Explore the faculty research, thought leadership, and groundbreaking philosophies that established Michigan Ross as one of the world’s top business schools.
Beginning from seminal efforts by Brian Talbot at the Michigan Business School in the early 1990s, the Tauber Institute for Global Operations was designed to bring business and engineering students together for a world-class education in operations. Students would take classes in both business and engineering and complete team projects with companies. The projects were scoped to incorporate both business and engineering content, addressing important problems that had a VP-level champion at the sponsoring company. The institute was innovative by offering additional training to students beyond operations: leadership training, communications training, and providing students the opportunity to organize conferences, etc. In addition to its impact on students and companies, the Institute has for years served as an important mechanism fueling the technology and operations faculty's relevant, problem-driven research by putting them in touch with practitioners at leading companies around the world. Since its foundation, more than 1,500 graduates have completed the program as Tauber Fellows, there have been 720 summer projects executed at 145 companies, and the Institute was honored in 2012 with the prestigious UPS George D. Smith Prize from INFORMS.
Originally launched by Michigan Ross Professor David Brophy and now organized and run by the Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies, the Midwest Growth Capital Symposium began as an opportunity to showcase innovative Michigan ventures seeking funding and connect them with venture capitalists, angel investors, industry stakeholders, and leaders from across the nation.
Today, the Symposium provides a platform for pre-selected Midwest companies to present their business ideas and investment opportunities. These companies span various sectors, such as life sciences, healthcare, technology, food and agriculture, and energy. First held in 1980, the Symposium is the longest-running university-based venture fair of its kind, has gained recognition, and attracts attendees from across the country.
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.
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.
Michigan Ross is known for being one of the first places to promote and provide rigorous evidence contrary to the efficient market hypothesis. The work of Professor Victor Bernard, a faculty member from 1982-1995, played a huge role in the beginnings of literature on market inefficiency. His work in valuation and fundamental analysis was the first to provide evidence that investors could not fully process information in earnings releases. The inefficient markets argument was further supported by the work of Professor Richard Sloan, a faculty member from 1997-2007. Bernard demonstrated that market participants treat the two basic components of accounting — cash and accruals — in an irrational way when making their valuation of corporate securities. This behavior became known as the "accrual anomaly." Bernard's work twice won the Notable Contribution to the Accounting Literature Award.
Professor Paul W. McCracken was part of the Michigan Ross faculty from 1948-1986. He was a prominent economist and adviser to both Republican and Democratic presidents and was also an advocate for an active government role in economic stabilization. McCracken advocated for government policies to moderate business cycles, control inflation, and address unemployment in order to assist the disadvantaged. As a result, McCracken played a central role in addressing the rising inflation of the late 1960s and early 1970s during his tenure as an economic adviser to President Richard Nixon. McCracken criticized the government for not taking sufficient measures to combat inflation, and he supported a policy of gradualism, which aimed to slow inflation by reducing economic growth slightly without causing a recession. He proposed a combination of budget surpluses and tighter monetary policy to control inflation without severely disrupting the economy. McCracken was present during the decision to unilaterally end the Bretton Woods system, which had fixed exchange rates for major currencies. This decision resulted in far-reaching changes in the international monetary system.
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.
In 1999, former Michigan Ross finance faculty member Josh Coval co-authored a paper that is among the top 50 most-cited papers in finance. The paper shows one of the most intriguing patterns in individual behavior. The strong bias in favor of domestic securities is a well-documented characteristic of international investment portfolios, yet this paper shows that the preference for investing close to home also applies to portfolios of domestic stocks. Specifically, U.S. investment managers strongly prefer locally headquartered firms, particularly small, highly leveraged firms that produce nontraded goods. These results suggest that asymmetric information between local and non-local investors may drive the preference for geographically proximate investments, and the relation between investment proximity and firm size and leverage may shed light on several well-documented asset pricing anomalies.
In 2002, Professor Ravi Anupindi and his co-authors published the influential paper "Coordination and Flexibility in Supply Contracts with Options" in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management. This work introduced an innovative model that integrated options into supply contracts, offering enhanced management of demand uncertainties in supply chains. The research highlighted the important potential role of options in attaining contractual flexibility to coordinate supply chain participants and improve overall efficiency. The paper influenced subsequent research on supply contract design and demand management, one of the major areas of supply chain management research in the past two decades.
Originally developed by Professors Gretchen Spreitzer, Bob Quinn, Jane Dutton, and Laura Morgan Roberts through their research at the Center for Positive Organizations, the Reflected Best Self Exercise™ is a personal development tool that helps you to see who you are at your best, engaging you to live and work from this powerful place daily. Since its launch, the RBSE has helped thousands of executives, managers, employees, and students discover new potential. Unlike most other feedback tools, the RBSE isn't limited to self-assessment. It invites people from your life and works to share stories of moments they feel they've seen you at your best, surfacing what few of us become aware of otherwise. The RBSE enables you to gain insight into how your unique talents have positively impacted others and gives you the opportunity to further leverage your strengths at work and in life.
