Education, Business, & Law

Wharton management professor Sigal Barsade details her research on emotional contagion with text bubbles on a white board behind her.

The key to keeping your employees happy

Moods, emotions, even smiles are some of the emotional contagions Wharton professor Sigal Barsade cites as what are passed along throughout the workplace, making the professional environment either more pleasant or more unhappy.

Penn Today Staff ・

wall of screen icons streaming different content and a hand with a remote

Streaming endures growing pains

With several new contenders entering the streaming wars in the months ahead, faculty from Wharton and Cinema and Media Studies weigh in on the state of streaming and obstacles ahead.

Brandon Baker ・

rendering of the human head from three angles with visuals of networks reaching out from the center of the brain

Removing human bias from predictive modeling

Predictive modeling is supposed to be neutral, a way to help remove personal prejudices from decision-making. But the algorithms are packed with the same biases that are built into the real-world data used to create them. 

Penn Today Staff ・

Two people shaking hands, one smiles confidently.

Why confidence is key to persuasion

Wharton’s Jonah Berger discusses his new research on how vocal cues affect a speaker’s ability to persuade others.

Penn Today Staff ・

Five people sitting in chairs against a wall wearing suits waiting for a job interview.

Why good people still can’t get jobs

Wharton's Peter Cappelli discusses where companies have gone wrong in the hiring process, and contends that the economy doesn’t have as much to do with the hiring process as we would like to believe. 

Penn Today Staff ・



In the News


The Chronicle of Higher Education

Will coronavirus close your college for good?

Robert Zemsky of the Graduate School of Education spoke about the coronavirus pandemic’s impact on the financial health of higher education.

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Reuters

Delivery drivers face pandemic without sick pay, insurance, sanitizer

Matthew Bidwell of the Wharton School spoke about the pandemic-related changes to working conditions for contract employees. “It’s very sad because three weeks ago we were in a historically tight labor market,” he said. “It was forcing employers for the first time in a long time to offer more perks and more benefits. They no longer have that pressure.”

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The Washington Post

The GAO told the government in 2015 to develop a plan to protect the aviation system against an outbreak. It never happened

Howard Kunreuther of the Wharton School said good leadership is critical in preparing government agencies for catastrophic events. “You cannot deal with this at the level of just saying let each agency operate,” he said. “You need to have some way to bring them together and to indicate that this is a problem, which cannot be solved by one agency alone. That is something that leadership is going to have to suggest—‘This is the way to do it’—and we don’t have that right now.”

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The New York Times

Businesses face a new coronavirus threat: Shrinking access to credit

Krista Schwarz of the Wharton School spoke about how businesses are coping with the financial impact of the coronavirus pandemic. “Everyone is just trying to get by day to day at the moment,” she said. “Right now is not the time to grow the company—it’s the time to stay solvent.”

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The New York Times

A conservative agenda unleashed on the federal courts

Stephen Burbank of the Law School spoke about trend by recent presidents to draw the federal judiciary into policy debates. “The problem as I see it is not that judges differ ideologically—of course they do—nor is it that a Republican president would look for someone with congenial ideological preferences,” he said. “It’s that in recent decades the search has been for hard-wired ideologues because they’re reliable policy agents.”

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