Explore the faculty research, thought leadership, and groundbreaking philosophies that established Michigan Ross as one of the world’s top business schools.
In the early 2000s, Professors Tim Fort and Cindy Schipani held the first conference on the role of business in promoting peace. The conference was attended by former Secretary of State Madeline Albright and brought together individuals from academia, business, and government to discuss efforts that could be made to reduce violence in the world. It was concluded that there is a role of business, especially in serving as an unofficial ambassador or role model when conducting business internationally. This event set in motion the beginnings of a new research paradigm on "Peace Through Commerce."
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.
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.
In the early 1990s, Professor Garry Brewer became dean of the U-M School of Natural Resources and the Environment. He approached Dean Joe White of the Michigan Business School with the concept of a dual-degree program to prepare future business leaders with an integrated education in both earth and management sciences. The concept took shape first in 1993 in the form of a graduate dual-degree program (originally called the Corporate Environmental Management Program) under the leadership of Professor Stuart Hart and then the Erb Institute after a generous grant from Fred and Barbara Erb in 1996 and a series of additional donations from other visionary donors. The dual-degree program was then incorporated into the Erb Institute and bolstered by the scholarly research of three newly endowed professorships. Nearly 30 years later, the Erb Institute has expanded dramatically to become a full-fledged, endowed institute with three chaired professors, an undergraduate Erb Fellows Program, more than 200 graduate and undergraduate students, and more than 750 alumni across 17 countries. In addition, the institute has an active agenda of scholarly and applied research and works to facilitate business engagement through business roundtables and global conference partnerships. Today, the Erb Institute is generally recognized as the leading business sustainability institute for research, teaching, and business engagement.
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.
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.
Factory Physics is a seminal text by Professors Wally Hopp and Mark Spearman, first published in 1996. The book presented the first set of principles that systematically describe the behavior of manufacturing systems and described how these principles can be leveraged to enhance the performance of these systems. The book has been cited over 5,000 times, used as a textbook in over 200 universities in North America, and has been translated into several languages. Since its publication, the term "factory physics" and the concepts it encompasses have become standard parts of the industrial and operations management lexicons. The principles first espoused in Factory Physics have been extended to supply chains in Hopp's later book Supply Chain Science (2008) and to health care in Hospital Operations (2012).
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.
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.
Michigan Ross has long been a pioneer in entrepreneurial education, introducing the nation's first course on entrepreneurship in 1927. However, in the early 1970s, Professor LaRue Hosmer played a pivotal role in championing entrepreneurship education at Ross. He developed and taught courses in small business management and a seminar on small business formation. He is considered the founder of the Michigan Entrepreneur Track and has also inspired present-day entrepreneurship faculty at Michigan Ross, including Professor Andy Lawlor. Lawlor was a student in Hosmer's entrepreneurial management course in 1973, and Hosmer has been an important mentor to Lawlor, helping to bridge the gap between business and teaching. Lawlor began guest lecturing under Hosmer's guidance in 1975 and assumed the teaching responsibilities for the entrepreneurship classes in 1981. Over the years, many successful companies have been born from Hosmer and Lawlor's teaching.
While concerns regarding corporate financial misreporting have persisted since the early 1900s, there were no rigorous methods that academics, market participants, and regulators could use to assess the accounting quality or the potential for financial misreporting when looking at a set of financial statements. Faculty members Patricia Dechow, Ilia Dichev, and several of their co-authors in the Michigan Accounting group developed several widely used models that allow users to assess the financial reporting quality of a set of financial statements and, more importantly, allow users to detect potential earnings management. These models and adaptations of these models continue to be used today, both in research and in accounting courses.
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 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.
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 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 Hess is a thought leader in using new governance regulatory theory to advance the effective and efficient use of corporate monitors in U.S. and international settings. Hess and his co-authors published their first research on the topic in 2008 in the Cornell International Law Journal.
Since then, David has become a recognized thought leader with multiple published articles and book chapters on using monitors in settlement agreements to battle corruption and cultivate ethical behavior.
Based on his expertise, in 2013, the American Bar Association's Task Force on Standards for Monitors asked Hess to serve as its reporter. In 2020, the ABA published the 77-page Criminal Justice Monitors and Monitoring Standards. Hess' role as a reporter required that he draft and revise the standards before each meeting to reflect task force input.
This required legal research and drafting of explanatory memoranda as well as responding to comments and concerns of task force members and ABA officials. The Standards are used by companies, prosecutors, and judges when considering the use of corporate monitors with Deferred Prosecution Agreements or other settlement agreements resulting from concerns about fraud or other misconduct. The Standards may be used by other countries when establishing monitoring programs.