Explore the faculty research, thought leadership, and groundbreaking philosophies that established Michigan Ross as one of the world’s top business schools.
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.
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.
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.
Sensory marketing is a relatively new and growing field of marketing that Professor Aradhna Krishna pioneered in the early 2000s. Krishna saw that there were disparate fields of study on senses, but there was no cohesion between these fields. She brought all these sub-fields together under the umbrella of sensory marketing and organized the first conference on it in 2008. She then wrote two books and dozens of scholarly articles on the subject to make the field grow. And the field did grow both in academia and in practice -- enough for Harvard Business Review to do a lead Ideawatch article on it featuring Krishna as the world's foremost expert on the topic. Krishna has defined "sensory marketing" as marketing that engages the consumers' senses and affects their perception, judgment, and behavior. Krishna continues to publish important, scholarly articles on the topic. She also started the Sensory Marketing Lab at Michigan Ross, which attracts PhD students and post-docs from around the world.
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.
"Co-creation as a revolutionary paradigm was introduced by Professors C. K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy in a series of articles published between 2000 and 2004 and an award-winning book, The Future of Competition. Their work provided a new frame of reference for jointly creating value through networked environments of increasingly digitalized experiences, going beyond goods and services, and called for a process of co-creation -- the practice of developing offerings, experiences, and unique value through ongoing interactions with customers, employees, managers, financiers, suppliers, partners, and other stakeholders. Through their work, they envisioned an individual and experience-centric view of interactive value creation and innovation.
Starting in 2005, the explosion of digital and social media, the convergence of technologies and industries, embedded intelligence, and information technology-enabled services enabled enterprises to build platforms for large-scale, ongoing interactions among the firm, its customers, and its extended network. Ramaswamy's work argued that success lies in connecting with people's experiences to generate insights and change the nature and quality of interactions. He also called for co-creation from the inside out of enterprises and their networks, as much as co-creation from the outside in, and for leaders to co-create transformative pathways.
In 2014, Ramaswamy published "The Co-Creation Paradigm", which combined the core ideas of co-creation with a call to see, think, and act differently in an interconnected world of possibilities and complex challenges to co-create a better future as individuals."
In 1985, Professor M.P. Narayanan published a paper on managers' proclivity to focus on the short- rather than the long-term. His paper is a rigorous and theoretical explanation that requires the manager to have private information. Narayanan shows that the manager's proclivity to focus on the short-term is more evident in a less experienced manager but is attenuated if the business's riskiness and the contract's length increase. While singling out the importance of the short- and long-term conflict as the basis for the myopic behavior of firms may be a challenge, this phenomenon is ever-present.
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.