This issue, we highlight David Lee, Adjunct Professor of Economics at the Robert B. Willumstad School of Business. Lee’s interdisciplinary research spans economics, climate science, and policy, leveraging machine learning and statistical models to predict and mitigate the effects of natural disasters like hurricanes and wildfires. With research experience at Columbia and Stony Brook Universities and policy work with the New York State Legislature, Lee champions partnerships between scientists and policymakers to address the global challenges of climate change.

At Adelphi, Lee bridges real-world challenges with academic inquiry, enriching the classroom by incorporating his diverse knowledge and practical insights. His work inspires both students and colleagues, fostering a deeper understanding of complex issues and equipping future leaders with analytical tools to address them.

Watch this month’s feature video to learn more about David Lee’s impactful work.

Stay tuned for more Faculty Fridays as we celebrate the extraordinary contributions of our faculty.

Interested in being featured? Contact Leeann Mello at FCPE to learn how you can be part of an upcoming Faculty Fridays issue.

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But according to James Hazy, EdD, professor ofĚýmanagementĚýin theĚýRobert B. Willumstad School of Business, the problem is not that simple. His latest co-authored paper, “Value Sinks: A Process Theory of Corruption Risk During Complex Organizing,” published in Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and Life Sciences (July 2023),Âą is a detailed application of complexity theory to the tangled maze of organizational corruption. While most studies of corruption typically scrutinize agency and ethics at the individual level, the paper presents a “process theory that describes how corruption risk emerges from conditions of uncertainty that are intrinsic in social systems and social interactions.”

Complexity science, which forms the basis for much of Dr. Hazy’s work in business management, examines the properties of physical systems and human systems, including human social networks. Applying it to corruption led Dr. Hazy to develop the concept of a “value sink.” Inspired by the physics term “heat sink” into which excess heat is dissipated from a system, a “value sink” refers to the idea of a value being captured by an actor or actors within a system, then removed permanently so that it cannot continue to benefit the system as a whole.

A system is at the greatest risk for corruption when it contains unstable dynamics, Dr. Hazy and his co-authors maintain. These dynamics are likely to emerge during a time of large- or small-scale disruption, called “disequilibrium conditions,” in the paper’s terms. Under disequilibrium, “agents in a system [can] take actions that exploit … conditions of uncertainty and ethical ambiguity,” the authors write. “Further, systemic corruption emerges when agent interactions are amplified locally in ways that create a hidden value sink, which we define as a structure that extracts, or ‘drains,’ resources from the system for the exclusive use of certain agents.” Such conditions can also prevent individuals from recognizing when they are contributing to corruption. “You sometimes don’t really realize when you’re in a value sink because you think you’re helping the organization, but you’re really getting sucked into a value sink,” Dr. Hazy said.

Value sinks aren’t always a net-negative. In fact, as Dr. Hazy explains, they are the same organizational property that leads to the development of new innovative technologies and new ways of making art. But, in the context of corruption, these value sinks remove value from an organization solely for the benefit of an individual or set of individuals, with no accompanying positive benefit for the system or the world at large. This constitutes ethical harm.

Dr. Hazy’s paper aims to identify the risks for value sinks in order to help organizations avert potential harm. He and his co-authors lay out 16 different elements of corruption risk, or indicators that value extraction might be occurring somewhere in an organization. Arranged on two axes, organizational scale and risk type, the elements cover the bases of the stages of corruption up and down the level of organizing, from the individual, early “Local Opportunities to ‘Defect'” to the late-stage, global “Institutions With Embedded, Dynamically Stable Value Sinks” in the broader economy.

Now, Dr. Hazy is organizing an upcoming symposium on corruption at the Academy of Management’s Annual Meeting, a global gathering that is open to representatives from business academia and international business and consulting organizations like McKinsey & Company. He hopes his work on value sinks will empower individuals within these systems to not only recognize corruption risks, but work to actively counter them. Despite the resistance these hard science concepts may face from the soft skills-centric business world, he believes they are a vital component of successful organizational management. After all, “When corrupt acts are occurring, how do we move forward?” Complexity science can help answer that question.

