By Joe Mathews   

This article was written for Zócalo Public Square and originally posted as "The Healthiest Californians Are the Ones Who Are Healthy Together"

Immigrants bring cultural practices that could improve our health systems and the health of all Californians — if we do more to understand and deploy the advantages of cultural diversity, said a panel of experts on health and immigration at a Zócalo/The California Wellness Foundation event.

Those panelists — including top researchers and journalists — offered multiple examples of ideas that originated in immigrant communities that have made us healthier — from diet to exercise to an emphasis on family and social relationships. But they all pointed to one overarching conclusion: Immigrants often approach health together, with the participation of relatives and neighbors, instead of alone, as too many native-born Americans do.

In the foreign cultures, “there’s this continuity and connectedness that’s fundamental to your being. You are never alone,” said UCLA medical anthropologist Marjorie Kagawa-Singer. “We’ve lost that here” in the U.S.

The moderator, CALmatters health and welfare reporter Elizabeth Aguilera, began the event, held in the library at the Mechanics’ Institute in San Francisco, by asking what has been learned and adopted from immigrant cultures.

Journalist Claudia Kolker, author of The Immigrant Advantage, answered by citing a host of ideas. She said immigrants had taught Americans about the importance of post-partum care (which has been a higher priority in other cultures than in the U.S., where pre-natal health gets more emphasis), better ways of eating (she noted that Vietnamese culture makes meat a condiment, not the main course) and about seeing loneliness as a threat to health. “These are now medical ideas,” she said.

Asked by Aguilera how we might change our approaches to health from the lessons of immigrants, Kolker pointed to two. First, she suggested thinking bigger and having bigger life goals, as many immigrants do, which may help explain why immigrant groups in the U.S. have measurably better mental health. Second, referring to research from Rice University professor Utpal Dholakia, she suggested that thinking of your life as less of a highway and more as circle contributes to better planning and even more saving of money, which in turns aids health.

Kolker also said that living with grandparents, which is common in immigrant families, has cognitive benefits for children. And she said that understanding the importance of human touch is vital now, since Americans “as a society are touching each other less and less.” Many elderly patients are not touched at all, she said, even though we know from research and from other cultures that touch is good for our health.

Dr. David Hayes-Bautista, director of the Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture at UCLA School of Medicine, argued that more attention must be given to the health advantages of immigrants and Latinos. He talked extensively about what he called the “Latino epidemiological paradox” — that even though Latinos often have less access to care than other Americans at the same income level, Latinos have fewer heart attacks, fewer cancers, drink less and smoke less, and live 3 and a half years longer. “If everyone in the United States had the same profile” as Latinos, “250,000 lives would be saved,” he said.

Hayes-Bautista has been investigating myriad possible reasons why Latinos do better — social networks, family, community support, diet, and even dance, music and spirituality. But, he cautions, instead of doing more to understand these advantages so they might be applied to medical care and training, the medical establishment has largely ignored diversity issues.

Medical training, he said, is based on “a bunch of stereotypes” about immigrants or Latinos as unhealthy, rather than as sources for ideas about health. And public health programs often exclude undocumented immigrants and recent immigrants, even though their participation in the health system might make us all healthier.

Kagawa-Singer, the UCLA medical anthropologist, said modern medicine doesn’t encourage doctors to listen to people from different cultures. And the U.S. system ends up dividing mental health and physical health, even though the experience of other cultures teaches us that mental and physical health are closely tied together.

“Modern medicine,” Kagawa-Singer said, offers “a very mechanistic view of the body isolated from the spirit, the family, and the community… And if there’s an immediate infection, biomedicine is great. But if you’re talking about chronic issues and mental illness, you have got to put the whole person back together again.”

During a wide-ranging question-and-answer session, audience members posed queries about the history of immigrant health and whether immigrants might bring a more open attitude and less costly interventions to medical care at life’s end. Panelists also suggested that the experience of immigrants who come from countries with universal health care might inspire the embrace of “Medicare for all,” especially in California, where political leaders have supported the idea.

