Explore the faculty research, thought leadership, and groundbreaking philosophies that established Michigan Ross as one of the world’s top business schools.
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.
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.
Professors Norman Bishara and Jagadeesh Sivadasan have made significant contributions to influential literature examining the variation in the enforceability of non-compete clauses and their consequences. Their work is an important part of broader literature documenting monopsony power (i.e., the power of employees to set wages leading to a redistribution of surpluses away from workers). In a pioneering paper published in 2010, Bishara created a detailed rating of the non-compete enforceability in all 50 states, building on painstaking work parsing the regulations and case law at the state level. Bishara and his U-M co-authors also undertook a broad survey of workers, documenting for the first time the surprising prevalence of the use of non-compete clauses across a range of industries, including for low-wage workers. The enforceability index from Bishara's 2010 paper, combined with worker-quarter-level U.S. Census data, was used in a paper by Sivadasan and co-authors to show that higher enforceability is correlated with lower wages and mobility for tech workers.
”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.
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.
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.
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.
The late 1990s ushered in a revolutionary view across the social sciences centered around the power and importance of studying strengths, better understanding how people thrive, and how systems seize opportunities for creating excellence. Michigan Ross led the way in advancing this fundamental research shift in the field of management and organizations, with many scholars publishing seminal research in the field. In 2002, three faculty members, Jane Dutton, Bob Quinn, and Kim Cameron, founded the Center for Positive Organizations to encourage rigor in this growing field of research and to serve as a home for a large network of scholars interested in pursuing this line of inquiry. As the field has grown over the years, Positive Organizational Scholarship has influenced how management is taught and practiced. CPO at Michigan Ross is a leader in helping teachers and students tap into this body of evidence and learn about this research through innovative courses and developmental learning programs. Those tools include the "Reciprocity Ring", a dynamic group exercise that applies the “pay-it-forward” principle while creating high-quality connections, and the "Reflected Best Self Exercise", which helps you see who you are at your best to engage you to live and work from that powerful place daily.
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.
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 Karl Weick was an iconic founder of the field of organizational behavior. Starting with his seminal book, The Social Psychology of Organizing, which was published in 1969, Weick's ideas had enormous influence, shaping organizational scholarship over the next decades and to this day. He focused on the processes of organizing rather than on organizations per se, suggesting that the insights into those processes give us important leverage to both understand and affect life in organizations. In his book, he introduced the seminal concept of "sense-making," which he defined as "the ongoing retrospective development of plausible images that rationalize what people are doing." Weick's ongoing research focused on how individuals engaged in making meaning and how that meaning-making affected important outcomes in organizations. His book has been cited more than 35,000 times, and his other work on the topic has been cited more than 13,000 times. His pioneering work has instilled a highly influential perspective on the people attempting the organizing work that goes into organizations.
The Integrated Product Development course is a unique cross-disciplinary experiential course delivered jointly by Michigan Ross, the College of Engineering, and the Stamps School of Art and Design. The course requires teams of business, engineering, and art students to execute the full range of the product development and launch process, from early-stage ideation through design and fabrication to launch stage promotion, pricing, and inventory decisions.
It has been continuously offered for more than 30 years and has been featured on CNN and in BusinessWeek, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. Professor William Lovejoy originally designed this course, but it was subsequently taught by a series of dedicated professors drawn from the three units. It remains a course students remember and refer back to throughout their professional careers.
In her research published in the American Economic Review, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Human Resources, Health Affairs, and other outlets, Professor Sarah Miller has used quasi-experimental methods to evaluate whether receiving improved access to health care in utero, in early childhood, and throughout childhood improves outcomes in adulthood. Miller and her co-authors have found that children who have received eligibility for health insurance through the Medicaid program have improved outcomes on a number of dimensions, both in terms of health and economic outcomes. Additionally, they found that the children of those children who had better access to healthcare in childhood were healthier at birth. This suggests a cycle in which investing in children's health today can have multigenerational benefits that allow the government to fully recoup the cost of its initial investment in the form of higher tax payments and lower spending on welfare programs. Miller's research has been discussed in numerous high-profile news outlets and has strongly impacted how academics and policymakers view investments in children. Furthermore, her papers have been cited nearly 500 times.
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.
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.
Michigan Business School Professor and Erb Institute Faculty Director,Tom Gladwin, pioneered the field of business sustainability with his concept of a "science of sustainable enterprise." It was one of the first scholarly frameworks to bring together the social, environmental, economic, and organizational aspects of competitive companies that likewise are managed to explicitly create value for society. With groundbreaking publications like "Shifting Paradigms for Sustainable Development: Implications for Management Theory and Research" and "Beyond Eco-Efficiency: Towards Socially Sustainable Business" in the 1990s, Gladwin dramatically expanded the scope of traditional management education and business leadership. Throughout his career, and his long-time partnership with the Prince of Wales's Business & the Environment Programme, Gladwin influenced hundreds of CEOs and other top corporate leaders to think deeply about, and take action on, the threat and the opportunity of sustainable business.