Rohan D'Lima

We explore the role of director nationality in mitigating the effects of supply chain disruptions caused by economic policy uncertainty (EPU). EPU spikes in a supplier's country are associated with significantly lower sales and firm value for its US buyers; however, these effects are mitigated when the buyer has a foreign national from that country on its board of directors. Our cross-sectional tests suggest that foreign nationals have a more pronounced impact in mitigating the effects of supply chain disruptions for firms that are smaller in size, highly leveraged, financially distressed, and with lower cash holdings. Taken together, our results highlight the benefits of foreign national members of corporate boards particularly for firms with significant dependence on foreign suppliers.

Operations and Supply Chain Management are intrinsically linked fields. However, some firms appoint both operations managers (OM) as well as supply chain managers (SCM)to their top management teams. We investigate this phenomena by focusing on the impact that the presence of an OM may have on the firm as opposed to the presence of a SCM. To do this, we consider the firm's strategic supplier portfolio management. Strategic supplier portfolio management (SSPM) decisions impact the firm's long-term performance and are thus the responsibility of the firm’s top management team (TMT). Grounding our research in the logic of Upper Echelons Theory (UET), this paper develops hypotheses that predict how supply chain and operations managers on a firm’s TMT affect two key aspects of it’s SSPM – the geographic sourcing strategy and the supplier relationship strategy.

We investigate the relationship between global sourcing and inventory investment with a focus on the moderating impact of a Supply Chain Management Executive (SCME) on that relationship. Due to the increased uncertainties and shipment lot sizes associated with sourcing from international locations, firms sourcing from foreign markets are seen to have higher inventory investment. This problem is expected to be compounded when a firm buys from multiple countries. Our theory driven hypotheses suggests that firms with a designated SCME are able to counter the negative impacts of global sourcing and, in turn, are able to have lower inventory investments vis-a-vis their counterparts without a designated SCME. Estimating an econometric model using data collected from multiple sources we support our hypotheses that global sourcing intensive firms with a SCME have lower inventory levels than their counterparts without a designated SCME. This is a significant contribution to the growing stream of literature exploring the impact the SCME’s.