Misericordia’s Dr. Soumendra Nath Banerjee Receives Prestigious Sywassink Award

Misericordia’s Dr. Soumendra Nath Banerjee Receives Prestigious Sywassink Award

Soumendra Nath Banerjee, Ph.D., associate professor in Business at Misericordia University, is the recipient of the Sywassink Award for best research paper in Economics on Exporting and pollution abatement expenditure: Evidence from firm-level data. The research paper was published in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management (JEEM).

The Sywassink Research Award is given out by the College of Business at Appalachian State University and was recognizing sustainability-related research. Appalachian State University honors those in teaching, research, and service as well as the spirit of the Walker College of Business. G.A. Sywassink, Chairman and CEO of Standard Holding Corporation provides the funding for the award. He is more than just a long-time supporter of Appalachian State University. Sywassink was a former chair of the Business Advisory Council for Walker College, past chair of Appalachian's Board of Trustees, and a past member of the UNC System Board of Governors. Sywassink is an Honorary Alumnus of Appalachian and a 1994 Honoree of the Walker College chapter of Beta Gamma Sigma.

Dr. Banerjee and his co-authors’, Dr. Jayjit Roy and Dr. Mahmut Yasar, work speaks for itself since JEEM is the gold standard in its field to have a publication. Given the faculty scholarship quality and strength in the Department of Economics at Appalachian State University, the award, itself speaks to the quality of work done by Dr. Banerjee and his co-authors. The award-winning research examined the environmental effects of plant-level trading and specifically assessed if facilities that export have measures in place to reduce pollution versus facilities that do not export. The findings showed that exporting facilities that spend more on lowering pollution, versus facilities that do not export, have environmental benefits to lowering the effects of pollution.

Not only did Dr. Banerjee work on the award-winning article but he is also a board of directors at the Pennsylvania Economic Association (PEA), and was Vice-President of this year's 36^th Conference held at Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania. Preparation of both the conference program and proceedings was his responsibility. At the conference, Dr. Banerjee presented his co-authored scholarly work, The Strategic Change-Managerial Ability Relationship and the Moderating Effects of Firm Age and Financial Slack. He also had the opportunity to chair the session and discuss other scholarly works.

During the summer, Dr. Banerjee and his co-authors published one of their research works, The Effect of Chief Executive Officer and Board Prior Corporate Social Responsibility Experiences on Their Focal Firm’s Corporate Social Responsibility: The Moderating Effect of Chief Executive Officer Overconfidence, in Frontiers in Psychology, a prestigious peer-reviewed journal. The study shows that CEO and board prior CSR experience are positively related to the firm’s current CSR activities. The authors find a significant positive moderating effect of CEO overconfidence on the relationship between CEO prior CSR and the focal firm’s CSR. 

During the summer, Dr. Banerjee has been extremely busy as well as he is working on an R&R from Strategic Organization, which is prestigious in the world of business. He has reviewed an article for a prominent business journal, Journal of Managerial Psychology, and is also reviewing an article for an even more prestigious journal, Technological Forecasting and Social Change. At Misericordia University he is teaching two asynchronous economics courses and has been supervising undergraduate student interns. 

For more information or any questions, Dr. Soumendra Nath Banerjee can be reached by email, and for more information about Misericordia's Business Department click here.