No matter the discipline, business research can have a huge impact on diversity, equity, and inclusion. In 2013, Venky Nagar, KPMG Professor of Accounting, along with former Michigan Ross professor Feng Li, published accounting research on U.S. firms initiating same-sex domestic partnership benefit policies.

Li and Nagar’s paper “Diversity and Performance,” published in Management Science, tests if corporate policy supporting LGBTQ+ rights frees all employees to bring their authentic selves to work, thus improving org culture and performance. The paper finds that the nearly 300 firms that adopted these policies between 1990 and 2006 saw significant improvement in operating performance relative to an approximate 10% average stock price increase. If an investor had accordingly timed their purchases of these firms, they would have outperformed ninety-five percent of all U.S. professional mutual funds.

The paper’s reasoning was core to the 2015 Amicus Brief filed in support of legalizing same-sex marriage by the law firm Morgan Lewis on behalf of 379 large and small corporate employers ranging from Apple to Zingerman’s in the landmark Supreme Court case Obergefell v. Hodges.