PUBLICATIONS AND PAPERS UNDER REVIEW
Bhatia, N., & Meier, S. (2025). What Drives Employee Strategic Salience in Shareholder Communications? A Machine Learning Approach. Strategy Science. [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. [Link to Paper] [Link to Replication Library].
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 competitive pressure through adaptive decisions that displace and harm stakeholders. When can affected stakeholders constrain such adaptation? In this paper, I argue that local media, by acting as an information intermediary for disenfranchised stakeholders, increases the visibility of labor-displacing decisions and raises their expected reputational costs. As a result, firms in stronger local media environments become less willing to undertake adaptive actions that impose concentrated harm on workers and communities. 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 industry downturns and are less likely to close establishments located in high-media regions. These results are robust to a range of empirical checks. Mechanism tests show that local media amplifies the reputational costs associated with layoffs and induces more stakeholderinclusive executive discourse during industry downturns. The effects are attenuated in industries with strong union presence and concentrated among firms with greater monopsonistic power in labor markets. These constraints also propagate downstream, slowing workforce skill reconfiguration and shaping AI adoption. The findings suggest that informational transparency, while protecting stakeholder claims, can impose real strategic costs by constraining organizationally necessary adaptation.
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)