Topic: Business & Public Policy

Chain of Command

Fall 2021|By KATHLEEN PENDER| PHOTO: CHRISTOPHE COAT/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

How chain stores influenced small businesses during COVID

Sign on a window that says, "Sorry we're closed due to coronavirus."

Since the pandemic began, local shops, restaurants, and other small businesses have struggled with how best to respond to the ever-changing crisis.

Haas researchers have found that when it came to daily closures, big chains set the tone: In the pandemic’s first few weeks, local businesses not affiliated with a chain were more likely to close their doors if competing chain outlets in the same ZIP code shut theirs.

The study, published in Management Science, focused on service-oriented businesses, such as retail shops, restaurants, movie theaters, and gyms, and excluded essential industries, such as grocery stores and gas stations.

The researchers—Assistant Professors Mathijs de Vaan and Abhishek Nagaraj; Associate Professor Sameer Srivastava, the Ewald T. Grether Chair in Business Administration and Public Policy; and PhD student Saqib Mumtaz— used anonymized cellphone-tracking data to determine whether 230,403 local businesses in the same ZIP codes as 319 national chain establishments were open or closed each day between March 1, 2020, just before local governments began issuing stay-at-home orders, and April 15, 2020.

Nationwide, if a chain store closed one day, a competing community business in the same ZIP code was, on average, 3.5% more likely to close the next day. That may not sound like a lot, but that’s just the daily level. “If you accumulate 3.5% across days and establishments and places, it adds up to be a fairly consequential effect in a town that may have hundreds of businesses,” Srivastava says.

While the focus was on closures, the researchers say the lessons are applicable to more current questions, such as whether to impose mask or vaccine mandates or let employees work from home.

Under the Influence

Fall 2021|By Michael Blanding| ILLUSTRATION: BRIAN STAUFFER

Strategic corporate donations can sway nonprofits and public policy

Illustration of a hand of a person wearing a business suit with finger puppets on all five fingers. The puppets are calling for some sort of action, denoting corporate influence.

In 2003, the Coca-Cola Foundation announced a $1 million donation to the American Association of Pediatric Dentistry, supposedly to improve child dental health. Shortly after receiving the philanthropic gift, the kids’ dental group changed its stance on sugary beverages, no longer calling them a “significant factor” in causing cavities but instead saying the scientific evidence was “not clear.”

Coincidence? According to new Berkeley Haas research, back-door corporate influence peddling through nonprofit donations is both common and effective.

In work for the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Associate Professor Matilde Bombardini; Professor Francesco Trebbi, the B. T. Rocca Jr. Chair in International Trade; and others provide the first systematic evidence that nonprofits change their stances in response to corporate donations, and government agencies change their rules alongside them.

Comparing data for rules posted by the federal government since 2003 with donations filed with the Internal Revenue Service, they found nonprofits are 76% more likely to comment on a proposed rule in the year after receiving a donation from a corporation that commented on the same rule. Using natural language processing, they found that the comment by the nonprofit was significantly closer to the corporation’s language after receiving a donation—and, even more alarmingly, that the language the government used in changing its proposed rule also became more similar.

“They are distorting the information policy makers receive,” says Bombardini. Nonprofits are often seen as speaking up for citizens or the environment, so “if the message from the nonprofit and the firm are the same, policy makers might weight that position more heavily.” To counteract that distortion, the researchers suggest that nonprofits commenting on a rule be required to disclose any donations from corporations potentially affected by that rule.

‘A giant of a person’: Economist John Morgan dies at 53

| by Laura Counts

Professor John Morgan, an economist who found elegant new ways to analyze the world through the lens of game theory, and whose popular classes and sage mentorship made a deep impression on his students, passed away Oct. 6 at age 53. He died peacefully at his Walnut Creek home.

Headshot of Professor John Morgan
Professor John Morgan

During his nearly two decades at Berkeley Haas, Morgan left his mark through his prolific and wide-ranging research, his unconventional teaching that drew on strategy games he invented, and his generous leadership. He had been struggling with a painful autoimmune disease that put him on medical leave, but he continued with his research and had planned to resume teaching in the spring.