The fields of social movements and organizations had very little overlap until Professors Jerry Davis and Mayer Zald convened a pair of conferences at Michigan Ross in 2001 and 2002 that brought together top scholars from both domains and forged research collaborations that yielded a 2005 Cambridge University Press volume and a 2008 special issue of Administrative Science Quarterly. Zald had previously published a piece on the topic in 1977, as had Davis in 1994. Today, this is a widely recognized and fruitful research domain that arose just in time to explain the increasingly prevalent interplay between corporations and social movements, including boycotts, corporate political activism, and employee social movements.
Previously, it was commonly believed that the media had little role to play in capital markets -- that they neither produced information nor disseminated information in a meaningful manner. Professor Greg Miller questioned this logic and set out to see if there was empirical evidence that would support such an assumption.
Miller found that the business press acted as a corporate watchdog that was instrumental in uncovering financial misconduct. As such, the business press was no longer viewed as talking heads, but as investigative journalism which brought value to the market through the governance role it played. With the more recent introduction of social media, many believed that social media had no role to play in capital markets. A team of researchers from U-M, including Beth Blankespor, Miller, and Hal White, decided to take a novel approach and see if social media could improve capital market outcomes.
Their work was the first to show that social media played an important role in disseminating corporate financial information. Their foundation of research was instrumental in corporate investor relation groups adopting social media to disseminate information to market participants.
The Preparation Initiative was created by Professor Emeritus Frank Yates in 2005. Yates was a champion of diversity in higher education and believed all students should have access to Michigan Ross, regardless of their preparation. The Preparation Initiative is a thriving community designed to foster the excellence and success of undergraduate business students from economically distressed backgrounds or from racial or ethnic groups historically underrepresented in business leadership. Since its inception, the Preparation Initiative has supported hundreds of students in their pursuit of a business education and now also offers mentoring opportunities for alums of the program.
The original trading floor at the Michigan Business School was established in 1999. At the time, it was the 12th academic trading lab to be developed in the United States and one of the first in a large public university.
Later, with a generous donation by John and Georgene Tozzi, a new lab was built. Over the years, thousands of students have come through the lab.
Today, there are approximately a dozen investment clubs, seven of which meet weekly in the lab. When the lab was first getting started, the student-managed fund was at $95,000, which has since grown to $700,000.
Professor C.K. Prahalad was the major pioneer and advocate of the 'bottom of the pyramid' proposition that selling to the poor can simultaneously be profitable and help eradicate poverty. While appealing, the BOP proposition is also controversial. Professor Aneel Karnani was an early and prominent critic of the BOP proposition. In his 2007 article "The Mirage of Marketing to the Bottom of the Pyramid" and his 2011 book Fighting Poverty Together: Rethinking Strategies for Business, Governments, and Civil Society to Reduce Poverty, he argues for an alternative perspective. Rather than viewing the poor primarily as consumers, it is better to focus on the poor as producers and to emphasize buying from the poor. Both the private sector and government have a critical role to play in alleviating poverty. The best way to alleviate poverty is to raise the real income of the poor by providing them appropriate employment opportunities. The private sector is the best engine of job creation. The government should facilitate the creation and growth of private enterprises in labor-intensive sectors of the economy. The government should also fulfill its traditional, accepted functions of providing adequate access to public services, such as education, public health, drinkable water, sanitation, security, and infrastructure.
Professor Jim Walsh played a significant role in the development of work on individual, group, and collective cognition in organizations. Interested in managerial mistakes, Walsh wanted to know if executives’ worldviews could blind them to their decision environments. He was also interested in learning how the cognitive capabilities of both leadership teams and the organization itself could be harnessed for the good of organizations. In a 1988 Academy of Management Journal article, Walsh traced how these belief structures might or might not blind executives to their decision environments. He also considered how these belief structures may or may not combine to shape team decision-making. Therefore, he wrote a theoretical paper about these possibilities, which was published in the Journal of Management in 1986. He followed up that article with an empirical effort to measure and trace the impact of “negotiated belief structures” on decision-making (Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes published his findings in 1988). His thoughts then turned to the organization as a whole. He wrote a seminal paper on organizational memory, one that identified the nature of information selection, retention, and retrieval processes in organizations – for the good or ill of those organizations. That work was published in the Academy of Management Review in 1991. When interest in cognition in organizations started to grow, Walsh became a founding officer of the Academy of Management’s Managerial and Organizational Cognition Interest Group in 1990 and helped to lead that pioneering group of scholars for the first three years of its existence. Tying all of the insights and experiences together, he wrote what became something of a field-defining scholarly paper in 1995. Titled “Managerial Organizational Cognition: Notes from a Trip Down Memory Lane,” it was published in Organization Science. Today the Managerial and Organizational Cognition Division of the Academy of Management is home to more than 1,200 scholars worldwide. Citing his foundational scholarship and early leadership, the Division honored Jim with its Distinguished Scholar Award in 2020.