Explore the faculty research, thought leadership, and groundbreaking philosophies that established Michigan Ross as one of the world’s top business schools.
”Bifurcation of the Owner and Operator Analysis" was published by Professor Lynda Oswald in 1994. Her research was cited and quoted extensively by the U.S. Supreme Court in its unanimous decision in United States v. Bestfoods (1998) in clarifying parent corporations' direct and indirect liability for their subsidiaries’ actions in the context of CERCLA liability and hazardous waste cleanup. The liability of a parent corporation for the acts of the subsidiary is a complex issue that permeates all areas of corporate law and business relationships, and is not confined to the environmental context found in Bestfoods. Oswald’s research has since informed the decisions of over 55 additional courts -- federal trial and appellate courts as well as state appellate and supreme courts -- in business law contexts as varied as environmental liability, whistle-blowing under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Racketeering-Influenced Corrupt Practices Act (RICO), employment discrimination, medical malpractice, negligence, bankruptcy, and real estate transactions.
The paper "Value of Information in Capacitated Supply Chains" by Professor Roman Kapuscinski and his co-authors was published in Management Science in 1999. This paper contributed significantly to the understanding of how information sharing impacts the performance of supply chains. Specifically, this paper turned on its head the notion that information would be most valuable in settings where capacity is tight, when the uncertainty of demand is huge, and when the costs of unsatisfying demand are very high. The paper uses careful, rigorous analyses to reveal when information is most valuable and how the value depends on many interrelated factors. Providing an innovative analytical model, Kapuscinski and his colleagues demonstrated when and how the sharing of demand information could remarkably enhance inventory management and order fulfillment for capacity-constrained supply chains. The subsequent literature in operations management has heavily referenced this pioneering work, leading to the development of practical strategies for improving supply chain efficiency through information sharing. Further studies have explored different facets of information sharing in diverse supply chain settings and have considered more complex forms of information, extending the paper's impact in many directions within operations.
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.
Under the leadership of Marian Krzyzowski, Michigan Ross launched the Domestic Corps in 1992 with financial support from the United States Department of Education Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education. The Domestic Corps provided leadership development and action-based learning opportunities for Ross students while providing critical business assistance to the non-profit community in the United States. For 15 years, the Domestic Corps placed hundreds of students in more than 100 non-profit organizations nationwide, where they worked on projects in economically distressed and culturally diverse communities. That included Native American communities, inner city community-based organizations, and rural non-profits. The Domestic Corps also partnered with the University of Michigan's Neighborhood AmeriCorps Program to place MBA interns in 20 more than Detroit community-based organizations. The Domestic Corps projects helped raise millions of dollars, won national awards for community and economic development, and transformed numerous organizations while simultaneously providing students with management experience in challenging contexts and instilling a sense of corporate responsibility and social justice.
In 2002, Professor C.K. Prahalad of the Michigan Ross Business School and professor Stuart L. Hart of the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School published the iconic article "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid" in Strategy+Business. The article suggested that "low-income markets present a prodigious opportunity for the world's wealthiest companies - to seek their fortunes and bring prosperity to the aspiring poor." Prahalad published a book with the same title five years before he passed in 2010. The article and book, with additional research and publications by Prahalad, Hart, Michigan Ross Professor Ted London, and others spawned a new business strategy for human development that has transformed into a social movement around the world known as Base of the Pyramid. The movement now includes transnationals, non-profits, social entrepreneurs, grassroots development organizations, international aid agencies, and many consulting firms dedicated to BoP strategy and implementation.
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.
Management and Organizations professors Sue Ashford and Jane Dutton invented the concept of "issue selling," arguing that most middle managers don’t simply wait for the organization’s strategy to come down from on high but also actively try to influence what that strategy might be. These active middle managers recognize that organizations have limited attentional capacity, and they try to influence what issues get on the organization’s agenda and gain the attention of top decision-makers for issues such as the need to be more ecologically sensitive, the experiences of gender mistreatment and other social issues. In other words, whereas the literature to that point had construed middle managers as passive recipients, these scholars gave them agency and engaged in several studies to better understand how they use that agency to affect bottom-up change. The impact of this idea can be seen in both the popularity of the advice given to middle managers derived from it and in its anticipation of the larger literature on social movements. Social movements were first studied outside of organizations in society, but scholars later proposed that such movements could also occur within organizations, as in issue selling.
