As the worlds of trade and culture were globalized in the 1980s, consumers worldwide saw standardized global brands enter and grow in their local markets, displacing local brands that had been dominant for decades. But what were consumers seeing in these global brands, and why were consumers switching to them? How could local brands fight back? These timely and important questions were addressed in a series of research papers by Michigan Ross Professor Rajeev Batra and his co-authors from 1999 through 2019. They showed that if consumers perceived brands as being global, they assumed these brands were of higher quality, capable of bestowing more prestige and status to their buyers, and would bring these buyers closer to the imagined lifestyles of consumers in the home countries of these brands. These papers have been cited over 6,000 times, have been nominated for and won multiple best-paper awards in journals and societies of international marketing, and have been included in lists of the 10 papers in the last 30 years that have made the most contribution to the international marketing literature. Today, as the lure of globalization seems to be receding and local brands seem to be winning again, this work highlights the tensions and trade-offs at play.

In their paper, “Crowdfunding the Front Lines: An Empirical Study of Teacher-Driven School Improvement,” Professors Samantha Keppler, Jun Li, and Andrew Wu conducted the first large-scale empirical test of the frontline improvement theory in K-12 schools. The theory, originating in automotive manufacturing, states that empowering front-line employees to identify organizational and process problems and implement solutions improves organizational performance and customer satisfaction. In this case, the team of Michigan Ross professors was interested in how teacher-identified problems in the classroom and crowd-funded solutions improved learning outcomes for K-12 students.

The team analyzed data on thousands of K-12 teacher projects on the largest teacher crowdfunding site, DonorsChoose. They found that one funded project (about $400 in value), on average, achieves a significant increase in the percentage of students scoring basic and above on all tested subjects in high school, as well as science and language arts in primary and middle schools. This effect translates to two-nine additional students moving up to at least a basic level of proficiency in the correlating subject. The effect of these projects is greatest in low-income schools, where funded projects, on average, move four-10 additional students to at least a basic level of proficiency in tested subjects.

From the textual analyses of the teacher's written statements about the impact of the projects in their schools, Keppler, Li, and Wu additionally learned that student academic performance is significantly better when teachers use crowd-funded money to improve knowledge retention, as a repeated learning tool, and to differentiate or personalize learning.

Due to the demonstrated impact of teacher-driven crowdfunded projects, DonorsChoose has partnered with eight states to spend COVID-19 education relief funding on teacher crowdfunding projects. To date, these partnerships have funded over $100 million of teacher projects from over 100,000 teachers, impacting over 10 million students.

From 1990-1993, Michigan Ross housed the Minority Summer Institute with support from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business and the Graduate Management Admission Council. MSI was designed to increase the number of minority faculty in business and management education. 

Each year, 30 Black, Hispanic, and Native American college students were selected to participate in MSI's six-week program. While at Ross, the students were involved in a series of classes, informational sessions, and presentations that provided a first-hand introduction to doctoral studies and the life and work of business professors. 

According to Dave Wilson, former president of GMAC, "When one thinks about changing the world, the MSI initiative must be seen as a resounding success." Following the last offering of MSI, the KPMG Foundation initiated the PhD Project, which has continued the mission of MSI. The PhD Project reports that the number of underrepresented business professors in the United States has risen from 294 in 1994 to more than 1,700 today.

In 1998, Professor David Hirshleifer of the Michigan Business School, and two co-authors, published a paper titled "Investor Psychology and Security Market Under- and Overreactions." This paper has been widely recognized as the first explanation of the seemingly contradictory behavior in asset prices (under- and overreactions to different news) based on two well documented behavioral biases. The biases outlined in the paper are overconfidence (regarding the precision of one's private information) and biased self-attribution. The former leads to well documented evidence of long-term overreaction (price reversals), while the latter causes underreaction (momentum) in the medium term. This paper was the first widely recognized paper in finance based on departures from rational behavior and provided a compelling explanation for seemingly anomalous behavior in asset prices.

Michigan Ross has long been a pioneer in entrepreneurial education, introducing the nation's first course on entrepreneurship in 1927. However, in the early 1970s, Professor LaRue Hosmer played a pivotal role in championing entrepreneurship education at Ross. He developed and taught courses in small business management and a seminar on small business formation. He is considered the founder of the Michigan Entrepreneur Track and has also inspired present-day entrepreneurship faculty at Michigan Ross, including Professor Andy Lawlor. Lawlor was a student in Hosmer's entrepreneurial management course in 1973, and Hosmer has been an important mentor to Lawlor, helping to bridge the gap between business and teaching. Lawlor began guest lecturing under Hosmer's guidance in 1975 and assumed the teaching responsibilities for the entrepreneurship classes in 1981. Over the years, many successful companies have been born from Hosmer and Lawlor's teaching.