Biography

James Hazy, EdD

James Hazy, EdD

James Hazy, EdD, professor of management, focuses his teaching both on how leadership creates value for organizational stakeholders and on helping students appreciate the importance of the human aspects of business value creation. His research interests range from organizational leadership and leadership effectiveness metrics to computational organization theory, organizational capabilities and corruption. Dr. Hazy is the founder and CEO of Leadership Science, LLC, a management consulting firm in human resource development.

^{ÂąHazy, J., Lichtenstein, B., Demetis, D., Backstrom, T. & Dooley, K. (2023). “.”ĚýNonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and Life Sciences,Ěý27, 319-350.}

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She researched colleges on Long Island that offered night and weekend classes and found Adelphi’s Adult Baccalaureate Learning Experience (ABLE) program, now the College of Professional and Continuing Studies, which helps working adults obtain a college degree. She has used that degree to build a career helping other incarcerated women.

of the program she helped to found in 2015, . The nonprofit is dedicated to empowering and supporting women and mothers within Long Island’s three jails.

It’s a program she said would have benefited her had it existed when she was released. But Martin said she was lucky that Bedford offered her the opportunity to take college classes. She was just 19, a 4.0 undergraduate and a cheerleader when her mother’s mental illness led to her becoming an accessory in a family violence situation.

“When everything fell apart, even while I was incarcerated, being a part of a college program inside of prison kind of centered me and made me feel as though I wasn’t just an inmate number,” Martin said.

A Little Community

That’s why she called her experience at Adelphi “like a breath of fresh air.” All her classmates were returning students who were warm and nonjudgmental.

“I felt so much more at home,” said Martin, who at the time was among the youngest at 23. “I was with people who were going back in their 40s and 50s and had never finished school or raised their children first. We were like a little community, and the professors were so deeply dedicated. Looking back, I remember the generosity of heart, thought and giving the professors had toward us.”

But it wasn’t easy. Martin was juggling work with classes, sometimes driving to class early Saturday morning after working a late shift as a waitress. “I was really committed. I knew that if I wanted to do something in my career that I would need that degree as a baseline.”

Spearheading Legislation

Instead, Martin got her first professional job in 2003 at the and then as associate director of policy at the , where she spearheaded legislative initiatives and policy advocacy addressing prison reform. She was the key organizer of a successful effort to create the , which works to secure parental rights for incarcerated parents, as well as the , which prohibits the shackling of incarcerated mothers during labor.

She then worked as an advocacy director and co-director at , using memoir writing to empower women in prison. In 2015, she was asked by , an advocate for prison reform who founded , to help develop a program to support women in the Suffolk County correctional facilities. Martin drafted a business plan for New Hour, creating programs that offered the support she never received in prison.

A Commitment to Advocacy

Since then, New Hour has provided more than 12,000 women with services such as pickups from jail, transportationĚýto social services, basic needs like clothing and toiletries, and helping them come up with a plan following their release from the Nassau and Suffolk jails.

In addition, she oversees and leads carceral reform across New York state through advocacy and policy reform efforts, including , , , along with the and the .

Martin is a recipient of the , the and the . She has also been featured in the media, including and .

And her activism is ongoing. She and New Hour are advocating the , which would provide reproductive care and support for pregnant women and create nurseries in prisons and jails.

Promoting an Education

As New Hour executive director, one of Martin’s main messages to the women she supports is the importance of education.

“I believe it is that lifeline to get you through some of the harder times in life. When women come through our doors, they’ll often look at me and say, ‘I can’t believe you were in prison.’ I often say to them, ‘You don’t have a scarlet letter A on you. Nobody knows what you’ve been through. You and I are the same.’”

She added, “I think that the kind of education I got out of Adelphi gave me the confidence that I really needed to be able to help the women I work with. I try to tell them that education gives you that self-esteem that you need to keep going; it really does make a difference.”