Currently organized by the Sanger Leadership Center, the Leadership Crisis Challenge partly came about based on Sue Ashford’s vision as the then head of the Ross Leadership Initiative and the enthusiasm of students wanting to create more venues to discuss complex and problematic business issues, such as the role of business in addressing society's most difficult problems and how businesses and other leaders might think about tensions between financial and environmental goals. Additionally, there was an interest in understanding how students, as future leaders, might best think about issues of corporate social responsibility. The LCC was intended to address those student interests by putting students in groups of four and asking them to exercise their courage, judgment, and integrity in response to a complex crisis situation and under strict time pressure. In the crisis challenge, students are confronted with a complex case for which there is no right answer or winning position – there are just tradeoffs. Built into the case are some of the most vexing questions of the day, including: What does a company “owe” the community in which it does business? Should the natural environment be sacrificed for shareholder wealth? Can companies admit wrongs in today’s aggressive legal climate? With the input of previous participants, the Net Impact club, and members of the faculty, a new case is prepared every year and overseen and judged by Michigan Ross community members, business leaders, and alums.
William Davidson (1922-2009) was a successful global business leader and alum of the University of Michigan. He understood the value of the private sector to empower people around the world.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Davidson recognized the value of educating and empowering economic decision-makers in formerly centralized economies with the tools of commercial success. Davidson partnered with U-M to create a unique institute providing consulting and training services to nonprofits, corporations and small businesses in emerging markets with the goals of economic growth and social progress. Since 1992, the William Davidson Institute (WDI) has served as a platform to introduce students to the challenges and opportunities facing firms in low- and middle-income countries.
Over its history, the Institute has supported U-M student teams, totaling more than 1,800 students, who collaborate with business and nonprofit partners to provide analysis and develop solutions built upon the foundation of basic business principles. To ensure ongoing access to current and relevant business education, WDI Publishing also produces and distributes high-quality, cutting-edge business cases and other teaching materials, with more than 700 cases in its collection, reaching approximately 800 universities and institutions globally.
The Institute is also home to NextBillion.net, an online platform for discussing business models and innovations that address development challenges in low- and middle-income countries. The platform reaches more than 25,000 readers a month.
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.
Professor Emerita Valerie Suslow and Adjunct Professor Margaret Levenstein have pursued a collaborative research agenda on the economics of cooperative behavior among firms, with a specific focus on cartels. Agreements between competing firms to reduce the intensity of competition can include actions such as price fixing, allocating geographic markets, allocating customers, and bid-rigging at auctions. Historically, such cooperative behavior was legal throughout the world but illegal in the United States under the Sherman Act of 1890.
The U.S. National Industrial Recovery Act of the early 1930s suspended price-fixing antitrust laws in certain circumstances. In the mid-1990s, after many decades of inattention, it became clear to competition policy enforcers that cartel activity was rampant and was likely causing substantial consumer harm. This spurred new leniency and amnesty policy tools to become available to firms. In their highly cited article "What Determines Cartel Success?" Levenstein and Suslow make the case that while cartels may break up due to cheating on the agreement, the more insurmountable problems are entry and adjustments in the face of changing economic conditions. "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do: Determinants of Cartel Duration" shows that cartels that turn to price wars to punish cheaters are not stable. Highly stable cartels draw upon a vast toolkit of mechanisms to enhance their stability and, therefore, their duration and economic harm.
Levenstein and Suslow's work has been cited in policy reports by organizations around the world, such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United Nations, and the World Trade Organization. They continue to explore hidden or overlooked sources of harm to consumers that may result from cartel activity, most recently turning their attention to the role played by vertical relationships between firms engaged in horizontal collusion, as well as how collusion may be facilitated by the use of a price index in long-term contracts.
In 2021, Assistant Professor Andreas Hagemann developed a new econometric methodology that addresses the complexities of clustered data to enhance the accuracy and reliability of empirical work in economics and related fields. Typical examples of clusters are firms, cities, or states. The central challenge is that units within clusters may influence one another or may be influenced by similar environmental factors in ways that cannot be observed. Empirical researchers know that neglecting to account for clusters can yield results where non-existent effects erroneously appear as highly significant. Hagemann's research agenda developed new tools to address this issue in challenging and empirically relevant scenarios. His work has had a substantial impact on econometric theory and empirical practice. For instance, the methodology he developed is now the standard option for clustering in the canonical implementation of quantile regression in the statistical programming language R.
