Based on research by Alexander Butler and Jess Cornaggia

• For decades, economists have asked whether access to more money causes economic growth.
• The difficulty of cleanly defining cause and effect makes that a hard question to study empirically.
• But examining real-life events shows that access to more money does affect economic growth, and higher productivity is one of the main channels through which it happens.

Crisp and green – nothing says abundance like a cornfield, its acres of swaying leaves as uniform as dollar bills. Since the start of agriculture, farmers have known that this abundance depends profoundly on outside forces, including rainfall, soil quality, even friendly neighbors.

Less obvious, not just to farmers but also to economists, is the role that finance plays in business growth. Does access to more money cause economic growth? And if it does, exactly how does finance sow productivity? A swath of Midwestern cornfields, it turns out, held the answer.

Rice Business Professor Alexander W. Butler and colleague Jess Cornaggia, now at Pennsylvania State University, seized a chance to conduct what’s known as a natural experiment — using real-life events to test theoretical hypotheses — to examine the finance/growth conundrum.

They did this by looking at the impact of the federal Energy Policy Act, which was enacted in 2005 and over a period of years nearly doubled the quantity of renewable fuel additives in American gasoline. Coupled with rising crude oil prices and the availability of federal biofuel tax credits, the legislation boosted demand for U.S.-grown corn, the main ingredient in ethanol.

The events were fortuitous from a research point of view. They allowed Butler and Cornaggia to add to the body of research about finance and growth by uprooting it from theory and transplanting the question to a real-life government policy. Conventional wisdom has long suggested that finance affects growth, but it’s a hypothesis that’s surprisingly hard to test. The biggest challenge is trying to weed out cause from effect: Does finance create growth, or does economic growth create more funds for production?

To answer these questions, the professors created a multipart experiment based on the real-life ethanol policy. Corn production proved a handy test case. Farmers and economists both use crop yields as a measure of farming productivity, so data on harvested bushels per acre planted are available county-by-county every year.

Next, the researchers needed a reliable way to measure farmers’ access to finance. They hit on measuring county-level bank deposits. Previous research shows that local bank deposits have an important positive effect on local economic outcomes, which are influenced by bank loans. To confirm this metric was a good proxy for finance levels, the professors studied several alternative measures of finance access. All showed similar outcomes.

Finally, to analyze the precise shift in corn production in response to higher demand for ethanol, Butler and Cornaggia used what they call a “triple differences” procedure. The first difference is the response of productivity to greater versus lesser access to external finance. The second is the response of productivity to a shift in demand. The third is the response of productivity for the commodity with increased demand — in this case corn — versus a control crop that had no shift in demand — in this case soybeans.

Complex as it was, the triple test allowed the researchers to dismiss many other hypotheses. Any competing theory not only would have to exclusively refer to corn, it would also have to relate only to the years of the ethanol boom and only describe those counties whose farmers enjoyed high levels of outside finance.

So what did they find? The effect of finance on growth is real. In response to rising demand for corn, yields in the Midwest increased by 10.4 more bushels per acre in counties with high bank deposits than in counties with low bank deposits.

In other words, an outside shift in demand — the ethanol boom — led to higher levels of productivity, which were in turn determined by farmers’ varying access to productivity.

But even with the higher demand, counties with low levels of bank deposits weren’t able to increase their corn yields as much as counties with better access to finance.

Put simply, there indeed is a critical link between finance and economic growth. For decades, the exact interaction has been as hard to discern as the action of minerals, water and soil on a corn kernel. Harvesting their data from the American heartland, Butler and Cornaggia brought new insight to the question. Finance really does feed economic growth, they found. Higher productivity is the crucial way that finance makes it flourish.

Alexander W. Butler is a professor of finance at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

To learn more, please see: Butler, A. W. & Cornaggia, J. (20ll). Does access to external finance improve productivity? Evidence from a natural experiment. Journal of Financial Economics, 99(1), 184-203.