“It’s impossible to over-express what a force John was in this school, and it didn’t take long for anyone who met him to realize that his small physical stature was a disguise for the giant of a person he was,” said Prof. Steve Tadelis, a close colleague in the Economic Analysis & Policy Group. “We have great researchers, we have great teachers, and we have people who give freely of themselves. But I cannot think of a single person who embodies all three of these at the extreme levels that John did.”

It’s impossible to over-express what a force John was in this school… —Prof. Steve Tadelis

 

Morgan was the Oliver E. and Dolores W. Williamson Chair of the Economics of Organizations; co-director of the Fisher Information Technology Center; founding director of the Experimental Social Sciences Laboratory (XLab); a member of the California Management Review editorial board; and faculty director and tireless advocate for Berkeley Executive Education. In 2013, he was the inaugural winner of the Williamson Award, given to faculty who embody the school’s four Defining Leadership Principles. He also won the Cheit Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2006.

Professor John Morgan writing on a whiteboard.
Morgan teaching at the whiteboard in 2011. (Photo: Jim Block)

Pennsylvania native

Born on November 11, 1967, in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., Morgan was raised in Ashley, Pa. He met his future wife, Heather Evans, when they were teenagers working at the Osterhout Free Library in Wilkes-Barre. They went to different high schools but both attended the University of Pennsylvania, where Morgan graduated summa cum laude in economics from the Wharton School in 1989. The couple was married in 1991, and celebrated their 30th anniversary in August.

Morgan earned a PhD in economics from Pennsylvania State University in 1996 and landed an assistant professorship in economics and public affairs at Princeton University. Following stints as a visiting professor at Penn and New York University, and a visiting fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, he joined Berkeley Haas in 2002. During his career at Berkeley, he also spent time as a visiting fellow, Trinity College, and an eternal fellow, Judge Business School, both at the University of Cambridge, U.K.

His doctoral thesis was an early example of his elegant reasoning, colleagues said. “Financing Public Goods by Means of Lottery” showed why, despite their reputation as regressive, lotteries are a very effective method of raising funds for public benefit: Unlike taxes, they are voluntary, and those who are paying have the chance to get some of the benefit distributed back to them.

Academic derring-do

Among the areas Morgan delved into were pricing and competition in online markets, auctions, expertise, reputations, and voting. He looked at why prices can vary so widely on the internet when it’s so easy to shop around; showed that people aren’t very good at accounting for hidden fees like shipping costs; and even had a paper on the economics of psych-outs, or why showing off can make competitive sense, despite being frowned upon.

No matter the topic, Morgan had an exceptional ability to dispassionately analyze problems, colleagues said. And while his brilliance with economic models stood out, he also loved experimental work, co-founding the Haas Xlab to allow researchers to see if their theories held up in practice.

“I wished we could bottle John, and give every economist a dose of his clear thinking,” said Prof. David Levine, chair of the Economic Analysis & Policy Group, who had been working with Morgan to return to the classroom in the spring. “He thought about ethics. He took the perspectives of other people. He was smarter than me—in fact, he was smarter than just about everyone.”

According to Tadelis, Morgan’s “rate of publication was second to none” before his illness took a toll. Levine was among several colleagues who commented on Morgan’s academic derring-do, which stood out even at an elite institution. “Sometimes his brilliance was intimidating—for example, the time he had two different articles in the same issue of the preeminent economics journal, the American Economic Review,” Levine said.

Prof. Ernesto Dal Bó, a political economist, often discussed voting theories with Morgan. “I enjoyed a front-row seat as he wrote really clever models investigating the informational and welfare properties of important voting institutions,” Dal Bó said. “John’s mathematical models of voting often delivered surprise, and always delivered significant truth and beauty. He was a uniquely gifted researcher who made those around him think much harder, while cheering us up with his wit.”

Mentor and father figure

Those qualities also made an impression on the doctoral students who sought him out for his attentive mentorship and unique approach to life and work.

“Conversing with him was like being on an adventure. He would throw himself at intellectual challenges and follow them wherever they went, and he was willing to challenge convention and be controversial on certain topics.” said Bo Cowgill, PhD 15, now an assistant professor at Columbia University. “On top of that he was hilarious—he could bring down the house with his mixture of humor and insights and game theory and economics.”

He was devoted to his students, a number of whom became good friends and repeated co-authors after they graduated.