Following the decision of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization by the U.S. Supreme Court, abortion restrictions within the United States have proliferated, and it is reasonable to expect that access to abortion services will be even further reduced in the future. The work of Associate Professor Sarah Miller investigates the impact of abortion denial using new linkages between data from the Turnaway Study and administrative records in credit reports. The Turnaway Study was a path-breaking study from the University of California San Francisco that recruited women seeking abortions, some of whom had pregnancies that just exceeded the gestational age limit of the clinic they attended and were denied abortions, others who fell just below this limit and were able to receive the abortion they sought. Miller and her co-authors found that women denied an abortion and those who received an abortion were on similar trajectories before the denial, but those denied an abortion experienced a large spike in financial problems such as unpaid bills and public records (such as bankruptcies and liens). This spike in financial problems persisted for the full six-year follow-up period that the authors had access to. The results provide evidence counter to the narrative that abortion is exclusively harmful to women who receive one (because of, for example, the regret they may feel after receiving an abortion). Instead, it suggests that giving women control over the timing of their reproduction allows them greater financial stability and self-sufficiency.
In 2006, Professor Sue Ashford, associate dean for leadership programming, founded the Ross Leadership Initiative, which was the precursor to the Sanger Leadership Center and one of the first organized leadership programs among business schools worldwide. The initiative was influenced by Ashford's research on learning leadership via experience and Professor Noel Tichy's action-based learning concepts. Suddenly students were not just learning about leadership but were actually engaged in doing it. Prominent among these efforts was the highly influential Leadership Crisis Challenge, which puts students in the hot seat needing to resolve a crisis in the moment. This program was recognized with the Provost's Teaching Innovation Prize in 2011 and remains a prominent and popular program in the school to this day. Later, under the leadership of Professors Scott DeRue and Gretchen Spreitzer, RLI grew and launched new programs that persist today, including Story Lab, the Ross Leaders Academy, and more. In 2015, alum Stephen W. Sanger, MBA '70, and Karen Sanger made a defining gift of $20 million to establish the Sanger Leadership Center. With the Sangers' gift, the Sanger Leadership Center, now under the leadership of Professor Lindy Greer, has created an array of custom programs and workshops and now offers leadership development programs for students across the university.
Professor David Brophy brought the study of small businesses and private financial markets (now known as alternative, in contrast to publicly traded markets) to Michigan Ross and the state of Michigan before it was recognized as a legitimate area of study at top research universities. This process started in the mid-to-late seventies, and Brophy relentlessly created awareness in Michigan and educated students interested in this space. For over fifty decades, until his recent retirement, Brophy designed and taught all Michigan Ross venture capital and private equity courses.
In 2018, Professor Tom Lyon led a team of scholars who published a groundbreaking article about corporate political responsibility titled “CSR Needs CPR” in the California Management Review. The article argued that corporate social responsibility was an insufficient measure of corporate contribution to society and that stakeholders who care about CSR should also pay attention to corporate political responsibility. In 2019, Elizabeth Doty, adjunct faculty at Presidio Graduate School, contacted the Erb Institute at the University of Michigan and suggested turning the article into an industry roundtable dedicated to working with a select group of influential business leaders and their companies to bring to life the core precept of the article – the need to better align companies’ political spending and lobbying with their commitments to values, purpose, sustainability, and stakeholders. Thus, the Erb Corporate Political Responsibility Taskforce was founded in 2020. Lyon and Doty have developed the taskforce into a nationally recognized forum with the goal of making CPR a new norm for business. The taskforce operates under Chatham House Rule and has 20 members from some of the most recognized brands in the United States who share best practices and address CPR challenges. In 2023, the taskforce released the non-partisan Erb Principles for Corporate Political Responsibility, with five major companies as inaugural signatories. Looking ahead, the taskforce will continue building its integrated framework and engage more companies in applying the Erb Principles. Lyon continues his work in this space with his recently published volume Corporate Political Responsibility.