prior affiliation to the board influences the relationship between ownership and control rights, and performance. We report a significant positive relationship between board independence and controlling shareholders' cash-flow rights for firms where the appointee had prior affiliation to the board, but no performance improvement. Firms where the regulatory compliant independent directors had no prior-affiliation to the board experienced significant improvement in firms' next period Return-on-Assets. Appointing affiliated directors is indicative diminished board quality, which is consistent with the empirical evidence that controlling shareholders determine board quality to accommodate tunneling to extract the private benefits of control to compensate for significant additional costs associated with concentrated ownership (Yeh and Woidtke, 2005; Luo et al., 2012; Liu et al., 2015). The positive association between performance and unaffiliated independent directors suggests a desire to introduce expertise to receive benefits via improved firm performance which is consistent with the literature, mostly from studies of emerging markets, reporting a causal link from independent directors to firm performance (Choi et al., 2007; Dahya et al. 2008; Liu et al., 2015).

The Effects of Manager-Auditor Affiliation and PCAOB Inspection Reports on Audit Committee Members' Auditor Selection

SUMMARY This article summarizes the “The Effects of Prior Manager-Auditor Affiliation and PCAOB Inspection Reports on Audit Committee Members' Auditor Recommendations” (Abbott, Brown, and Higgs 2016), who investigate the extent to which audit committee members (ACM) of small public companies consider auditors' Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) inspection reports and/or the auditors' prior affiliation with management in their auditor hiring decisions. The authors find participants (the study's proxy for ACM) incorporate the inspection report, as well as the auditor's prior affiliation with management into their selection decision. Specifically, an auditor's prior affiliation with management negatively impacts his/her chances of being selected by the audit committee. To the extent inspection results measure auditors' competence and prior affiliation with management measures auditor independence, the authors find auditor independence influences auditor selection decisions only when an auditor is deemed competent. In this paper, I discuss the implications of Abbott et al.'s (2016) findings for auditors, public companies, audit committees, and regulators/policymakers interested in understanding whether and how major aspects of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 are being implemented within corporate governance.

The Effects of Prior Manager-Auditor Affiliation and PCAOB Inspection Reports on Audit Committee Members' Auditor Recommendations

ABSTRACTThis study investigates (1) the extent to which audit committee members (ACM) of small publicly traded companies utilize Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) inspection reports in their auditor selection recommendations when management recommends hiring the auditor, and (2) whether the Sarbanes-Oxley Act's mandated one-year cooling-off period mitigates independence concerns of ACM resulting from a prior management-auditor affiliation in the same auditor selection context. We use financially literate professional participants as proxies for ACM who make a Likert-scale based recommendation for hiring the auditor. Our study manipulates a hypothetical, triennially inspected auditor's inspection results (favorable/unfavorable) as an auditor competence indicator and a prior management-auditor affiliation (present/absent) as an auditor independence indicator. We document that participants incorporate the inspection results into their selection recommendations, that prior affiliation negatively impacts ACMs' selection recommendations, and that auditor independence effects are contingent upon auditor competence. More specifically, auditor independence impacts auditor selection decisions only when auditor competence is favorable.

Between Capture and Discretion - The Determinants of Distressed Bank Treatment and Expected Government Support

In this paper, we analyze how sources of political influence relate to the actual regulatory treatment of distressed banks and to the expectation of bank support provided by the government. We assemble a unique dataset that links U.S. banks' sources of influence (e.g., lobbying expenditures, proximity to the relevant legislative committee, prior affiliation with regulatory or government institutions) to bank financial data, actual bank supervisory actions, and market-inferred expected government support. Employing this novel data, we cast some light on how regulatory decision making is affected by these sources of influence. Our findings suggest that banks' influence matters for the regulatory treatment of distressed banks, as well as for the expectation of support regardless of bank distress. Several conditions increase the effectiveness of sources of influence in actual regulatory treatment: Lobbying activities are more effective with increasing lobbying expenditures, deteriorating capital ratios, and with the aid of former politicians. In addition, the effectiveness of proximity to representatives of the relevant legislative committee increases with the amount of campaign contributions from the financial industry. However, there seems to be a limit to the impact of influence when it comes to closure decisions of the most severely distressed banks. Our findings are instructive for understanding the political influence banks can leverage on shaping regulatory decisions and propose increased attention to the relations between legislators, regulators, and banks.