Award presented to Zeff at the annual AAA meeting in San Diego Aug. 9

The American Accounting Association (AAA) announced June 12 that Stephen Zeff, the Keith Anderson Professor of Accounting at Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business, is the recipient of its 2017 Lifetime Service Award. The award was presented to Zeff in the form of a unique glass art piece at the annual AAA meeting in San Diego Aug. 9.

AAA is a worldwide organization devoted to excellence in accounting education, research and practice. The Lifetime Service Award recognizes contributions to accounting education over a sustained period of time through service to the association and to the education efforts of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), Institute of Management Accountants, other accounting professional organizations, public accounting firms, corporations and nonprofit organizations.

Zeff, who joined the Rice faculty in 1978, was editor of the AAA’s The Accounting Review (1978-83) and is a past president of the organization (1985-86). As the association’s Distinguished International Visiting Lecturer in Latin America in 1977, he gave all of his lectures in Spanish. In 1988, the AAA presented him its Outstanding Accounting Educator Award. In 2009, he received the inaugural Anthony G. Hopwood Award for Academic Leadership from the European Accounting Association, and in 2011, the International Federation of Accountants honored him with its inaugural IFAC International Gold Service Award. In 2002, he was inducted into the Accounting Hall of Fame.

Zeff is author or editor of 31 books and has written more than 100 articles. He serves on the editorial board of 15 research journals edited in 10 countries. He was book review editor of The International Journal of Accounting from 1997 to 2003 and was book review editor of The Accounting Review from 2006 to 2015. He has been a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley, University of Chicago, Harvard Business School, Northwestern University and The University of Texas at Austin, and at universities in Mexico, Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands. He served on the advisory council to the Financial Accounting Standards Board, and he was a public member of the planning committee of the AICPA’s Auditing Standards Board. From 1981 to 2009, he was a member of the executive committee/board of the European Accounting Association. Since 1991, he has been a member of the academic panel of the U.K.’s Accounting Standards Board/Financial Reporting Council, and from 1991 to 2002 he served as international research adviser to the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland. He has lectured in more than 55 countries.

Paul de Meo ’17 built a successful high-end construction firm in Hampshire, England, with revenues of $30 million but recognized the limited scalability and inefficiencies that plague the construction industry. The Rice MBA offered the chance to re-evaluate his interests and rekindle a long-standing passion to tackle the global crisis of urbanization and growing inaccessibility of homeownership.

Joining forces with Alex Pichon ’17, formerly of the Federal Reserve, and Sebastian DeGregorio ’15, a marketing specialist, Cobuild was established to modernize homeownership so more people could live, work and play in homes and communities they love.

With the help of Rice Business and some talented coders, the team has developed their beta product — the first part of an end-to-end digital house-building experience. Users are matched together based on preferences and connected to recommended builders, leveraging the group buying power. Right now, Cobuild is in the final stages of preparing a limited release in Houston to the first group of customers seeking to build their own homes ahead of a 2017 fundraise.

Since graduation, Paul and Alex joined Sebastian full time and leave the label of side hustle behind.

“My wife, Kristin, and children, Henry and Emily, and I have struggled to find a home in Houston that meets our needs," says Paul de Meo, Co-Founder and CEO of Cobuild. "It seems impossible to find a well-designed, well-built home of modest proportions in a neighborhood with good schools. We’ve since discovered that this is the experience of many others. After 18 months of searching, we’ll be building with one of the first Cobuild communities.”

Based on research by Jing Zhou (Rice Business), Xiaoye May Wang (Tsinghua University), Lynda Jiwen Song (Renmin University of China), and Jufeng Wu (University of Illinois at Chicago)

Key takeaways:

• New ideas can be crucially important to businesses, driving innovation and preventing stagnation.
• Recognizing those ideas, though, isn’t always easy.
• Nurturing what is known as “promotion focus” can help managers spot fresh ideas.

Whenever the late surgeon Michael DeBakey opened a human chest, he drew on a lifetime of resources: the conviction that heart surgery could and should be vastly improved, the skill to venture beyond medicine’s known horizons, and the vision to recognize new ideas in everyone around him, no matter how little formal training they had.

