Same Activities, Governed Differently: Governance Mode as a Structural Response to Institutional Complexity

Governance with Shon R. Hiatt · Draft available on request

Using deal-level data on governance arrangements among the world's integrated oil and gas majors, this paper studies how firms respond when their strategic direction is publicly contested. Contestation does not push firms out of the contested activity. They keep doing it and recompose how it is governed, shifting toward joint arrangements, with no credible drop in total activity. Governance mode sets which entities are formally positioned to answer for a deal, and a contested firm can move from sole governing entity to one among several. Whether that repositioning carries accountability consequences depends on audiences, since it works only insofar as they allocate some accountability beyond the focal firm. The response operates at the firm's boundary, on who is positioned to answer, rather than on what the firm does.

Relational Competition: Interesting Idea, Questionable Construct

Theory Ao, J., Nicholson, J. B., Blatman, G., Madhavan, R., & Prescott, J. (2022). Academy of Management Perspectives, 36(4), 1033-1048.

Assesses the construct validity of relational competition and identifies what stands in the way of its theoretical development.

It All Adds Up: Immigration Policy Multiplicity and the Eroding Education Advantage in Ownership

Multiplicity with Alfred Marcus · Draft available on request

A business is a committed stake in a state's policy environment, while a job is portable. Studying twenty-one years of within-state policy variation and roughly four million Census observations, we find that where more immigration policies are simultaneously in force, education converts into business ownership at lower rates among immigrants. Supportive measures compress the relationship as strongly as restrictive ones, and equally educated US-born workers in the same states and years show no response. The feature that matters is how many measures are in force, not what they say.

Measuring the World That Was: How Evaluators Sustain or Counteract a Drifting Institutional Measure

Measurement with Shon R. Hiatt · working title

An authorized measure can keep its force after the conditions it was built to represent have changed, while the same system produces the evidence of that drift. This project develops distributed validity governance: the authority to produce a measure, evaluate with it, diagnose its validity, attach consequences, and revise it is divided among actors moving on different timetables. Whether the evidence bites falls to evaluators, who can reproduce the drift by continuing to use the inherited measure or counteract its consequences by incorporating the diagnostic, well before the standard is formally recalibrated.

Stick to Your Knitting or Chase the Wind? Rethinking Capability Balance in the Transition to Renewable Energy

Capabilities with Ravi Madhavan · working title

How integrated energy firms balance existing capabilities against new ones as they move into renewables.

Capability Formation and Network Evolution: An Exploratory TERGM Analysis

Capabilities with R. Krause and Ravi Madhavan · working title

An exploratory temporal network analysis of how capabilities and partnership networks co-evolve in the energy transition.

Regulatory Harmonization for Small Modular Reactors: Direct and Opportunity Cost Implications Evidence from U.S. Developers and Cross-Jurisdictional Benchmarks

Research Fellow · White paper with the Hamm Institute for American Energy, Oklahoma State University, 2025

U.S. Nuclear Power Industry Employment Forecast Analysis: Operations, New Construction, and Reactor Restart Workforce Projections

Research Fellow · White paper funded by the National Center for Energy Analytics, 2026