This award provides support to Dr. Mark S. Mizruchi under the National Science Foundation's Young Presidential Awards program. The objectives of this program are to provide research support to the Nation's most outstanding and promising young science and engineering faculty. The awards are intended to improve the capability of U.S. academic institutions to respond to the demand for highly qualified science and engineering personnel for academic and industrial research and teaching. This award will allow the investigator to pursue his research in the application of social network ideas to issues in organizational theory and political sociology. Much of his work focuses on the behavior of large corporations. He is interested in the factors that determine the types of government policies supported by businesses. Dr. Mizruchi's focus is on the ways in which factors such as market constraint exerted by one firm over another and the number of common institutional shareholders determine whether a pair of firms will support the same policy. He is also concerned with the methods corporations use to handle their capital needs. The focus is on whether representatives of financial institutions join the boards of nonfinancial corporations when the latter are in financial difficulty, as well as the types of alternatives that are available to capital- dependent firms and the factors that influence how capital is raised.