Appreciating new ideas is the heartbeat of business as well as medicine. But innovation is surprisingly hard to recognize. In a pioneering 2017 article, Rice Business Professor Jing Zhou and her colleagues published their findings on the first-ever study of the traits and environments that allow leaders to recognize new ideas.

What is novelty recognition — and why does it matter?

Recent decades have produced a surge of research looking at how and when employees generate fresh ideas. But almost nothing has been written on another crucial part of workplace creativity: a leader’s ability to appreciate new thinking when they see it.

Novelty, after all, is what drives company differentiation and competitiveness. Work that springs from new concepts sparks more investigation than work based on worn, already established thought. Companies invest millions to recruit and pay star creatives.

Yet not every leader can spot a fresh idea, and not every workplace brings out that kind of discernment. In four separate studies, Zhou and her coauthors examined exactly what it takes to see a glittering new idea wherever it appears. Their work sets the stage for an entirely new field of future research.

First, though, the team had to define their key terms. “Novelty recognition” is the ability to spot a new idea when someone else presents it. “Promotion focus,” previous research has shown, is a comfort level with new experiences that evokes feelings of adventure and excitement. “Prevention focus” is the opposite trait: the tendency to associate new ideas with danger, and respond to them with caution.

How promotion focus shapes a leader’s ability to spot new ideas

But does having “promotion focus” as opposed to “prevention focus” color the ability to see novelty? To find out, Zhou’s team came up with an ingenious test, artificially inducing these two perspectives through a series of exercises. First, they told 92 undergraduate participants that they would be asked to perform a set of unrelated tasks. Then the subjects guided a fictional mouse through two pencil and paper maze exercises.

While one exercise showed a piece of cheese awaiting the mouse at the end of the maze (the promise of a reward), the other maze depicted a menacing owl nearby (motivation to flee).

Once the participants had traced their way through the mazes with pencils, they were asked to rate the novelty of 33 pictures — nine drawings of space aliens and 24 unrelated images. The students who were prepped to feel an adventurous promotion focus by seeking a reward were much better at spotting the new or different details among these images than the students who’d been cued to have a prevention focus by fleeing a threat.

The conclusion? A promotion focus really does create a mental lens through which new ideas are more visible.

Which workplace environments make novelty easier to see?

Zhou’s team followed this study with three additional studies, including one that surveyed 44 human resource managers from a variety of companies. For this study, independent coders rated the mission statements of each firm, assessing their cultures as “innovative” or “not innovative.” The HR managers then evaluated a set of written practices — three that had been in use for years, and three new ones that relied on recent technology. 

The managers from the innovative companies were much better at rating the new HR practices for novelty and creativity. To recognize novelty, in other words, both interior and external environments make a difference.

The implications of the research are groundbreaking. The first ever done on this subject, it opens up a completely new research field with profound questions. Can promotion focus be created? How much of this trait is genetic, and how much based on natural temperament, culture, environment and life experience? Should promotion focus be cultivated in education? If so, what would be the impact? After all, there are important uses for prevention focus, such as corporate security and compliance. Meanwhile, how can workplaces be organized to bring out the best in both kinds of focus?

Leaders eager to put Zhou’s findings to use right away, meanwhile, might look to the real-world model of Michael DeBakey. Practice viewing new ideas as adventures, seek workplaces that actively push innovation and, above all, cultivate the view that every coworker, high or low, is a potential source of glittering new ideas.

Zhou, et al (2017). “Is It New? Personal and Contextual Influences on Perceptions of Novelty and Creativity.” Journal of Applied Psychology. 

MBA Crystal Ball invited Abbey Rice, associate director of MBA global programs at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business, to share her views on the common problems faced by international students.

1. Immigration/Visa Status and Work Authorization (Employment After Graduation) #1 for MBA

Problem: From the time they are accepted into the program, many international students are already worried about the options for internships and post-MBA job opportunity in the United States. The laws and processes change frequently so it can be difficult for even the administration to keep up. Students are responsible to understand their visa status and what it takes to obtain that status.