Former Michigan Ross Professor Gautam Ahuja's "Collaboration Networks, Structural Holes, and Innovation: A Longitudinal Study" marked a significant turn in the way scholars view the impact of inter-organizational networks on innovation. Until this point, the common perception was more or less linear: the more connections a firm has, the better it is for innovation. However, Ahuja's research added a layer of complexity by considering indirect ties and structural holes in a firm's network. The results of Ahuja's study challenged existing theories at the time and opened up an entirely new area of research. Now, scholars must consider not only the quantity of a firm's connections but also their quality and structure and how these elements influence innovation. This nuanced understanding helped expand the study of inter-organizational networks, underlining how the firms' positions within such networks can dictate their innovation output. This paper is credited with kickstarting a whole new area of research -- inter-organizational networks and innovation -- which focuses not just on the number of connections a firm has but the whole structure of its network and how it impacts its ability to innovate.

Professor Jim Walsh was elected as the 65th president of the Academy of Management in 2006, making him only the second Michigan faculty member to lead the Academy. Walsh took stock of the approximately 16,000 members who lived in more than 100 countries at the time and noted that very few of them resided on the continent of Africa. Knowing that Africa, the cradle of civilization, is home to over a billion people and more than 1,000 universities and that the continent was poised for enormous population and economic growth, he wanted to bridge the gap and reach out to the teacher-scholars on the continent. Fully aware of the terrible history of colonization, he decided to simply create space for colleagues in Africa to meet their colleagues from the rest of the world. The first step in the process was to work with others to co-found the African Academy of Management. His continued work culminated in a 2013 AOM Africa Conference, in which approximately 300 colleagues from the world over journeyed to Johannesburg to share and imagine new research and teaching ideas. Since that time, the Africa Academy of Management has hosted a number of faculty development workshops, launched the Africa Journal of Management, and held conferences across the continent. In short, Africa-centered scholarship has burgeoned. Beyond that, the Ross School was just granted affiliate member status in the Association of African Business Schools. Professor Walsh wanted to be sure that we too are a part of the emerging scholarly conversations and evolving business practices on the continent.

Since an article she published in the Iowa Law Review in 1995, Professor Dana Muir has worked in the field of fiduciary obligation, particularly as it relates to the investment of the almost $37 trillion in U.S. retirement assets, but also as it relates to a variety of other employee benefit plans. In her 1995 article, Muir explained that the courts' attempts to define fiduciary obligation using concepts from fourteenth-century trust law were misguided. Muir has subsequently addressed fiduciary concepts in the context of investment advice, the extent to which employers serve as fiduciaries of the plans the sponsor, and, most recently, in their application to the consideration of environmental, societal, and governance factors in the investment of retirement fund assets.

The public corporation in America is vanishing, and more people, from low-income earners to professionals, are doing their work in the so-called “gig economy.” The work of Professors Jerry Davis and Sue Ashford put these two issues on the research agenda of scholarly colleagues. Davis documents the first idea in his book, The Vanishing American Corporation (2016). Although some scholars have suggested that over-regulation might account for this surprising trend, he argues that a more fundamental shift in the economy, enabled by information and communication technologies, was ultimately responsible. By making it cheaper to "buy" rather than "make" inputs (from capital and labor to supplies, manufacturing, and distribution), information and communication technologies have made the parts of an enterprise like a pile of Legos, ready to assemble into a business, scale, and disassemble. This idea explains Nikefication, Uberization, Amazon, and other recent trends in the organization of the U.S. economy, as well as why the same technologies are used differently in different countries, resulting in very different corporate structures. If what Davis says is true, then fewer people will be working in large public corporation settings going forward. This shift may account for the growth in people working independently, some using technologically mediated apps to find and conduct work. Ashford puts the gig economy and gig workers on the agenda of people wanting to understand individuals at work. Her qualitative and quantitative studies identify the challenges faced by those working independently and what they can do to survive and thrive. Challenges include maintaining one’s identity, keeping sufficient income flowing in, staying organized, finding and maintaining work connections, and figuring out how to make working in this manner work over the long run. This research tests a variety of interventions and solicits ideas from individuals working in this manner regarding strategies that make this kind of work-life viable and enlivening.

Associate Professor Anant Nyshadham co-founded and co-directs the Good Business Lab, a labor research and innovation lab whose work to identify workplace tools and interventions to deliver both impact to workers and returns to employers has quickly expanded across four continents over the last decade. Designed and tested through rigorous randomized controlled trials in real-world workplaces, GBL has developed several tools for rapid and broad scale. GBL's worker voice tool, Inache, has been proven to improve worker retention, reduce absenteeism, and increase worker productivity in manufacturing settings. Similarly, the tool Pratibha is a tablet-based screening and training tool for frontline supervisors that measures and addresses soft skill deficiencies and has been proven to improve the retention of supervisors and dramatically and sustainably raise the productivity of workers in factories. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently awarded GBL a multi-million dollar grant to scale these tools to more than a million workers in the next two years.

