Nathan Barrymore is an assistant professor of business, government, and society at The University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business. He is also a senior fellow at the Wharton ESG Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania. Barrymore studies the ways that firms respond strategically to stakeholders and the performance results of these strategic decisions.

In one stream of research, he studies managers’ strategic choices around firm-level environmental and social actions. He examines firms’ decisions to either substantively or symbolically address outside pressures for social performance. Barrymore has found that although managers’ preferences for social performance predict substantive responses, firms symbolically respond to investor pressures (they greenwash), consistent with a principal-agent model.

In a second stream of research, he uses experimental methods to examine how gender affects managers’ willingness to advocate for, or sponsor, subordinates. Although women and men are equally likely to compete for subordinates (unlike when competing for themselves), men compete much more often for other men. He finds that biases around perceived risk preferences drive this discrimination.

Barrymore’s work has been featured in the Strategic Management Journal, and The Hill.