In the Blood: Organizational History and the Heritability of New Venture Performance

A growing literature on the genealogy of new firms has demonstrated a powerful link between the career history of founding teams and the future performance of the organizations they create. Yet there is no consensus on what historically contingent material individuals actually carry from one organization to another, as well as a lack of theory about how such material is transferred from one organization to another. By examining the pathways by which genealogy is transmitted through the action of individuals to new firms, and combining that with an empirical analysis of over 250 new firms in the computer game industry, this paper seeks to shed additional light on the linkage between genealogy and new venture performance. I conclude that the entrepreneurial prominence of a founder’s prior affiliation, as opposed to the founder’s prior routines and industry knowledge, transfers from individuals to new ventures, and has a persistent effect on new venture performance.

Cross-species common regulatory network inference without requirement for prior gene affiliation

Cross-species meta-analyses of microarray data usually require prior affiliation of genes based on orthology information that often relies on sequence similarity. We present an algorithm merging microarray datasets on the basis of co-expression alone, without any requirement for orthology information to affiliate genes. Combining existing methods such as co-inertia analysis, back-transformation, Hungarian matching and majority voting in an iterative non-greedy hill-climbing approach, it affiliates arrays and genes at the same time, maximizing the co-structure between the datasets. To introduce the method, we demonstrate its performance on two closely and two distantly related datasets of different experimental context and produced on different platforms. Each pair stems from two different species. The resulting cross-species dynamic Bayesian gene networks improve on the networks inferred from each dataset alone by yielding more significant network motifs, as well as more of the interactions already recorded in KEGG and other databases. Also, it is shown that our algorithm converges on the optimal number of nodes for network inference. Being readily extendable to more than two datasets, it provides the opportunity to infer extensive gene regulatory networks. Source code (MATLAB and R) freely available for download at http://www.mchips.org/supplements/moghaddasi_source.tgz.

Measuring Managerial Efficiency in South African Soccer

Direct measurement of managerial performance in firms is often problematic and is compounded by the problem of unobservable action in organisations. However, in the South African football association, unobservable action is unlikely to be a significantly important problem because the manager’s performance is observed by the owner of the club each time the team plays (at least once per week during the on-season period). In this situation, the production frontier analysis lends itself to being used to measure managerial performance (efficiency) and analyse the variation in efficiency across managers in terms of manager human capital. The results suggest that having some kind of prior affiliation with the club and achieving international recognition as a player is especially important. Overall, it is initial experience that counts more than specific and general managerial experience.

Employees' Prior Affiliations Constrain Organizational Network Change: Evidence from U.S. Venture Capital and Private Equity

I theorize that in order to alleviate information asymmetries organizations embed both employment relationships and inter-organizational relationships in their employees’ prior education and employment affiliations. Analyses of employment and investment data from U.S. venture capital and private equity firms support the theory. First, increasing educational prestige differentials decrease both inter-individual co-employment rates and inter-organizational co-investment rates. Second, two individuals who share a prior education or a prior employment affiliation are more likely to be employed by the same organization than are two individuals who do not share such an affiliation. Third, the likelihood of two organizations forming a co-investment relationship increases with the number of prior education or employment affiliations shared by their employees. I propose that these tendencies constrain inter-organizational network change by stabilizing advantaged organizations’ positions and limiting disadvantaged organizations’ positional mobility. Implications for studies of network evolution and socioeconomic inequality are discussed.

Experimental evidence of how prior experience as an auditor influences managers’ strategic reporting decisions

We design an experiment to examine the influence of audit experience on subsequent reporting decisions when auditors become managers of audited firms. In contrast to the independence issues that can arise when auditors and their clients are related by prior affiliation, we focus this study on the more common case in which auditors assume subsequent employment with other firms’ clients. In a bi-matrix experimental game that captures key features of the strategic tension between auditors and reporters, we find that reporters who have prior experience as an auditor, particularly the experience of having been a diligent auditor, are more sensitive to large penalties for aggressive reporting than are reporters whose experience is exclusively as a reporter. Our results suggest implications for regulators in predicting the effects of reporting penalties and for firms in considering the effects of CPA experience when hiring for reporting positions.

Experimental Evidence of How Prior Experience as an Auditor Influences Managers' Strategic Reporting Decisions

We design an experiment to examine the influence of prior audit experience on subsequent reporting decisions when auditors become managers of audited firms. In contrast to the independence issues that can arise when auditors and their clients are related by prior affiliation, we focus this study on the more common case in which auditors assume subsequent employment with other firms' clients. In a bi-matrix experimental game that captures key features of the tension between auditors and reporters, we find that reporters who have experience as an auditor are more sensitive to large penalties for misreporting than are reporters who have the same amount of experience exclusively in the reporter role. This finding is particularly strong among reporters who were relatively diligent in their former role as auditors. These results suggest implications for regulators in predicting the effects of changes in the consequences of aggressive reporting behavior, and for firms in deciding whether to employ individuals who have CPA experience in positions with corporate reporting responsibility.