From 2000 to 2005, Professors C.K. Prahalad and M.S. Krishnan co-authored several papers on concepts related to how the emergence of digital technologies was transforming business models. From 2005 to 2008, they co-authored the book New Age of Innovation, which introduced the concept of N=1;R=G business model framework. The basic argument was that given the new capabilities emerging from digital technologies, the structure of business models was in the midst of a transformation across industries. They claimed that business models will shift from mass production of products or services to businesses co-creating personalized experiences for one customer at a time. They called this N=1 business model, i.e., businesses will operate on a sample size (N) of one. They argued that to orchestrate this personalized experience for one customer at a time, businesses will not own all resources but will connect with resource partners across the globe (Resources=Global or R=G), and these partners could be big organizations, small businesses, entrepreneurs, or even individuals. They called this business model N=1;R=G. They argued that digital technology was at the center of enabling these capabilities, and no industry will be immune to this change. They presented more than 80 examples in the book. The rest of the book was on the capabilities companies needed to build inside their organizations to compete as an N=1 business. Their primary thesis identified the significant role of software in orchestrating the personalized N=1 experience in an ecosystem of partners and the criticality of the right capabilities in the information architecture and social architecture of companies to thrive in this competition of N=1;R=G ecosystem business models.

In a paper published as a lead article in the Journal of Finance in 1990, Professor Nejat Seyhun investigated whether informed investors stabilize and correct mistakes in security prices by buying undervalued assets and selling overvalued assets or destabilize security prices by jumping into already overpriced securities to create bigger bubbles and mis-valuations first, only to exploit them later. Seyhun's investigation centered on the stock market crash of Oct. 19, 1987, when the stock market crashed by 22% in one day. He found that top corporate insiders bought undervalued stocks and sold overvalued stocks in record quantities immediately following the crash. Hence, informed insiders were stabilizing security prices and not destabilizing them further. This finding provides comfort that the stock market will be self-policing and self-correcting and justifies the current regulatory system, which assumes that more information is beneficial by requiring timely, accurate, and full dissemination of information from all parties involved. Seyhun was among the first to explore various aspects of reported insider trading and its effects on share prices and shareholder wealth.

Professor Gautam Kaul and two former PhD students, in their seminal 1994 study titled, "Transactions, Volume, and Volatility" convincingly argued and verified empirically that it is the occurrence of a trade in a certain direction rather than its dollar value (or volume) that has the greatest effect on prices, hence the greatest relevance when assessing the liquidity of the market where that trade took place. A trade sign is determined by the buyer or seller's information, while market conditions determine trade amount and price. This is a simple yet extremely powerful notion that was originally predicated in theory but had no empirical support before their 1994 study. The publication of this study opened the door to the accurate measurement and needed assessment of market liquidity. These days, the approach they recommended is widespread in its use.

Expanding on his dissertation thesis, completed in 2003, Professor Paolo Pasquariello's powerful insight (published in 2007) demonstrates that financial contagion (the spread of a shock from one financial market to many) could occur due to the simple, and highly plausible, heterogeneous private information of speculators about fundamentals. Financial contagion is an increasingly common phenomenon of global concern, especially during financial crises. Importantly, Pasquariello's theoretical multi-market setting rules out all the more complicated explanations of contagion --- usual suspects such as correlated information and/or liquidity and portfolio rebalancing --- while linking it to some of the main features of globalization, the expansion of and access to international financial markets.

Professor Kenneth Lieberthal was a pioneer in the practice of business school professors contributing their knowledge in public service to society. Lieberthal served as the senior director for Asia for the U.S. National Security Council during the years 1998-2000. 

During that same time, Lieberthal was also special assistant to President Clinton for National Security Affairs. His core academic research findings included a seminal analysis of China's bureaucratic system, which featured a nuanced and careful delineation of the fragmented nature of China's political system in the late 20th century. 

Lieberthal's research was able to explain why China, during that era, had weak policy implementation at times because of the fragmentation in its bureaucratic system. He was known for introducing U.S. policymakers to a nuanced and careful understanding of the Chinese governmental system and how it functions.

In 1993, former Michigan Ross finance faculty member Victor Ng, co-authored a paper that is among the top 50 most cited papers in finance. Ng's paper defines the news impact curve, which measures how new information is incorporated into volatility estimates. His paper compares and estimates various new and existing autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity models, including a partially nonparametric one, with daily Japanese stock return data. New diagnostic tests are presented which emphasize the asymmetry of the volatility response to news. Ng's results suggest that the Glosten, Jagannathan, and Runkle Model is the best parametric model. This path-breaking paper demonstrates the use of a new methodology to show the impact of news on stock prices, probably the most important function of financial markets.