“He would generously give his time to PhD students. He put in the hard work to make them better—and they did quite well on the job market,” Cowgill said. “Yet he also cared about things outside of academic success and climbing the career ladder. He would encourage students to take time for their mental health and their lives outside of their careers. He was like a father figure, or a mentor for questions about life.”

Morgan sometimes offered his own money as prizes for students who won his strategy games.

“Survivor” at Haas

Morgan taught strategy, leadership, microeconomics and policy, and his long-running game theory class was one of the most popular at Haas. He blasted rock music to welcome students to class and energize them for competition in his signature strategy games, which he eventually incorporated into a semester-long game based on the reality TV show Survivor. He said his goal was to teach students to be “outward thinkers,” by which he meant they would need to be able to relate to others to succeed in business.

“You don’t really learn how to empathize by having some professor tell you about the need to empathize. It’s like reading a self-help book. It doesn’t work. You actually have to do it,” he said.

He received awards from the National Science Foundation, and was selected as a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution and the International Monetary Fund. He consulted on auctions and dynamic pricing for Google, was a research scientist at Yahoo!, and served as a consultant to the Federal Trade Commission.

“We will dearly miss John’s sharp wit, brilliant intellect, and personal warmth,” said Dean Ann Harrison. “He was greatly beloved by colleagues and students alike.”

Devoted family man

John Morgan wearing a Red Sox shirt
Morgan was a passionate fan of the Boston Red Sox.

Yet Morgan had another side, as a grounded and devoted husband to Heather, an enthusiastic father to his son. He also pursued many non-academic interests. “John was a brilliant, loving, quirky, wonderful man who never had just hobbies; they always became obsessions,” said Heather Morgan. He had a deep and wide-ranging knowledge of history, which he loved to share. He also loved golf, travel, and hiking, as well as fountain pen collecting, photography, drawing, watercolor, and painting miniatures for strategy board games and Dungeons & Dragons. (For many years, he ran a weekly D&D game for his son and friends.) He was also an enormous fan of the Boston Red Sox, and he shared a love of the Oakland A’s and fantasy sports with his son.

In addition to his wife and son, Aidan, Morgan is survived by his mother, Diana Williams Morgan, of Wilkes-Barre, Pa.; father, Roy J. Morgan, Zephyrhills, Fl.; brother, David W. Morgan (Julie), Longwood, Fl.; aunt, Maxine Williams, Ashley, Pa.; nieces and nephews, and brothers and sisters-in-law. Plans for a memorial are still being discussed. Donations in John’s memory may be made to the American Autoimmune Related Diseases Association (AARDA) or The Humane Society of the United States.

 

 

 

 

Study shows how corporations influence policy through nonprofit donations

|By Michael Blanding
Photo: View of the U.S. Capitol. (Credit: Matt Anderson for iStock/Getty)

In 2003, the Coca-Cola Foundation announced a $1 million donation to the American Association of Pediatric Dentistry, supposedly to “improve child dental health.” Shortly after receiving the gift, the children’s dental group changed its stance on sugary beverages, no longer calling them a “significant factor” in causing cavities, but instead saying the scientific evidence was “not clear.”

Coincidence? A study co-authored by Berkeley Haas researchers provides the first convincing evidence that not only do nonprofits change their stances in response to corporate donations, but that government agencies change their rules alongside them.

“If it had no impact, why would corporations do it?” said study co-author Matilde Bombardini, associate professor of Business and Public Policy at the Haas School of Business. “The bigger question has been whether you have evidence showing that impact.”

Published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the paper shows that corporate influence peddling through nonprofit donations is effective in influencing policy. The authors include Francesco Trebbi of Berkeley Haas, Marianne Bertrand of Chicago Booth, Raymond Fisman of Boston University, and Brad Hackinen of Western University Ivey School of Business (Canada).

Influencing rules and regulations

The thousands of government rules and regulations governing corporate behavior may seem obscure at times, but they have direct impact on people’s lives, Bombardini says. “They cover the environment, highways, aviation, health—issues that are very, very close to consumers and workers.”

As policies are hashed out, nonprofits often play an important role, balancing corporate interests by speaking on behalf of citizens and the environment. But what happens when they start speaking on behalf of their corporate donors instead? The researchers scraped data for hundreds of thousands of rules, proposed rules, and comments posted by the federal government since 2003 and compared those rules with detailed data on corporate foundations grants filed with the Internal Revenue Service.

