SSHRC awards Sprott researchers $175k in new funding for short-term research projects

Three Sprott faculty members have been awarded Insight Development Grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Reserved for research in its early stages, these one- or two-year grants support such projects as case studies, pilot initiatives, and explorations of new approaches to knowledge mobilization.  

Despite increasing and shared willingness to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, apparel companies still disagree about the effects of and best strategies for managing climate change. Since lead firms (apparel brands and retailers) and first-tier suppliers (responsible for manufacturing) are located in different geographies, moreover, they experience climate change differently. Jinsun will develop four case studies to determine how companies perceive and coordinate responses to the impacts of climate change. She will also explore how climate change shapes working conditions in first-tier supplier firms and how companies collectively respond to emerging labour issues. Her research will produce novel empirical insights while helping companies identify the successes and weaknesses of their climate strategies.

Customer service chatbots offer significant savings for companies and efficient, 24/7 service for customers, but extant research indicates that consumers still prefer human agents. In order to shed light on this preference, Lindsay will develop a unifying framework to clarify how chatbot interactions influence consumers’ service experience and relationship to the company as a whole. To this end, she will conduct a series of controlled experiments that manipulate different elements of chatbot design and service encounter to examine how different variables shape consumer perception. Her results will allow for evidence-based improvement of the integration and navigation of chatbots, thereby benefitting companies, consumers, and parties in other sectors (e.g., health, government) who are increasingly relying on chatbot service models.

In 2017, the Financial Stability Board created a new framework called the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) to improve investor assessment regarding climate-related financial risks and opportunities. Adoption of the TCFD has grown globally, yet uncertainty remains about how such reporting actually impacts firms’ cost of equity capital. This study will fill the gap in our current understanding by clarifying the relation between TCFD reporting and cost of capital. Shi will collect information from the TCFD Knowledge Hub and then employ textual analysis to quantify firms’ responses to TCFD recommendations in order to test the hypothesis that TCFD reporting reduces information asymmetry and climate risk vulnerability, bolsters investor confidence, and thus reduces the cost of raising capital. The novel dataset and analyses that Shi produces are likely to interest not only investors, but also policymakers concerned about environmental regulation and reporting.