In the book Build, Borrow, or Buy: Solving the Growth Dilemma the late Professor Will Mitchell and his co-author Laurence Capron developed a groundbreaking framework showing how firms can dynamically manage their resource portfolios and choose an appropriate growth strategy in turbulent market environments fraught with institutional, technological, and economic challenges. This comprehensive framework integrates the capability-based perspective with the principles of transaction cost economics. The intellectual origins of the capability-based perspective are deeply rooted in the foundational work in the strategy field carried out at the University of Michigan around 1980. Mitchell's foundational framework has not only shaped the research agendas of scholars interested in central questions in corporate strategy but also influenced practitioners who are faced with the perpetual strategic conundrum of how best to grow their firms.

”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 root of the Great Financial Crisis of 2008-2009 lay in poor-quality residential mortgage loans made by financial institutions. A set of academic research papers established that lenders made poorer quality loans when they anticipated selling the loans to investors rather than continuing to own the loans until they matured. When loans were sold, a complex securitization process led to a large distance between the originator of a mortgage and the final investor in the loans. Amit Seru, PhD '07, and co-authors established in an important series of papers that focused on 1) keeping most characteristics of loans the same, loans that were only marginally easier to securitize had significantly higher default rates than those that were marginally more difficult to securitize, 2) (in work with Professor Uday Rajan) securitized loans, the interest rate (which represents the compensation to investors for bearing the risk of default by the borrower) became an increasingly worse predictor of default in the build-up to the GFC, and 3) information passed on to investors by mortgage securitizers was limited and sometimes outright fraudulent. In another crucial strand of work, Professor Amiyatosh Purnanandam demonstrated that 1) loans held by banks on their own balance sheets had lower default rates than otherwise identical loans sold by banks to investors and 2) (in work with Taylor Begley, PhD '14, and Kuncheng Zheng, PhD '15) even with securitized loans, default rates were lower when the riskiest tranche was held by the lender rather than sold to investors. Collectively, the work done by Ross faculty and PhD alums showed that the ability to securitize mortgage loans undermined the incentives of lenders to the point that low-quality mortgage loans were made, essentially providing the dry timber that fueled the GFC.

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. 

In the 1990s, a research team at Michigan Ross, led by Emeritus Professor Claes Fornell, created the American Customer Satisfaction Index. This groundbreaking project included Professors Eugene Anderson and Michael Johnson, as well as Research Scientist Jaesumg Cha and Barbara Everitt, former director of the U.S. Census Bureau. 

ACSI represents a paradigm shift in measuring market performance, offering a more complete view of firms, industries, and economies and treats customer satisfaction as a latent construct connecting expectations, perceived quality and perceived value, through customer satisfaction, to customer voice and loyalty. For the past three decades, ACSI has catalyzed a wealth of peer-reviewed research in marketing and business. Empirical studies consistently find ACSI positively associated with profitability, cash flows, stock returns, credit ratings, positive earnings surprises, revenue, gross margins, return on investment, cash flow stability, and operating margins. Greater ACSI is also associated with lower cost of capital, cost of debt, and selling costs. At a macro level, ACSI is found to be predictive of gross domestic product. 

Published research by the ACSI team enjoys wide recognition, garnering more than 100,000 citations. Additionally, ACSI-related research has played an outsized role in establishing customer satisfaction as an essential metric within firms' management information systems, priority setting, and key performance indicators.

In 1984, former faculty member Birger Wernerfelt introduced a paradigm shift in business strategy with his paper "A Resource-Based View of the Firm." Prior to this transformative work, the discourse on business strategy was predominantly centered around external market factors and competitive forces. 

Wernerfelt challenged this conventional wisdom by presenting the argument that a firm's internal resources, ranging from tangible assets like machinery to intangible assets like reputation, could be the key to creating a competitive advantage. This theory, known as the Resource-Based View, asserts that for resources to offer a firm sustained competitive advantage, they must be valuable, rare, and difficult to substitute or imitate. 

The RBV has had profound implications and has changed how firms undertake strategic planning by emphasizing the importance of leveraging internal assets for competitive advantage. Wernerfelt's paper has been cited in thousands of academic publications and is now a staple in business school curricula worldwide.

Professor Gretchen Spreitzer received her PhD from Michigan Ross in 1992. Her work on empowerment, stemming from her Michigan Ross dissertation, has set the foundation for a new understanding of the employee experience. Instead of capital that organizations needed to control, empowerment brought forth the idea that employees thrive when they are given the freedom and autonomy to do their work autonomously. This pioneering work ushered in a new era of research and a fundamental shift in how organizations view their relationship with employees.