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Recent Response Letters

• Con​sump​tion has to fall for cli​mate crisis to ease – January 31, 2024
• Wellness shows how capitalism can co-opt the consumer – October 4, 2023
• A bit less prediction and a bit more common sense – May 16, 2023
• – January 27, 2023
• Why economic forecasting remains a mug’s game – September 18, 2022
• America’s economy recalls pre-Napoleonic France – June 2, 2022
• Defining sustainability is a challenge for investors – February 24, 2022
• Online scams and rent extraction go hand in hand – October 28, 2021
• Use facts as guide to truth, not to push narratives – June 15, 2021
• In such an uncertain world some humility is needed – January 19, 2021

Mariano Torras, PhD is a Professor and Chair of the Finance and Economics Department at the Â鶹ֱ˛Ą Robert B. Willumstad School of Business.

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Robert Goldberg is a James F. Bender Clinical Professor of Finance at the Â鶹ֱ˛Ą Robert B. Willumstad School of Business.

In a similar spirit, here we introduce a rudimentary measure of monetary accommodation. Our Fed Accommodation Index is the simple sum of two components. The first is the difference between the rates of money supply growth and the growth rate of GDP, where a greater difference would signify “looser” money. The other component is the difference between inflation and the Fed funds rate, where inflation greater than the interest rate suggests insufficient tightening.

A positive index value implies that the Fed is being accommodative, while a negative value implies the opposite. And as we will see,ĚýmagnitudeĚýmatters.

Mariano Torras is a Professor and Chair of the Finance and Economics Department at the Â鶹ֱ˛Ą Robert B. Willumstad School of Business.

The accompanying graph shows changes in the value of the index over more than six decades. The pattern is revealing. From 1959 to the late 1970s, the index mostly remained at a low absolute magnitude, whether positive or negative. But for the 20-year period immediately following, it is nearly always negative, flirting with and even falling below -15 on a few occasions in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The Fed, in other words, had its foot on the brake from about 1980 to 2000, the effect at least partly a residual from its emphatic response to the double-digit inflation of the 1970s.

FED Accommodation Index Change in M2-GDP Plus CPI-Fed Funds

After 2000, however, a starkly different picture emerges. The Index moves into positive territory and, after some fluctuation during the aughts, remains there in the decade or so following the financial crisis. Moreover, it peaks at 25, and then again at 18, both far higher than anything seen in the preceding six decades. What is most remarkable is that the index remains relatively highĚýdespite historically low inflationĚýover the period. The pedal was, in other words, “pressing down hard on the metal”, as monetary policy was increasingly relied upon to stimulate an economy no longer responding to fiscal stimulus funded by federal budget deficits. The macroeconomic data certainly seem to bear this out; after growing at an annualized rate of over 3.5 percent from 1947 to 2000, inflation-adjusted US GDP grew only two percent per annum from 2000 to 2020.

Our index also reflects the unprecedented volatility of the early Covid years, and its sensitivity to the emergency measures undertaken. Sharply negative GDP growth in the second quarter of 2020 raised the index to an anomalously high level (88), while the ensuing “correction” did the same in the third quarter but in the opposite direction (-22). And notice how, in response to the recent return of inflation about eighteen months ago, our index shows the United States entering a phase of monetary tightening the likes of which we have not seen in about 40 years.

WhatĚýthe graphĚýcannot, of course, tell us – and it is the critical question on everyone’s mind –Ěý is what to expect in the medium to long-term. Is the drop in our index over the past 18 months a mere blip, to be reversed once we re-enter the accommodative regime of persistently low rates – if that is even possible? Or does it perhaps signify entry into a new policy regime of high rates? The short run answer is highly unpredictable. But in the longer term, the path followed by the Accommodation Index will in large part depend on a mix of factors with low uncertainty (e.g., demographics), medium uncertainty (government policy), and high uncertainty (the rate and impact of scientific discovery). It is almost assured that such factors will weigh heavily on future growth and inflation trends and monetary responses.

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