We work with them to provide an opportunity through the 2-year MBA program for an internship (CPT) and a 12 month post-grad opportunity (OPT). Students are only eligible for either of these if they land an internship or job. H-1B is only an option, not through the MBA, if they find an employer for sponsorship.

Many times students confuse federal law and Rice policy. They understand that there is a lot riding on the fact that they have to land those opportunities to even have the option to work here in the U.S. during their time here, and after.

Additionally, many students come into issues with different visa that may not allow them to participate in authorized work during the program. This is something that is typically understood too late in the process.

Suggestions: Take the time before you even apply to schools in the U.S. to understand all of the stipulations involved with working/studying on your particular visa. If possible speak to people you know who have gone through the process of studying in a foreign country.

Network from the very beginning and begin researching particular companies that sponsor international students in the industry of your focus. Once you’re accepted into the program immediately utilize all of the resources and departments at your fingertips.

Although the student is responsible for their visa status and understanding that, there are many offices and people on campus who want to help make the transition and process as smooth as possible.

READ, READ, READ. Read through all documents and guidelines given to you throughout the program. There are reasons these documents have been carefully put together and it’s important students understand and acknowledge what they are signing/agreeing to.

2. Language Barriers & Communication Difficulties

Problem: Many international students, although scoring high on the TOEFL exam, arrive to their programs under prepared in comparison to their classmates to perform at high level in writing and communication skills. This is due to English not being their first language.

It becomes extremely intimidating and can cause insecurities within the student early on in the program. Often times international students do not succeed at a high level in their communication courses and/or do not step up in leadership positions within group oral presentations.
 
Suggestions: Practice before you arrive. Challenge yourself to watch American movies and TV shows without subtitles, along with listening to English speaking music. Translate passages from an article in a newspaper.

Once arrived, befriend American students and surround yourself with them often. Hanging out with your peers most like you will not allow you to grow, especially with your communication skills. Many times your University will provide opportunities for Diction Coaching and/or communication workshops prior to school starting. Always opt into these.

Lastly, even If your communication program does not have one, adopt a mentor and have them coach you through presentations and have them peer review your writing. Practice makes perfect.

3. Understanding Plagiarism and Academic Honor Code

Problem: Believe it or not, many times international students are unfamiliar with the term and concept of plagiarism, at least in the way that we as Americans understand it. Working in groups can be very confusing for international students as they believe they are completing the assignment together, but may not understand that they cannot then copy verbatim their classmates work.

Unlike American students who have been told and guided through what plagiarism looks like since grade school, international students are starting with a blank slate.

Perceptions of plagiarism are mostly based on historical and cultural assumptions. Many of the policies and guidelines set for students may not be specific enough for a foreign population. The language barrier can play a role in this situation as well.

Suggestions: Speak with your professors often. Utilize them as a resource from the very beginning. Familiarize yourself with well-known American plagiarism guidelines sites like Purdue Owl Writing Lab.

Speak with your academic advisors to gain resources provided by the university. The university should be speaking openly early on with international students about plagiarism and the severity of breaking an academic honor code in the states.

Based on research by Alexander Butler and Umit G. Gurun

• Mutual fund managers with social or educational links to a particular CEO tend to invest in that CEO’s company.
• The portfolios of managers with social or educational links to a CEO perform better than the portfolios of managers without such social connections.
• CEOs with social or school links to mutual fund managers get paid more than those without such connections.

Friends help each other out, right? Imagine young men or women racing down a New England playing field, effortlessly passing a lacrosse ball on their way to the goal. Now imagine some of those old friends as CEOs of large firms, and others as managers of mutual funds. Do they still have each other’s backs?

That was the question Rice Business Professor Alexander W. Butler explored in a recent paper. What he found makes perfect sense given human nature, and raises serious questions about the dynamics of the financial market.