In response to one query, panelists noted that immigrants may be healthier because people willing to leave their countries may be more adventurous and robust.

“There is evidence that families make the decision about who is the smartest and who is the least prone to being sick” when they decide who might immigrate first, Kolker said, “because he’s the person who is going to take care of us. So we get these extraordinary people coming here.”

Joe Mathews is the California and Innovation editor at Zócalo Public Square.

Based on research by Vikas Mittal, Yan Anthea Zhang and Kyuhong Han

• Most firms stoke strategic advantages with innovations based on research and development or by managing customers using marketing and advertisement.
• Each of these approaches in turn affects stock market risk.
• When such companies emphasize research and development, rather than marketing, they’re more exposed to risk when demand drops.

Consider for a moment the race to build the next super computer. Google, Alibaba and other U.S. and China companies are racing to build a machine — called quantum computing — far more powerful than anything the world has ever seen. In this race, China reportedly has the lead.

Given that this kind of technology can protect trillions of dollars in corporate and even national secrets, why do American companies lag behind? If such research and development represents an unknown and is a potential business risk, should U.S. companies be interested in assuming such a task? Rice Business professors Vikas Mittal, Yan Anthea Zhang and a Rice Business Ph.D. student Kyuhong Han, may have answers.

They researched the various ways companies create strategic advantages for themselves. What is the relationship between these strategies and the risks involved? Companies create value through innovation-based activities such as research and development or else via branding and advertisement. As there’s no set formula for success, each company has its own approach — which could affect the risk associated with the company’s stock price (called idiosyncratic risk).

Typically, the two strategic pillars are examined separately, rather than jointly. But when they compared the two approaches, they found that one presented far more risk than the other.

To reach their conclusions, the Rice team looked at a data set of 13,880 firm-year observations that included 2,403 firms operating in 59 industries over 15 years (2000–2014). The data sets were from the firms’ annual operational and financial information from Standard & Poor’s Compustat, the University of Chicago’s Center for Research in Security Prices and from the Kenneth French Data Library. What the data revealed was the stock price of companies that placed a higher strategic emphasis on marketing and branding (called value appropriation) than companies that focused research and development (called value creation).

If it is less risky for a firm to emphasize branding and marketing over research and development it stands to reason that firms would want to exercise caution in big new research and development efforts. What’s the payoff for making a quantum computer or even Space X, after all, if the research and development risks associated with the endeavor are extraordinarily high? In some instances, it may be much safer to rebrand and market. Closer to home, many companies in the oil and gas industry bet big on innovative ventures — costly product features, digitization initiatives and so on that may only increase the risk to their stock price than meet customer needs.

The researchers found that firms that plunge big efforts into research and development have more to worry about than whether their innovations will work. They have to weather the fluctuations of industry demand. When industry demand is volatile, the downside of excessive research and development, at the cost of customer-relevant strategies is even worse.

For the Rice Business researchers, the lessons for managers are clear. The return on investment is intimately linked not only with optimizing potential profits but also minimizing potential risks. Research and development heavy endeavors like Space X and quantum computers may be flashy, but in the event of an unexpected drop in demand, they’re also more likely to plummet to earth, creating stock-price volatility.

Managers need to think about the elements that create risk — like demand instability. The more companies create a stable and predictable client base, the less risk that they have to face in the stock market. There is still a tendency among many firms to see advertising and research and development as preceding and guiding customer perceptions, preferences and behaviors. But perhaps the relationship is just the opposite.

Vikas Mittal is the J. Hugh Liedtke Professor of Marketing and Management at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University. 

Yan Anthea Zhang is a Fayez Sarofim Vanguard Professor of Management in Strategic Management at the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University. 

Kyuhong Han is a marketing Ph.D. student at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University. 

To learn more, please see: Han, K., Mittal, V., & Zhang, Y. A. (2017). Relative Strategic Emphasis and Firm-Idiosyncratic Risk: The Moderating Role of Relative Performance and Demand Instability. Journal of Marketing, 81(4), 25-44.

Based on research by Alan Crane,  James P. Weston and Sébastien Michenaud

To learn more about the methodology behind this story, please see the video below. 