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.

The Affordable Care Act represented arguably the largest change in federal health policy since the creation of the Medicare and Medicaid programs in the 1960s, expanding coverage to approximately 40 million people who were previously uninsured. In a series of papers published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, New England Journal of Medicine, AEJ: Applied Economics, Journal of Public Economics, and other outlets, Associate Professor Sarah Miller and her co-author Dr. Lara R. Wherry quantify the impact of this policy on the predominantly low-income population who gained coverage as a result of the reform's resultant changes in Medicaid eligibility. Their work has shown that 1) low-income adults who gained coverage through the ACA Medicaid expansions experienced reduced mortality rates and that the failure of some states to adopt these expansions cost approximately 4,800 deaths per year in those states; 2) low-income adults who gained coverage through these expansions experienced improved access to medical care and improved financial outcomes; 3) the expansion of coverage to these individuals did not crowd out care provided to population who were unaffected, such as those in Medicare. This work has garnered over 1,800 citations and has been discussed in numerous high-profile media outlets and policy documents.

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.

With generous support from the Mitsui Life Insurance Company, Professor E. Han Kim helped to establish the Mitsui Life Financial Research Center in 1990. The center supports research in finance in a myriad of ways and functions as an active community of faculty, students, and visiting research scholars. Since its inception, the center has rapidly expanded its influence and reputation in supporting and disseminating academic research in financial economics. In 1994, a gift from Nippon Telegraph and Telephone allowed the center to offer even greater research support to Michigan Ross faculty. The center holds annual symposiums in Ann Arbor, Michigan, as well as in Tokyo, Japan, and provides research support for faculty and doctoral students through sponsoring weekly Mitsui Finance Seminars, NTT Fellowships, the Mitsui Distinguished Visiting Scholar program, weekly finance reading groups, and data acquisitions.

The Michigan Business Challenge is a prestigious business plan competition hosted by the Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies. It allows U-M students to showcase their entrepreneurial ideas, receive feedback from experienced judges, and compete for over $100,000 in cash prizes to support their ventures. 

The Michigan Business Challenge was established in 1984 at Michigan Ross and has since become one of the region's most impactful and well-known startup competitions. Over the years, the MBC has supported numerous successful startups, generated millions of dollars in funding, and helped launch successful entrepreneurial careers for U-M students and alumni. The MBC is open to various stages of business concepts, from early-stage ideas to established businesses. 

The competition consists of three tracks that cater to specific industry sectors, including the Seigle Impact Track for social ventures, the Invention Track for ventures that have intellectual property at the core of their high-tech venture, and the Innovation Track for growing startups. These tracks provide tailored resources, networking opportunities, and funding for participants. Notable entrepreneurial ventures that have come through the MBC include Morning Brew, Xoran Technologies, AMBIQ Micro, Elevate K-12, and many more.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the public K-12 education system has faced significantly high teacher turnover and poor retention rates. Teachers have faced increasing pressure to achieve academic success while challenged with growing class sizes, reduced funding, and learning loss from the pandemic. This problem has been incredibly difficult to correct, and public school districts across the country have not been able to address it cost effectively.

In their paper, “Stopping the Revolving Door: An Empirical and Textual Study of Crowdfunding and Teacher Turnover,” Professors Samantha Keppler, Jun Li, and Andrew Wu conducted a study of data from the largest teacher crowdfunding site, DonorsChoose, to study the effect of crowdfunded projects on teacher retention. The team found that teachers are less likely to leave their schools and the state public school system when their projects are funded. Assessing teachers’ project request essays, they identified that teachers who received funding for unique projects or requested resources to improve their classroom environment had higher retention rates.

Their paper is the first to identify the effect of crowdfunding on teacher retention. It provides initial, strong evidence that the effect is positive, showing that teachers funded on DonorsChoose are 1.6 percentage points (pp) less likely to leave their schools and 1.9 pp less likely to leave the teaching profession — a 14% and 41% reduction versus baseline turnover and attrition rates, respectively.

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.

Four student-run venture funds are currently operating at Michigan Ross, more than any other business school. Collectively, these funds manage a portfolio worth more than $10 million. These funds help students learn about investing early-stage capital by making real deals with real companies and real money. The concept of student-run venture funds has been adopted by universities around the world. 

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 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.