Yes, Butler and his coauthor, Umit G. Gurun of the University of Texas at Dallas, found, CEOs of publicly traded corporations and mutual fund managers from the same schools do appear to help each other out. It may be conscious or unconscious: They do what friends do the world over. But the effect on the market can be profound.

To trace the role of social connections in the world of corporate and finance, Butler and Gurun studied how mutual fund managers vote when shareholders proposed limiting executive pay. They cross-referenced these data with information about the educational background of the firms’ executives and of the mutual fund managers who took part in the votes.

When voting fund managers and an executive went to the same schools, Butler found, those halcyon days at A&M or Wharton clearly corresponded to fewer votes to limit executive pay.

Now, this may reflect all kinds of things. Shared school ties could mean fund managers have more relevant information about a firm’s CEO and his or her value. The shared culture and vocabulary of a school environment might ease information flow between a CEO and managers. But there is also another possibility: Perhaps the value a mutual fund manager places on a CEO’s firm has nothing to do with the company’s actual value. The manager may simply support him because he’s a school friend.

CEOs weren’t the only ones to benefit from old-school ties. Well-connected investors prospered too. When a fund manager shared a school background with a given CEO, Butler found, the fund outperformed funds whose managers weren’t part of the network. For investors as well as CEOs, in other words, school ties with decision makers at mutual funds raised the chances of a winning outcome.

So a shared school or social background leads to well-paid CEOs, successful fund managers and happy investors. What’s not to celebrate?

Plenty, it turns out.

The better trading outcomes of well-connected mutual fund managers have implications far beyond one happy set of shareholders.  The Securities and Exchange Commission protects a level playing field because it’s in the public interest for the U.S. financial markets to be liquid.

Consumers buy and sell stocks more easily when they are confident that a product’s price is reasonably close to its actual value. When one party seems to know more about a stock — perhaps through friendship with the CEO — other investors may lose confidence that they can assess the value of stocks as accurately. When too many consumers distrust the market, liquidity drops. Fewer people buy and sell.

Think how much easier it is to buy a used car with public resources such as Carfax, or pre-owned car certifications. In the past, a buyer had to wonder what a car seller knew but wasn’t saying — or else try to buy a car from someone she already knew and trusted.

Almost everyone has a friend. Almost everyone has experienced the memories, common lingo and wordless sense of goodwill that come from sharing a common history. Butler and Gurun’s study of corporate and financial markets, however, shows how these natural instincts can disadvantage players outside the alumni circle. Shareholders may have less power to limit CEO pay. And consumers may end up less confident about the value of stocks, shaking trust in the financial markets overall. Surely, that’s not what friends are for.

Alexander W. Butler is a professor of finance at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

To learn more, please see: Butler, A. W. & Gurun, U. G.  (2012). Educational networks, mutual fund voting patterns and CEO compensation. The Review of Financial Studies, 25(8), 2533-2562.

By Gabriel Collins

If you’re driven to go green but aren’t quite ready to drive electric, consider kicking a familiar set of tires.

Although it’s counterintuitive, there may be reason to revisit an iconic, gas-guzzling American favorite: The Ford F-150 pickup. Pickups and other such vehicles aren’t as thirsty as they used to be. And, according to a Rice researcher, improving their fuel efficiency might do more to reduce overall gasoline consumption than improving the mileage of fuel-miserly electric and hybrid vehicles.

That’s the argument of a recent paper by Baker Botts fellow Gabriel Collins at the Center for Energy Studies at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. Boosting a single F-150’s fuel efficiency by five miles per gallon, Collins writes, saves the same volume of gasoline as improving a half dozen Toyota Priuses’ efficiency by six miles per gallon.

Because the Prius is designed as a fuel-efficient vehicle, Collins says, any improvements in its mileage going forward are going to be smaller percentagewise. From 2007 to 2017, for example, the F-150’s fuel efficiency rose from 14 mpg to 19 mpg, an increase of more than a third. During that same time period, the Prius’ gas mileage improved only about 13 percent, from 46 to 52 mpg.