• Institutional investors can play an outsized role in determining stock dividends. 
• As little as a one-percentage point rise in institutional ownership can cause a $7 million (8 percent) increase in dividends.
• Institutional owners can influence payouts with the threat of selling, shareholder activism and even old- fashioned jawboning.

Markets tend to be obsessed with institutional investors. Hedge funds and other institutional investors are, after all, the pros. While there’s been ample research on the behavior of institutional investors, however, confirming a link between these investors and the level of dividend payouts has proven elusive. Until now, that is. 

Previously, the question concerned chickens and eggs: Do institutional investors influence stock payouts, or do they just choose firms where such payouts are prevalent? Using an innovative study sample, Rice Business professors Alan Crane and James Weston have found a clear link between the level of institutional investment and dividend payouts.

In order to tackle this problem, Crane and Weston joined Sébastien Michenaud of DePaul University to look at dividend payouts from the Russell 1000 and Russell 2000 indices between 1991 and 2006. 

The Russell 1000 is a value-weighted index of the largest 1,000 U.S.-listed firms. It competes with the highly popular S&P 500 index. The Russell 2000 is a value-weighted index of the 2,000 next-largest firms and has less competition in indexing mid-to-small cap stocks. 

According to the team’s estimates, a 1 percent increase in institutional investment in a firm caused a $7 million or 8 percent increase in dividends. The researchers were particularly interested in activities of firms that had fallen from the Russell 1000 and were not at the top of the Russell 2000 index. Why? Because this in-between zone between the Russell 1000 and 2000 is one of the few cases where the influence of institutional investors can be clearly traced. 

Fund managers, Weston explains, closely watch the top companies in the Russell 2000 — and the outcomes of those investments may or may not reflect their professional choices. But no one can know in advance the dividing line “between the 999th and 1001th largest stocks,” he notes. “Where the music stops, on June 30th, which is the day the index weights are defined for the year, is a crapshoot.” 

The result is a study scenario that’s akin to true randomization — necessary to the scientific method. 

The results? Institutional ownership, the researchers found, was roughly nine percentage points higher for firms at the top of the Russell 2000 compared to firms at the bottom of the Russell 1000. This difference is statistically significant. But did these firms change their behavior once they fell into the category in which large institutional investors would take interest?

What the researchers found was a pronounced pattern. Columbia Sportswear, for example, was a low-ranked Russell 1000 firm between the years 2001 and 2005. In 2006, Columbia fell out of the 1000 to land at the top of the Russell 2000. By the end of 2006, the company initiated a dividend, after investor pressure to boost payout.

Institutional investors, the researchers concluded, can exert influence for greater payouts in a number of ways. The most obvious is threatening to withdraw from a given stock altogether. Because such investors generally represent a large percentage of overall stock ownership, their threats can’t be taken lightly. 

Another way institutional investors can throw their weight around is by getting more active. Proxy voting, which allows shareholders to vote as a block, wields tremendous pressure on firms to pay out more in the way of dividends. The researchers found that firms at the top of the Russell 2000 were subject to far more shareholder proposals, especially those related to corporate governance, and far fewer management-backed proposals. The mere threat of voting, the researchers found, can influence firm policies.

Studying the unpredictable dividing zone between the Russell 1000 and Russell 2000 gave the scholars a unique chance to test an important economic question with conditions close to those in a random medical trial. The takeaway, however, is concrete. The rise of institutional investors in recent decades has led to better monitoring of corporations, which means shareholders are better off sharing investments with large instutional investors. 

So the next time you’re researching stocks, make sure to look at how much of the target company is institutionally owned. It may mean more in the way of dividends down the road.

To learn more about the methodology behind this story, please see the video of Professor James Weston speaking at a recent Rice Business Insights Series titlted "Cause and Effect. Making Sense of Data." 

Alan Crane is an associate professor of finance at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

James P. Weston is the Harmon Whittington Professor of finance at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

To learn more, please see: Crane, A. D., Michenaud, S., & Weston, J. P. (2016). The effect of institutional ownership on payout policy: Evidence from index thresholds. The Review of Financial Studies, 29(6), 1377–1408.

