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.

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.

In 2004, Ross finance Professors M.P. Narayanan and Nejat Seyhun's research revealed that thousands of corporate executives were systematically backdating their executive option awards to pocket hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra compensation illegally.  The authors’ research proved difficult to publish, however. Referees and editors refused publication because the authors were “accusing the captains of American industry of outright fraud." Eventually, following dozens of press appearances between 2004 and 2006, the attitudes changed.  Soon afterward, the floodgates of civil and criminal lawsuits opened, following a Wall Street Journal story truly accusing the top executives of outright fraud. Finally, one editor relented in 2008 and the research was published as is. Subsequent investigations indeed found that many executives, in collusion with the board of directors as well as the company human resources executives, went so far as to make up fake meeting dates and fake meeting minutes and fraudulently altered corporate documents to perpetuate their fraud.  Finally, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission changed the option award rules to end option-award backdating. Narayanan and Seyhun's research underlines the importance of good corporate governance policies in containing executives’ worst instincts and stopping them from preying on their own shareholders.

Professor Joel Slemrod has worked on an agenda to broaden the scope of tax analysis to address several issues that standard economics models of taxation ignore. He has written several articles analyzing and addressing the blind spots of standard economics models and has co-authored a book titled Tax Systems, which outlines the implications of these blind spots. The influence of his work is demonstrated by the recent policy attention given to tax enforcement in the United States and other countries, such as an increase in funding appropriated to the IRS to reduce evasion of high-income individuals and corporations, as well as innovative administrative policy developments through the U.S. Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act and the OECD Pillars One and Two, which subjects a group of large multinational companies to a global minimum corporate tax of 15%. Slemrod's work has received over 35,000 citations, numerous awards and accolades, and a No. 1 ranking among public finance economists per the Research Papers In Economics site.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

Building on his experience as an attorney at the Federal Reserve, the 2020-22 research of Assistant Professor Jeremy Kress has identified critical weaknesses in bank merger oversight and proposed strategies to reinvigorate bank merger enforcement. Kress' work has shown that lax bank merger oversight has harmed consumers, businesses, and the broader financial system. His research has demonstrated that the prevailing approach to bank merger regulation has increased the cost and reduced the availability of consumer credit, inflated the fees that banks charge for basic financial services, limited small business credit availability, and threatened financial stability. Kress' research has pushed bank merger reform onto the policy agenda in Washington, D.C. by serving as a blueprint for legislation introduced by Senator Elizabeth Warren and inspiring an executive order on bank mergers by President Joe Biden. The Department of Justice also invited Kress to lead a joint initiative with the federal banking agencies to rewrite their bank merger policies.

Professor George Siedel was a pioneer in developing the concept of law as a source of competitive advantage. This concept originated in his 2002 book: Using the Law for Competitive Advantage. In an article in the Academy of Management Executive, Robert Thomas (past president of the Academy of Legal Studies in Business), concluded that the book "is trailblazing in its assertion that legal issues are critical strategic variables in business planning." Siedel later emphasized an international dimension to his work in his 2010 book: Proactive Law for Managers: A Hidden Source of Competitive Advantage. This work has served as a foundation for academic and practitioner interest in the design and simplification of contracts and other legal documents.

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.