To reach his results, Collins converted miles per gallon to gallons consumed per 100 miles. It’s a less familiar metric, but it’s more useful for comparing fuel consumption. (If you want to do the math, here’s how it works: The 2007 F-150’s 14 mpg equals 7.1 gallons per 100 miles – 100 divided by 14. The 2017 F-150’s 19 mpg equals 5.3 gallons per 100 miles – 100 divided by 19.)

Collins’ conclusion: The newer F-150 uses 1.8 gallons less for a 100-mile trip – about the distance from Houston to Galveston and back. Based on the same calculations, the Prius’ fuel consumption for a day at the beach fell by only three-tenths of a gallon. That’s a puny one sixth of the F-150’s improvement.

In real-life driving conditions, of course, vehicles don’t always manage the mileage they do in controlled EPA tests. But technological advances are consistently making fuel efficiency better.

There’s another reason that boosts in larger-vehicle fuel mileage could have a greater effect on overall fuel use: Americans still buy a lot more trucks and SUVs than gasoline-electric hybrids such as the Prius or fully electric vehicles such as the Tesla. According to autoblog.com, the Ford F-150 is the top-selling vehicle not just in Texas and 15 other states, but nationwide.

While automakers have sold about 600,000 electric vehicles in the U.S. in the past five years, Ford can produce and sell a staggering 1 million F-150s in 18 months.

Drivers in the market for new pickups typically are replacing older ones. In other words, most drivers who are looking for fuel-efficient vehicles already have them. That leaves old-school trucks and SUVs with powerful, fossil fuel engines as “the low-hanging fruit for any policymaker seeking the most efficient path to reducing gasoline use and the related emissions,” Collins says.

Pushing traditional gas-guzzlers like trucks may be a non-starter for policymakers who prioritize environmental and climate change. But Collins argues that better fuel efficiency in these wildly popular vehicles would create long-term fuel supply and emissions benefits.

Government incentives could enhance the effect, he writes. What if manufacturers of the big vehicles got a tax credit of $100 per truck for each one-tenth gallon drop in fuel consumed per hundred miles, compared to comparable vehicles from 10 years earlier? (Note to car buffs: The credit would apply to vehicles with engine displacement higher than 3.0 liters.)

This hypothetical credit would apply to the first one million high-displacement vehicles a manufacturer produced each year. Under these circumstances, an automaker who improved a model’s gas mileage to 20 mpg from 16 mpg and sold a million vehicles could save $1.3 billion in taxes.

That’s a pretty good incentive to steer hard toward better gas mileage. Collins’ paper doesn’t explore how the government might make up the lost tax revenue, but based on federal and other data on car sales and miles driven, he argues, the tax credit could encourage breakthroughs in fuel efficiency that would lower daily U.S. gasoline demand by almost 10.5 million gallons in five years. That would cut emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide by 34 million tons per year.

And if cleaner air and arresting global warming aren’t enough? Manufacturers would get the tax credit, Collins writes, but they could pass part of their savings along to customers. So whether you care more about looming climate change or having a classic set of wheels on which to hitch your trailer, you’d still get a sweet deal on America’s favorite ride.

Gabriel Collins is the Baker Botts fellow in energy and environmental regulatory affairs at the Center for Energy Studies at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.

Based on research by Vikas Mittal, Andrea Morales and Karen Page Winterich

• Triggering feelings of disgust can cause people to act unethically.
• Physical cleansing actions, like washing our hands, can reduce the negative effects of disgust.
• Managers need to know how emotional states like disgust can influence ethical decision making.

Humans are hardwired to feel disgust, and it doesn’t take much to trigger it. Just watching a gory movie scene or taking a bite from a wormy plum can do it. And in general, this is a good thing: Researchers think of disgust as nature’s police tape, designed to keep us from eating tainted, possibly dangerous food. But disgust can also be influenced by culture. Foods that are considered disgusting in some cultures — think locusts and haggis — are delicacies in others.

Because disgust inspires such powerful self-protective reactions — twisted faces, spitting, physical recoiling —  it’s great at preventing us from taking that second gulp of expired milk. The problem is that this ancient reflex can also trigger completely unrelated behaviors that are, in and of themselves, rotten.