Similarities in language

They found a direct correlation between donations and the likelihood that nonprofits spoke up about a rule: A nonprofit was 76% more likely to comment on a proposed rule in the year after it received a donation from a corporation commenting on the same rule. And frequency wasn’t the only thing connected to money. The researchers used natural language processing to compare comments from the donor companies and the nonprofits, and found that after a nonprofit received a donation, the language it used in its comments was significantly closer to the language used by the company.

In addition, the language the government used in describing how and why the rule changed also became more similar to the corporate line—implying that regulators weighted the comments by the nonprofit more heavily in their deliberation process. “At a minimum, regulators are paying more attention to what the firm has to say, and devoting more time towards discussing the same kinds of issues the firm was discussing in their letters,” said Bombardini.

Adding transparency

While it certainly appears that companies are “buying” favorable comments to help their case, the researchers allow that it’s possible they are just funding nonprofits that already agree with them, allowing the nonprofits more resources for public advocacy. That distinction hardly matters in the outcome, however. “Either way, they are distorting the information policy makers receive,” said Bombardini. “If officials are looking for signals from different players in society, and the message from the nonprofit and the firm are the same, they might weight that position more heavily, not realizing that the two are linked.”

In order to counteract that distortion, the researchers propose a simple rule requiring all nonprofits to disclose any donations they receive from corporations that could be potentially affected by a rule on which they are commenting. Such a guideline wouldn’t necessarily lead regulators to discount the nonprofits’ points of view, but it might cause them to take it with a grain of salt, properly weighting its value. “We’re not saying all of these donations are nefarious—there might be a good reason why a nonprofit adopts a certain view,” said Bombardini. “We are advocating to make it all more transparent, so the public and the agencies know where the funding is coming from.”

Small businesses follow big chains’ lead on pandemic closures, research finds

|By Kathleen Pender
Closed due to coronavirus
Photo: Gwengoat for Getty Images

From the earliest days of the coronavirus pandemic, local shops, restaurants, and other small business have struggled with how best to respond to the ever-changing crisis.

A new Berkeley Haas study found that when it came to closures, the big chains set the tone: In the first few weeks of the pandemic, local businesses not affiliated with a chain were more likely to close their doors if competing chain outlets in the same ZIP code shut theirs.

The study, based on cell-phone location data and published in the journal Management Science, sheds light on how businesses influence each other through “social learning.”

And while the focus was on business closures, “the key lessons are applicable to some of the questions businesses are grappling with now,” such as whether to impose mask or vaccine mandates or let employees work from home, said co-author Mathijs de Vaan, an assistant professor of management at Berkeley Haas.

The researchers, who included Berkeley Haas professors Sameer Srivastava and Abhishek Nagaraj along with PhD student Saqib Mumtaz, used anonymized cell-phone tracking data to determine whether local and chain establishments were open or closed each day between March 1, 2020— just before local governments began issuing stay-at-home orders—and April 15, 2020.

“Many of these directives were ambiguous or not enforced, leaving business owners with latitude to interpret the guidance as they see fit,” the authors noted.

Business owners had to make unprecedented closure decisions not knowing how their customers and employees would react. The situation was so uncertain that going into the experiment, the team couldn’t predict whether the closure of a chain store would cause an independent business nearby to do the same or remain open for competitive reasons.

“If I’m a small business owner, it’s not so straightforward what I should do,” de Vaan said. “If the big guy stays closed, maybe I can make more money. Conversely, maybe the big guy is better equipped to know” the right response.

The researchers analyzed daily visits to 230,403 local businesses that were in the same industries and ZIP codes as chain outlets affiliated with 319 large national brands. They focused on service-oriented outfits such as retail shops, restaurants, movie theaters, and gyms, and excluded industries deemed essential, such as grocery stores and gas stations.

The team tried to control for other local variables that could cause establishments to close, such as shelter-in-place orders, local infection rates, or demographics. “Interestingly, we found the decisions of these branded chains were uncorrelated with the local Covid conditions,” de Vaan said.

In a typical example, the researchers looked at fitness centers in two neighboring ZIP codes in Collin County, Texas, on March 25, 2020. One ZIP code had an Orangetheory chain gym that was closed, while the other had an Anytime Fitness chain location that was open. They found that all six local gyms in the same ZIP code as the closed Orangetheory were closed, while three out of five local establishments in the same ZIP code as the Anytime Fitness were also open.

