OVERVIEW
Publishing correlational evidence is becoming increasingly difficult. Using an instrument to control/correct for endogeneity is often fraught with the difficulty of convincing others that the instrument meets exclusion restriction. Peer-based instruments seem to have lived their life! Ah, the life of an empiricist seems to be getting harder!
This course acknowledges the challenges and informs you of various methods you can use to convince reviewers/referees and editors that your observed beta is causal. We will begin with experiments, so you are set up on the gold standard for causality. Next, we will discuss various methods that take you away from correlational evidence and toward its causal counterpart. Specifically, we will study instrumental variables and their use in regressions, instrument-free methods (e.g., Copula, heteroskedasticity-based methods), nonrandom shocks that require various matching methods and DiD, and random shocks. This course will introduce you to several databases that can help you answer firm-level questions, in general, and B2B/B2G questions, specifically. We will also talk about data from primary survey, secondary survey (think of YouGov), and interviews. Last, I will cull random shocks in the United States and China that academics in accounting, finance, and management disciplines have used and I will teach how these shocks can help answer marketing questions.
The course consists of eight sessions of 120 minutes each. The course will be offered on Fridays from 9:00AM-11:00AM ET beginning on March 7 through May 8, 2025. We believe 9:00AM Eastern time will allow participation from people in the U.S. Pacific time zone (6:00AM for them), Asia, Australia, Middle East, Europe, and hopefully, South America and Africa.
INSTRUCTOR:
Vivek Astvansh (Ph.D., University of Western Ontario) is an Associate Professor of Quantitative Marketing and Analytics at McGill University, Canada and Indiana University, USA. Vivek is an academic researcher. He is currently researching how corporate governance actors (e.g., short sellers who hold a short position, activist institutional investors who hold a long position, and NGOs who hold a nonfinancial stake) shape a firm’s actions that can affect consumers.
Vivek is an empiricist. He obtains quantitative and experimental data and analyzes them using econometrics and machine learning to test his hypotheses. His research has been published in (among others) Harvard Business Review (HBR; two articles), the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (JAMS; one article), the Journal of Marketing (JM, one article), Manufacturing & Service Operations Management (M&SOM, two articles), and Production and Operations Management (POM, four articles).
Vivek teaches in undergraduate, master’s, doctoral, and executive education programs. Specifically, he teaches marketing strategy (MRKT 354) in B.Com. program, marketing intelligence (MRKT 658) in the MBA program, advanced marketing analytics (MRKT 671), and pricing analytics (MRKT 673) in residential and online MMA programs. He teaches a Ph.D. seminar (MRKT 710) in marketing strategy. Lastly, he teaches a module on “the language of marketplace and the marketplace of language” in the IMPM (International Masters Program for Managers; https://impm.org/) program.
Vivek also teaches “Data Science in Business” (DSCI-D590) to students in the residential and online MS in Data Science students at Indiana University’s Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering.
Vivek is an Associate Editor at the Journal of Operations Management, and a member of the editorial board of the Production and Operations Management. He is an “ad hoc” reviewer for the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Business Ethics, Human Resource Management Journal, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of Marketing, and Marketing Science.