By Anastasiya Zavyalova

This article originally appeared in the Houston Chronicle as "For Catholics, what to ask your priest — and yourself — about abuse scandal" 

It’s a TV image so common we barely pause to look up: a hive of uniformed law enforcement officers swarming onto a crime scene. But the target of this SWAT-type strike was groundbreaking.

Unfolding on air over a “developing story” banner in November, the surprise targeted the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston. Instead of contraband or drugs, law enforcers were seeking records linked to a diocese priest, recently released on bond, accused of sexually abusing children.

While the optics of a police raid on a church were unusual, the crime allegation behind it is by now familiar. The world has been aware of systemic sexual abuse in the U.S. Catholic Church since 2002, when the Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation exposed the breadth of this crime epidemic. Catholics might reasonably have assumed then their church would tackle the crisis swiftly and forcefully. Instead, new revelations of crimes by priests against children continue year after year, in stunning lists of dozens, hundreds and thousands.

In recent months, in the wake of federal and state investigations nationwide, some dioceses have begun releasing lists of priests accused of child abuse without waiting for the Vatican’s green light. During Christmas weekend, Pope Francis implored predator priests to turn themselves in, swearing the church would bring the guilty to justice. Yet in the very same month, revelations about church sex crimes against children were breaking out in Illinois, California, and New York.

As a scholar of scandals and reputation management, I have spent more than a decade analyzing the child sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia, looking at how such events affect organizations and their members. Based on similar cases of institutional crisis, I believe the Church’s slow action during its sexual abuse crisis indicates that someone within the hierarchy conducted a cost-benefit analysis: weighing the pros and cons of addressing institutional child abuse all at once versus slamming the lid on it, facing cases only if they became public — and outside forces insisted on asking questions.

In my field, questions are a powerful tool. The right questions can be transformative for church members confronting the sex abuse epidemic in their trusted, and beloved, institution. Painful as it may be, they should be bold about posing these difficult queries to religious leaders.

According to organizational research, churchgoing Catholics experience a spectrum of reactions when church sexual abuse is exposed. Some people leave the Catholic Church altogether, seeking spiritual refuge in different denominations. Some abandon organized religion entirely. But many actually become more religious, reaffirming their commitment to the Roman Catholic Church and vowing to help fight the problem.

For parishioners who are now making this decision, here are a series of questions I suggest asking priests, church leaders and finally themselves. Added to data from outside sources including scholarship and investigative journalism, the answers may offer guidance on how, or whether, to engage with the Church at a devastating time.

Q: Have Catholics been too eager to forgive, and if so, what has been the price of that forgiveness?

A: In 2005, after a horrifying Philadelphia Grand Jury Report became public, Temple University’s Institute of Public Affairs and The Philadelphia Inquirer polled, among others, Catholics who attended church regularly. Asked whether the Church had prioritized protecting its reputation or preventing abuse, more than 80 percent responded that in the past, the Church prioritized its reputation. The answers changed, however, regarding the Church’s current motives: only 37 percent believed the church still prioritized its image over protecting children. Yet just last August, the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office released documentation of sexual abuse of more than 1,000 individuals by hundreds of priests. Was church members’ forgiveness premature?

Q: Why is the proportion of Catholic priests accused of sexual abuse of children almost triple that of the general population?

A: According to BishopAccountability.org, which tracks sexual abuse against children within the Catholic Church, 5.8 percent of priests active in the United States between 1950 and 2016 have been accused of sexual abuse. Research on pedophilia estimates that the number of child abusers within the general population totals 2 percent. This disparity suggests some self-selection going on.

Q: Does the power structure within the Catholic Church enable the abuse?

A: Data collected by BishopAccountability.org shows that approximately two-thirds of sitting U.S. bishops were alleged in 2002 to have kept accused priests in ministry or moved accused priests to new assignments. Because these are not likely choices that would be made by parishioners, power seems to be concentrated in too few hands. Even when church hierarchy takes abuse charges seriously, those in power consistently protect their own. In the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, the 2005 Grand Jury Report revealed, the harshest punishment any accused priest had to face was a “supervised life of penance and prayer.”

