Faculty in the News

If you want to raise emotionally healthy kids, research shows how—not how long—you spend time with them matters most.

Startup accelerators are now essential to entrepreneurial ecosystems, providing mentorship, resources, and networks to fast-track early-stage ventures. But does accelerator participation always improve a startup’s performance? And how much does program design matter?  

Our recent study, published in the Strategic Management Journal, explores these questions, analyzing data from 8,580 startups in 408 accelerators across 176 countries. The findings reveal that while accelerators generally boost startup success, the specific design of these programs plays a critical role.

More than 20 years ago Stewart D. Friedman, an organizational psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, conducted a search of 900 business professionals and their relationships with their children.

So, in 2018, in an article for the Harvard Business Review, the emeritus practice professor revisited his research to examine how it may have become even more relevant.

Friedman found that factors such as parents’ discretion over work, control over workload, and the psychological interference of employment in family life all correlated with children’s behavior.

“A father’s cognitive interference of work on family and relaxation time—that is, a father’s psychological availability, or presence, which is noticeably absent when he is on his digital device—was linked with children having emotional and behavioral problems,” Friedman wrote.

The findings went deeper when it came to mothers. The study found that working moms who had authority and discretion around work had mentally healthier children.

A new study should reassure parents who work long hours (and worry those who are distracted at home).

Combat burnout by conducting your own stakeholder assessment

The world’s most influential banks need to substantially accelerate climate efforts if global temperature rise is to be kept within the targets of the Paris Agreement, an assessment released Thursday by an institutional investors group warned.

Earth Day and Earth Week in 2022 are starkly different from the annual holiday in past decades: this is no time to simply plant a tree, pick up some roadside trash, and call it a day.

Investors today must focus on climate and environmental risk as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) pushes for mandated carbon footprint disclosures. At the same time, risks to corporations mapped out by the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), including reputational, legal, and policy risk, are increasingly in focus.

Companies that make decisions based on the effect on local communities or the labor force may suffer in the short term — but they’re better performers in the long run.

Wharton Professor Jacqueline Kirtley joins Emily Chang on Bloomberg Technology to discuss the guilty verdict (on three counts) of former CEO and founder of failed blood testing startup Theranos, and whether this will prompt investors to scrutinize their portfolio companies more carefully. (Source: Bloomberg)

Increases in economic growth contribute to one-for-one increases in carbon emissions. Energy system decarbonization and economic productivity gains are the most effective carbon emissions mitigation mechanisms for sustainable economic development.

A guilty verdict won’t chasten investors, and a not-guilty verdict won’t leave founders feeling free to lie. The tech industry has already learned whatever lessons it’s willing to take.

In this Wharton Scale School Workshop, Professor Jacqueline (Jax) Kirtley and panelists Jeff Fluhr, ENG’96, W’96, General Partner at Craft Ventures, and Andy Friedman, WG’95, Managing Partner at Pin High Capital LLC, and Founder and former CEO of SkinnyPop Popcorn, discuss the thinking behind their own pivot decisions as well as how recent world events have led to choices to change, adapt, or persist.

Behold the “underdog effect”: Workers sometimes perform better when they think others expect them to fail.

Reprinted at Brink, Horsesmouth, Montana Associated Technology Roundtables, Michigan-Ross.

Letter to the editor

Boards need to address globalisation fears

Sky News’ Ticky Fullerton spoke with Professor Witold Henisz from The Wharton School on the demand for corporate diplomacy.

Second only to Silicon Valley, the Swedish capital has produced the most billion-dollar companies, per capita. It’s also the No. 2 city for fast-growing companies, according to the 2017 Inc. 5000 Europe.

Inside China’s Health Care Reform Effort

Wharton Professor’s Book Takes a Deep Dive in a Very Complicated Market

Coverage of working paper on longevity and bicycling.

Terrapass, a venture founded as an MBA class project is described by the New York Times as one of the most noteworthy ideas of 2005.