Looking at all industries and locations nationwide, they estimated that if a chain store closed one day, a competing community business in the same ZIP code was, on average, 3.5% more likely to close the next day. That may not sound like a lot, but that’s just the daily level. “If you accumulate 3.5% across days and establishments and places, it adds up to be a fairly consequential effect in a town that may have hundreds of businesses,” Srivastava said.

The researchers concluded that, “if you don’t have clear-cut information, you are going to look at people around you,” de Vaan said.

Given that local governments are unlikely to mandate vaccines, “it creates an arena for social influence to pop up,” de Vaan said. If a large company required vaccinations, small competitors have to decide whether following suit would cause them to gain or lose customers and employees. Based on their findings, de Vaan predicts that small businesses would be more inclined to follow suit, but cautions that they didn’t study that question.

“Perhaps most importantly,” the authors concluded, “this paper shows that when government directives and health guidelines are ambiguous, firms will look for other information to guide their decision making. Obviously, such ambiguity may have been intentional if local governments believe that firms are well positioned to make these important decisions. But if one assumes that this is not the case, policy makers and local governments should consider the consequences of a lack of clarity and precision in their directives.”

 

Power-hungry cryptominers push up electricity costs for locals

|By Laura Counts
Photo illustration of a hand holding a bitcoin in front of a power plant
Photo: STRF/STAR MAX/IPx via AP Images

When cryptominers come to town, local residents and small businesses pay a price in surging electricity rates.   

A new Berkeley Haas working paper estimates that the power demands of cryptocurrency mining operations in upstate New York push up annual electric bills by about $165 million for small businesses and $79 million for individuals—with little or no local economic benefit.

“Small businesses operate on very thin margins, so I don’t think they’d be happy paying for the energy that cryptominers are using,” said Asst. Prof. Matteo Benetton, who co-authored the paper with Assoc. Prof. Adair Morse and Asst. Prof. Giovanni Compiani, now at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. “And the profits do not stay local: Bitcoin mining profits can be moved from upstate New York to Italy or Colombia or China in a second.”

While cryptomining has been criticized for its outsized environmental impact, the paper is the first to quantify its negative economic impacts on local communities. Massive cryptomining server farms employ just a few people yet guzzle electricity by the megawatt. That’s because “proof-of-work” cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, require brute computational power to solve the complex math problems required to verify transactions on a blockchain. 

Bitcoin mining alone was estimated to consume 0.5% of global electricity in 2017. From Mongolia to Montana to Washington, cryptominers have flocked to northern locales where it’s easier to keep servers cool. They’re also lured by cheap, abundant power supplies—sometimes with discounts on electricity. 

Impacts upstate

The researchers analyzed upstate New York, where Niagara Falls has fueled inexpensive hydropower and rural communities like Plattsburgh have borne an outsized impact from cryptomining operations that moved into former industrial sites. By looking at surges in Bitcoin prices and electricity demand curves, the researchers estimated that mining pushes up monthly electric bills about $8 for individuals, and $12 for small businesses. 

“That adds up to $250 million just for upstate New York for a year, and if you think of scaling that up for the U.S., we estimated it’s about $1 billion per year—many times that globally,” said Compiani. “These are warehouses full of computers and they only require one or two IT people to run the whole operation, so it’s unlikely that it  brings jobs or stimulates the economy.”

They did find that local governments were able to capture some increased tax revenue—most likely in the form of real estate taxes—amounting to about $40 million per year. That may be why some localities have offered discounted power, Compiani said. However, the increased tax revenue only offsets about 15% of the increased costs to locals.

Chinese price constraints 

The researchers also looked at China, where electricity prices are constrained by the government rather than fluctuating with demand. While the data available was less detailed, they found evidence that mining operations seemed to crowd out other potential industries that may have employed more people, slightly depressing local economies. There is also anecdotal evidence that the increased power demands with constrained prices has led to supply shortages, rationing, and blackouts. 

Implications for data centers

While the paper focused only on the impacts from cryptomining, the researchers noted that large data centers—which are proliferating from the growing processing demands of cloud computing, AI, natural language processing, and quantum computing—may generate many of the same impacts for local communities. 

Read the full paper: “When cryptomining comes to town: High electricity-use spillovers to the local economy.”