Vikas Mittal, a professor at Rice Business, wanted to understand how the feeling of disgust might influence unjust behavior. In previous research, with co-authors from Penn State and Arizona State, Mittal had shown that subjects who feel disgusted were more prone to harshly judge others’ unethical behaviors.

Now the researchers wanted to take their questions about disgust further. How exactly did this visceral reaction to organic triggers influence just or unjust behavior in the disgusted person herself? And how could the ethical effects of this physical sensation be neutralized?

The professors hypothesized that if disgust creates a self-protective response — making people act to their own benefit, even at the expense of others — then just triggering the disgust experience could make them act unethically; that is, in a way that could harm other people. To test their hypothesis, the team conducted three randomized experiments. Each one compared participants who had been made to feel disgust with a control group of participants who had not.

The first experimental group evaluated such queasy-making products as anti-diarrheal medicine, diapers, and adult incontinence aids. In the second experiment, subjects wrote about their most disgusting memory. In the third, participants watched the notorious toilet scene from the movie Trainspotting. All the participants then took part in experiments measuring their willingness to lie and cheat.

The researchers’ predictions came true: The subjects who felt seized with revulsion indulged in self-interested behaviors at a significantly higher rate than their less disgusted counterparts. Offered a monetary incentive, the disgusted participants lied about the results of a coin toss, fibbed about solving an unsolvable puzzle, and cheated their fellow participants.

Now the team wanted to see if this morally tainting effect could be undone. Researchers have already demonstrated that physical cleaning can improve interpersonal behavior. Studies have shown that just thinking about cleansing activities or inhaling smells like citrus-scented Windex can foster pro-social behaviors. A whiff of lemony glass cleaner, it turns out, can make a subject gentler in condemning someone else’s unethical behavior. Maybe, Mittal and his colleagues theorized, cleansing behaviors could ameliorate the self-serving effects of disgust.

To find out, the researchers conducted another set of experiments, asking their subjects to evaluate a range of cleansing products, including disinfectants, household cleaners and body wash. Then they studied the subjects’ willingness to take part in deceptive interactions. Voila: The once-disgusted subjects who evaluated the cleansing products seemed literally morally cleansed. In the second part of the experiment, they behaved no more deceptively than the members of the neutral control group who had been spared any disgusting experience.

It’s evocative research, with profound implications for further study. Can research about these findings be applied to societal problems such as bullying, the marginalization of out-groups, or irrational public policy? Already, the disgust experiments suggest clear application for business. Managers need to know that important ethical and practical decisions can be contaminated by cultural and even physical sensations of disgust. More optimistically, clean living — at least in the form of cleansing mental images and clean-smelling aromas — actually can make for clean business.

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

To learn more, please see: Mittal, V., Morales, A. & Winterich, K. P. (2014). Protect thyself: how affective self-protection increases self-interested behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 125(2), 151-161.

Patra Brannon Isaac ’11 started her business in 2008 after a career as a corporate auditor that required her to travel up to 75 percent of the time throughout Europe and Australia. While great to work in new and exciting places, it was hard to manage the demands of life at home in Houston being so far away. Many friends and acquaintances complained about the same thing.

When she transitioned into a new career in HR with much less travel, she wanted to help other professionals who faced similar stresses. And her concierge business was born.

My-Handler is a boutique concierge business helping people handle work and life. It’s focused on providing convenient and affordable services that meet the demands of busy professionals, primarily in the Houston area. It is a trusted resource for small business owners, consultants, attorneys, project managers and many others.

The company continues to build new client relationships and help solve the demands of busy Houstonians. My-Handler was named a Houston Super Bowl LI diverse supplier, providing ad hoc services to assist with special projects organized by the Super Bowl Host Committee’s Business Connect program.

“We felt blessed to play a small role in the success of the Super Bowl LI programming, landing a few contracts and an ongoing client relationship with an NFL representative," said Patra Brannon Isaac. "We have already received a call for a new project requesting virtual assistant support post-Super Bowl and can’t wait to help handle it!”