Now is the time for law enforcement, religious leaders and the faithful themselves to ask and answer these difficult questions. While I know the answers I would want to hear, matters of faith are deeply personal. Here, too, asking questions can strengthen the decision-making process. If you stay, can you make a difference? Does staying make you an enabler? What should you do when a presumed moral authority turns out to be corrupt, even evil? Is it more important to protect the church or to protect children? What does the church owe the victims? And finally, if redemption is an option, what are the practical steps toward making it real?

Anastasiya Zavyalova is an assistant professor of strategic management at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University. 

Based on research by  Utpal Dholakia, René Algesheimer and Richard P. Bagozzi

Key findings:

• A new model contributes to research about the dynamics of small group behavior.
• It yields fresh insights into the behavior of a group that’s working toward a common goal.
• Findings from the model are relevant to professional and private life, for anything from decision-making within families to activities by corporate teams.

You just got a promotion — along with a brand-new work team whose members barely speak to one another. But first-rate cooperation is essential if you’re going to deliver for your client. So you decide to spend a month getting to know each of your workers.

One is competent but bitter, frustrated by years of small mistakes by a colleague, mistakes that add to her own workload. Another, the one making the mistakes, seems so distracted he may as well be working at another company. Others have their own quirks. And to make matters worse, another department is set to merge its employees with your creaky, cranky team in a few months. How are you going to understand all these individuals, much less get them into shape as a unit?

For many managers, training and reading can help provide guidance. Others may hire an outside consultant and resort to team-building activities. But where does that outside expertise — not to mention training and reading — come from? It’s based on academic research.

Rice Business professor Utpal Dholakia and colleagues René Algesheimer of the University of Zurich and Richard P. Bagozzi of the University of Michigan are among the scholars updating what we know about the dynamics of group decisions. Starting with classic group behavior theory, the scholars developed a series of sociologically-based models for analyzing small teams.

To better understand the existing shared intentions and attachment between teammates, Dholakia and his colleagues used a novel set of questions to survey 277 teams of computer gamers, each comprised of three people. They ran the survey responses through variations of a classic model called the Key Informant, which depends on the observations of group members about the social relationships inside a group.

Next, the researchers applied a sociological theory called Plural Subject Theory, focused on what’s known as “we-attitude.” That’s exactly what it sounds like: verbally and actively treating an endeavor as a group project.

The core of this theory, the notion that successful teams frequently use collective pronouns when they discuss themselves and cognitively conceive of themselves as “we,” has been heavily studied. Groups whose members think in terms of “we” act more cohesively and are measurably more committed to collectively reaching their goal.

To enhance the way these attitudes are measured, Dholakia created multiple variations of a new model. These differ from previous models because they include information not just from a “key informant,” but from every member of a group. The researcher asks group members questions about themselves, their impressions of others in the group, their impressions about how others in the group think of each member and impressions about the group as a whole. This longer, more elaborate approach offers fresh insights about a group’s shared consciousness — which provides a valuable new research outcome.

The professors found that this revision of classic key informant model generally worked the best of the various group-analysis models they tested — even improving on the original key informant approach. Future researchers, Dholakia notes, should consider the context of the team situation to decide which configuration of members is best to analyze.   

So the next time you find yourself nonplussed by a chaotic group dynamic at work, remember you are in time-honored company — and that help is out there. By updating the key informant model, Dholakia and his colleagues have added to the analytical toolbox something that can help whip that team into shape. Whether it’s an army of accountants or a network of hospital workers, Dholakia writes, the first step to creating a real team is analyzing which intentions they truly share. 

Utpal Dholakia is the George R. Brown Professor of Marketing at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

To learn more, please see: Algesheimer, R., Bagozzi, R. & Dholakia, U. (2018). "Key informant models for measuring group-level variables in small groups: Application to plural subject theory." Sociological Methods & Research, 47.2: 277–313.