PHD Publications

This dissertation focuses on organizations’ use of collective resources which are shared with other organizations, including competitors. Specifically, this work examines the interactions between cooperative organizational forms – which are relying on shared resources – and other resources, whether collective or not (e.g. privately owned resources, Common-Pool Resources, public resources), and the consequences for firm performance. The first chapter investigates members defection from cooperatives, and explores retention practices cooperatives can adopt to retain these members. It relies on proprietary data from a prominent wine cooperative in France. While the first chapter examines reasons for members within a cooperative to discontinue using shared resources, the locus of study shifts in the second chapter to explore industry-wide factors that may influence the utilization of shared resources. Specifically, it delves into the role of Common-Pool Resources (CPRs or Commons) in this decision. The second chapter thus examines how collective resources within cooperatives may conflict with CPRs and undermine each other. The identification strategy relies on an instrumental variable thanks to hand-collected data on AOC in France and geographic data on fruit production in France which is paired with confidential data from the French Customs Authorities. Building on the second chapter's exploration of CPRs, the third chapter redefines performance in contexts where such commons are at risk of depletion. It explores how non-exploitation of resources can indicate performance for firms. This dissertation contributes significantly to both theory and empirical strategy research, while simultaneously offering practical implications for practitioners. The theoretical contribution of this dissertation lies in providing new insights on cooperative structures from a strategic perspective, as well as deepening our understanding of the importance of collective resources on firms’ strategy. Empirically, this dissertation employs original and fine-grained data not previously used in management sciences and provides a robust causal identification method. Furthermore, the inclusion of geographic data introduces a promising new data source for research in strategy and business policy, enabling a better understanding of organizations and their interactions within their local contexts.

Abstract : This thesis predominantly delves into what motivates social media users' interactions (the antecedents), what determines patterns of different users' activities (the content), what influences the effectiveness of social media activities (the implementation), and what determines the outcomes of those activities (the consequences).Keywords: social media platform, influencer marketing, online community

This thesis explores the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on human work. It consists of three essays that investigate the influence of exposure to AI on creative work, the interaction between an algorithm's prescriptive authority and human uniqueness beliefs, and how humanness perceptions are established in opposition to AI. In the first essay, I show that exposure to AI impacts creative work differently than non-creative work, and that creative effort increases only when a schema violation event takes place. In the second essay, I propose a theoretical distinction between a prescriptive and a suggestive algorithm and find that in high human uniqueness contexts, people are as reluctant and critical of algorithmic suggestions as they are of prescriptions. In the third essay I develop the concept of situated humanness that recognizes the dynamic and contextually determined qualities that differentiate humans from AI and discussed its implications for organizational processes and outcomes. Overall, this thesis contributes to the understanding of how people interact and collaborate with AI in organizational settings, highlighting the importance of context and perceptions in shaping these interactions Kaywords: Artificial intelligence, humanness, creativity, human uniqueness Abstract:

This thesis is made of three distinct chapters that investigate innovation and human capital in the investment management industry. The first chapter studies the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) by venture capitalists (VCs) to screen startups and shows how it affects the funding of early-stage companies. The second chapter focuses on the mobility of fund managers across mutual fund firms and shows that it plays an important role in the efficient allocation of capital within the mutual fund industry. The third chapter, joint with Anastasia Buyalskaya and Tianhao Yao, explores product differentiation in the mutual fund industry and shows how funds with low quality can still compete for investors by choosing to be more differentiated and cater to a smaller set of consumers.Keywords: investment management, innovation, human capital, technology, venture capital, mutual funds

Purpose-driven companies propose to reintroduce morality at the most foundational level of organizations and suggest new articulation between businesses, societies and the environment. This dissertation examines the consequences of the moral dimension that a corporate purpose induces. I highlight that the moral dimension of a corporate purpose shapes firm members’ legitimacy judgments on the purpose-driven company. In turn, firm members’ legitimacy judgments impact firm performance.Keywords: Corporate Purpose, Legitimacy judgments, Morality, Corporate Social Responsibility

Professional investors advertise some of their investment ideas to other investors at investment conferences, on social media, or on their own website. In doing so, they disseminate various arguments and estimates to support their stock recommendations. In this thesis, I document the nature of professional investors’ equity research and examine the economic implications by particularly focusing on the unique role of target prices. In the first essay, I study whether the stock ownership of fund managers improves or impairs the informativeness of their equity research disclosed at investment conferences. Overall, I find that fund managers’ ownership improves the informativeness of their equity research. However, as fund managers’ incentives are uncertain and they sometimes trade against their own stock recommendations and target prices, investors learn and discount their equity research. In the second and third essays, I restrict my analysis to equity research disclosed by activist short sellers. In the second essay, I examine activist short sellers’ target prices and find that they are pessimistically biased, but informative, as they predict future returns in various windows. Target prices are informative, as activist short sellers have reputation concerns and target prices are summary statistics of their investment theses. Finally, I find that including target prices accelerates price discovery, that activist short sellers exhibit differential abilities to forecast stock prices, and that retail investors seem not to understand the informativeness of activist short sellers’ target prices. In the third essay, I investigate how earnings announcements are critical events for activist short sellers and attacked firms. On the one hand, I find that activist short sellers use investors’ fixation on earnings and increase their Twitter activity at earnings announcements. On the other hand, I provide evidence that attacked firms manage earnings to deter short sellers from disclosing allegations and reclaim the control of the investment narrative surrounding their stock. Keywords: Professional investors, Stock recommendations, Target prices, Short selling, Narratives, Stock ownership.

The thesis contains three essays. In the first essay, I investigate whether ESG environmental, social and governance) education promotes ESG awareness and affects job choices. Exploiting the radual introduction of mandatory ESG courses in MBA curricula, I find that students who have taken mandatory ESG courses change their careers to work at firms with better ESG performance and in more sustainable sectors. School-level wages decrease after the introduction of mandatory ESG courses. Graduates with ESG education are more likely to state ESG concerns on their CVs, and are less (more) likely to leave better (worse) ESG-performing companies. My results imply that ESG teaching affects how students trade off pecuniary benefits and externalities, and thereby affects the matching between employees and firms. In the second essay, I investigate how sell-side analysts adjust their earnings forecasts following negative ESG incidents. I find that after learning about negative ESG news, analysts significantly downgrade their earnings forecasts over all horizons, including long-term horizons. Negative ESG incidents affect earnings forecasts at longer horizons than other types of corporate incidents. The negative revisions of earnings forecasts reflect expectations of lower future sales (rather than higher future costs). Forecast revisions explain most of the negative impacts of ESG incidents on firm value. In the third essay, I study product differentiation in the mutual fund industry. I design a model in which funds with heterogeneous perceived quality can choose their level of product differentiation. In equilibrium, high quality funds choose broad market designs appealing to many investors, while low quality funds adopt niche designs that investors either love or loath. Using as a measure of fund differentiation the degree of textual uniqueness of investment strategy description in fund prospectuses, I confirm empirically that funds with lower expected performance tend to differentiate more. I use the issuance of Morningstar rating as an exogenous shock to perceived quality to show the effect is causal.Key words: Sustainable Finance, ESG, Mututal Funds.

Three chapters are included in my dissertation. These three chapters concern the interplay between national security policies and corporate behavior. The first chapter focuses on corporate investment. The second chapter examines financial analysts behavior. The third chapter investigates information exchanges within the sovereign debt market. This dissertation sheds new light on the consequences of this relevant but unexplored policy area.