Patra works full-time as regional director, Harris County, Leadership ISD.

By Claudia Feldman

At first glance, businessmen Les Alexander and Drayton McLane don't have much in common.

Alexander, 73, is a former bond trader from New Jersey, Jewish, a liberal, a vegetarian, an animal rights advocate. Fellow billionaire McLane, 80, is a Southern Baptist, a lifelong Texan, a conservative, a steak lover.

And yet the two men are old friends, and McLane is watching with empathy as Alexander begins the process of selling his Houston Rockets.

McLane sold his professional sports team, the Houston Astros, when he, too, was in his mid-70s. "I just felt it was time," said McLane in a telephone call phone from Amsterdam, recalling his own decision to sell.

"I'd had a lot of fun — we went to the World Series and built a new stadium. But it's kind of like getting out of college. I thoroughly enjoyed it but you can't go to college forever."

McLane summed up his best advice for Alexander: "I'd tell Les to make sure it's the right time for him and his family — and to move forward."

Tom Stallings, a professor of sports management at Rice University, predicts Alexander will be just fine, in fact, relieved when he finds a buyer. "Owners say a team is just like owning a boat," he said. "You'll be happiest the day you buy the boat — and the day you sell it."

Stallings, who worked for both the Astros and the Houston Aeros early in his career, has been a close observer of Houston's professional sports team owners for decades.

They spend millions, even billions for a team, Stallings said, and assume a huge financial risk. But in the eyes of the fans, owners are only "caretakers. It's not the owner's team, but the city's team."

McLane would have to agree, though he described his old job a little bit differently. "It's like being a mayor or a senator who is responsible to the fans," he said. "You can't just look at a sports team as if you bought a piece of real estate that is yours and you can do what you want with it. The fans, the citizens are totally involved, and owners have to be concerned about the things that are important to them."

Stallings said both Alexander and McLane more than met those obligations. They supported dozens of good causes around the city during their tenures, they spent generously to improve their teams and they relished contact with the players and the fans.

The diplomatic Stallings points to Bud Adams, who died in 2013, as an example of an owner less sensitive to the public's wants and desires. When his financial demands were not met, he moved his professional football team, then the Houston Oilers, to Nashville.

The move was actually a sound business decision, Stallings said, but locals considered Adams a traitor. "Fans reacted as though their hearts had been ripped out. Instead of being beloved, he was reviled."

Stallings acknowledges a steep learning curve for nearly all businessmen turned sports team owners and says they probably wonder, at their lowest moments, why they took on the headaches. "These owners have been successful all their lives," Stallings said. "After a while they assume that if they work hard enough, they can be successful at anything."

But in sports and in life, that calculation doesn't always work. "Every year, half these teams are going to have losing records," Stallings said. "For owners, that's hard to understand. All those things — desire, hard work and financial investment — don't necessarily translate to championships."

Maybe it's every sports fan's dream to own a professional team. Certainly the instant notoriety holds appeal, at least at first. "Then the novelty wears off," Stallings said. "Maybe it is no different from elected office. Eventually you say, 'OK, I had enough.'"

"Drayton is right," the college professor added. "Eventually it is time to graduate."

Alexander's decision to sell took most sports fans by surprise. He's said little publicly except that he wants to devote more time to his family and philanthropy.

Psychologist Mary Burnside would say to Alexander what she says to all clients — and friends — considering a move away from the limelight. "Have a plan in place. Have something to look forward to. You might think that you're able to step away, but you might find out a little bit differently later."

Then Burnside paused to consider the money involved.

The man whose name is synonymous with the Rockets bought the team for $85 million. The sales price is anybody's guess, but expected to hover around $2 billion.

"It sounds," Burnside said, "like a very fortuitous time to sell."

Claudia Feldman is a freelance writer living in Houston and editor of the Last Word, a service that helps people tell their own stories.

This article originally appeared online in Gray Matters.