Shaping the future: Grant success at DeGroote

The success of DeGroote faculty in recent national funding competitions demonstrates the excellence, relevance and real-world impact of research at the DeGroote School of Business. This research advances understanding of some of today’s most pressing topics, including artificial intelligence, climate risk and the evolving political landscape.

This year, DeGroote researchers secured Tri-Agency funding for eight projects through the SSHRC Insight Grant program, alongside two renewed NSERC Discovery Grants, six Insight Development Grant projects and two Partnership Engage projects.

SSHRC Insight Grants

Meena Andiappan, associate professor, Human Resources and Management (with Lucas Dufour)

Project title: Turning loss into leverage: Strategic friendship as a proactive response to employee status loss

Led by Andiappan, this project studies how individuals might respond adaptively to the detrimental effects of losing status in the workplace, and how employees might be able to use strategic friendship formation to recover from status loss.

Ronald Balvers, professor, Finance and Business Economics

Project title: Dynamics of anomaly returns

The objective of this project is to examine and understand determinants of the variation of anomaly returns in calendar time. This is critical to improve categorization of anomalies to better understand the efficiency of financial markets and to help guide investment decisions.

John Maheu, professor, Finance and Business Economics

Project title: New time series models for financial econometrics

This project seeks to improve econometric methodology and forecasting in Canada. Among Maheu’s goals is the exploration of models that will help small to large investors understand market trends and the risk and return associated with them, particularly in the context of dramatic events such as COVID19 and Trump tariffs.

Katya Malinova, associate professor, Finance and Business Economics (with Andreas Park)

Project title: Reimagining equity market design: Data fees, platform competition and asset tokenization

This project will consider how data costs and trading rules shape markets, propose practical solutions to improve access and competition and open new directions for thinking about incentives, market design and the implications of tokenized trading within the Canadian context.

Yang Pan, assistant professor, Marketing and Ruhai Wu, associate professor, Marketing

Project title: Multi-category analysis: Inventory influence and sequential bundling

This project will investigate how sequential consumer behaviors shape market basket outcomes in retail settings. Pan and Wu plan to develop a model that captures how existing inventory levels in one category influence future purchases in the same or related categories, and to reform the model to focus on how consumers assemble product bundles across multiple shopping trips to fulfill latent objectives.

Nooshin Salari, assistant professor, Operations Management and Kai Huang, professor, Operations Management

Project title: Keeping volunteers, feeding communities: improving retention in Canadian food banks

While working with a Burlington food bank, this study will generate retention risk scores and highlight where volunteer disengagement is most likely to occur and create practical tools that connect retention insights to daily operations.

Sash Vaid, associate professor, Marketing

Project title: Investigating the asymmetric effects of types of data breach notification laws on consumer well-being outcomes

A comparative study of healthcare and other sectors.

Yan Wang, associate professor, Finance and Business Economics

Project title: When skills don’t match: The financial implications of workforce mismatch

This study will examine whether workforce skill mismatches affect a firm’s capital structure decisions and construct a novel firm-level metric of skill mismatch using granular data on firms’ job postings (skill demand) and employee profiles (skill supply).

NSERC Discovery Grants

 Mahmut Parlar, professor, Operations Management

Project title: Game-theoretic models for green inventory management under carbon emission policies

Mahmut Parlar, who has received uninterrupted research support from NSERC for the last 41 years, will have his funding renewed for an additional five-year term. His research proposal will explore how companies can manage their inventory in a way that is both economically smart and environmentally friendly. Traditionally, businesses focus on ordering and storing products to meet customer demand efficiently. However, these activities also produce carbon emissions, which contribute to climate change. This proposal aims to find better ways for companies to make inventory decisions while considering their impact on the environment.

Elkafi Hassini, professor, Operations Management

Project title: Scalable optimization methods for equitable and climate-conscious urban logistics infrastructure

This research will pursue a new approach to designing logistics infrastructure, one that is not only technically efficient but also responsive to community needs and environmental realities. Over five years, the program will develop scalable optimization models and computational frameworks that support equitable and climate-conscious logistics planning. Rather than treating logistics as a purely technical problem, the research embraces interpretive technologies, tools that help translate complex data and optimization outputs into meaningful, actionable insights for diverse stakeholders.

