PUBLICATIONS AND PAPERS UNDER REVIEW
Bhatia, N., & Meier, S. (2025). What Drives Employee Strategic Salience in Shareholder Communications? A Machine Learning Approach. Strategy Science, 11(2), 187-208. [Link to Paper] [Code and Data].
Keum, D. D., & Bhatia, N. (2026). When do nice guys finish last? Prosociality and the psychological model of CEO ‐firm matching. Strategic Management Journal, 47(5), 1272–1300. [Link to Paper] [Link to Replication Library].
Bhatia, N., Cai, W., & Srivastava, S. B. (2026). Throwing curveballs: A language‐based model of curveball questions in quarterly earnings calls uncovers their consequences and antecedents. Strategic Management Journal, 47(8), 2341–2389. [Link to Paper] [Link to Replication Library].
Practitioner article available at the Harvard Business Review
Keum, D. D., Wang, S., & Bhatia, N. (2026). Do Machines Make Firms Meaner? Automation and the Erosion of Firm-Employee Relations. Working Paper (Revise & Resubmit - Management Science) [Link to Paper].
WORKING PAPERS AND RESEARCH IN PROGRESS
1. The Fear of Being Seen: Local Media as a Constraint on Labor Adaptation. (Job Market Paper - Link to Paper on SSRN)
Abstract: Firms often respond to competition through adaptive decisions, such as layoffs and establishment closures, that impose concentrated harm on workers and communities. I argue that local media makes this concentrated harm public, enabling opposition among those affected and raising the expected costs of firms' labor-displacing decisions. As a result, firms in stronger local media environments become less willing to undertake these forms of adaptation. I test this argument using a shift-share style research design that exploits variation in Chinese import competition across U.S. industries. I find that firms headquartered in regions with greater local media intensity are less likely to lay off workers in response to import shocks and to close establishments located in high-media regions. Mechanism tests show that local media amplifies the reputational costs of layoffs. The constraint intensifies with the severity of displacement harm and the reach of local coverage within the community and weakens where labor unions provide collective voice. Firms adapt by hiring and firing workers, so these constraints propagate downstream: firms in high-media regions reconfigure workforce skills more slowly, hire less AI talent, and shift from exploration toward exploitation.
2. Vertical Integration and Information Environments. (Solo-authored - Dissertation Chapter)
3. Institutional Investors, Networks, and Shared Sensemaking under Uncertainty. (with Yashodhara Basuthakur & Srikanth Paruchuri)
Grant Awarded - Bernstein Center for Leadership and Ethics, Columbia Business School (5,000$)
4. Distracted peers and the unraveling of collaborative governance: reactions of co-institutional investors to organizational misconduct. (with Yashodhara Basuthakur & Srikanth Paruchuri)