2026 SSHRC Insight Development Grants

Anna Danielova, associate professor, Finance and Business Economics and Trevor Chamberlain, professor, Finance and Business Economics (with Hesam Shahriari)

Project title: Non-compete enforceability, human capital risk and corporate liquidity

This project will investigate how the legal enforceability of NCAs shapes corporate risk, cash flows and liquidity management, thereby influencing firms’ capacity to invest, innovate and withstand economic shocks. They seek to understand whether stronger enforcement of NCAs stabilizes firms by reducing disruptive employee exits and knowledge leakage or instead creates distortions by weakening labour-market discipline and entrenching management.

Rui Duan, assistant professor, Finance and Business Economics and co-applicants

Project title: Managing biodiversity risk in a global economy: Evidence from multinational corporations

This study will take up two questions: the first asks whether multinational corporations (MNCs) manage their dependence on nature separately from the ecological damage they cause, and whether investors recognize and penalize this disconnect. The second examines the broader consequences of MNCs’ biodiversity strategies for host-country ecosystems by analyzing their spillover effects on local firms and identifying the conditions under which such spillovers arise.

Judy Han, assistant professor, Strategic Management and co-applicants

Project title: Always economic and strategic? Rethinking entrepreneurs’ foreign location choice

This study will challenge the predominant assumption that foreign location choice is a purely strategic, firm-level decision, look at how the personal preferences of foreign entrepreneurs influence location decisions alongside economic factors, and how founders trade off personal and economic factors across location alternatives.

Khalid Nainar, professor, Accounting and Financial Management and Trevor Chamberlain, professor, Finance and Business Economics (with Abdul Rahman Khokhar)

Project title: Modern slavery in supply chains: firm disclosures, behaviour and risk

This project will investigate the effectiveness of modern slavery disclosure (MSD) statements that firms are now required to make in several jurisdictions, including in Canada starting in 2024, by assessing and quantifying investors’ responses and the impact on firms.

Amir Taherizadeh, assistant professor, Strategic Management

Project title: How is collective strategy developed for artificial intelligence adoption in public healthcare organizations?

This study will examine how public hospitals develop and implement strategies for AI-driven digital transformation. Rather than viewing AI adoption as a technical upgrade or an isolated project, the study treats it as a management and organizational challenge that requires coordination among multiple actors. The focus will be on the everyday work through which hospital leaders and partners balance innovation with accountability, safety and operational reliability.

Baniyelme Zoogah, professor, Human Resources and Management

Project title: Educating for ethical extraction: Building knowledge, values and leadership for responsible mining in Ghana’s upper east region

Artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) provides vital livelihoods, but weak regulations, limited educational opportunities and the absence of ethical governance has created cycles of conflict and ecological harm. With the local community, Zoogah will co-design and analyze a program that will meaningfully enable mining community members to make informed, value-based decisions about resource management and sustainable development.

SSHRC Partnership Engage Grants

Javid Nafari, postdoctoral candidate in Business Administration, Benson Honig, professor, Human Resources and Management and Trish Ruebottom, professor, Human Resources and Management

Collaborators include Tej Sandhu, Trevor Copp and Mary Reid, in a partnership with Hamilton Artists Inc. (The Inc.), a long-standing artist-run centre.

Project title: Developing a virtual entrepreneurial incubation model for equity-deserving artists

This project, in partnership with McMaster University’s Reframery Virtual Incubator at the Centre for Research on Community-Oriented Entrepreneurship (CRCE), will co-design, deliver and assess a virtual entrepreneurship incubator tailored to equity-deserving artist-entrepreneur members of The Inc.

Khalid Nainar, professor, Accounting and Financial Management and Trevor Chamberlain, professor, Finance and Business Economics (with Abdul Rahman Khokhar)
Collaborator Hesam Shahriari

Project title: Disclosure quality of and compliance with the Forced Labour and Child Labour in Supply Chains Act of Canada

The team will partner with Above Ground, an advocacy group dedicated to eliminating forced labour and other violations of human rights from Canadian supply chains, to increase their capacity to monitor the adherence of firms (domestic and foreign) to Canada’s Forced Labour and Child Labour in Supply Chains (FLCLA) Act, S.C 2023.