Carlson's Eleven

BY STEVE RUDOLPH

Wharton’s Joel Waldfogel headlines an impressive roster of faculty who have joined the Carlson School.

Eleven new tenured or tenure-track faculty have joined the Carlson School. The new members increase the number of tenured and tenure-track faculty to 111.

“The rapid growth of our student body in recent years provided us with a unique opportunity to make a significant addition to an already solid foundation,” says Sri Zaheer, associate dean of Faculty and Research. “We competed with the top schools to recruit this group, which includes one chaired professor, some relatively senior associate and assistant professors, and some new assistant professors who were in high demand.

“Faculty are attracted to the Carlson School because of the intellectual environment we offer,” Zaheer adds. “Working in an institution with the support of a vibrant business community is also very appealing.”

Topping the list of new professors is Joel Waldfogel, who arrives from the Wharton School as the Carlson School’s Frederick R. Kappel Chair in Applied Economics. “Joel Waldfogel is extremely creative; he is well known for coming up with clever strategies for tackling important empirical questions,” says Professor Tom Holmes of the University of Minnesota Department of Economics. “He is a fantastic addition to the economics community here at Minnesota.”

Waldfogel will be spearheading the management economics offerings at the Carlson School, starting with MBA 6140: Managerial Economics in spring 2011.

The 11 new faculty were added to help the Carlson School further its aim of contributing new knowledge to the academic and corporate worlds and to prepare and educate the world’s current and future business leaders.

Joel Waldfogel

Frederick R. Kappel Chair in Applied Economics

Joel Waldfogel joins the Carlson School from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, where he was the Ehrenkranz Family Professor of Business and Public Policy and had served as department chair and associate vice dean. Prior to Wharton, Waldfogel was an associate professor of economics at Yale University.

His main research interests are industrial organization and law and economics, and he has conducted empirical studies of price advertising, media markets, the operation of differentiated product markets, and issues related to digital products, including piracy, pricing, and revenue sharing. He has published more than 50 articles in scholarly outlets, including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and the RAND Journal of Economics. He also has published several books, including The Tyranny of the Market: Why You Can’t Always Get What You Want (Harvard University Press, 2007) and Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays (Princeton University Press, 2009). He has also written for Slate.

Waldfogel received a BA in economics from Brandeis University and a PhD in economics from Stanford University. He grew up in South Minneapolis, graduating from Washburn High School.

Department of Accounting

Aiyesha Dey

Assistant Professor

Aiyesha Dey conducts research in the areas of corporate governance, financial reporting and disclosures, and earnings management. She has published in major refereed journals, including the Journal of Accounting and Economics, the Journal of Accounting Research, and The Accounting Review, and has written on the chilling effect of Sarbanes-Oxley on corporate risk-taking and on internal control weaknesses in firms.

She joins the Carlson School from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. Dey earned her bachelor’s degree with honors in mathematics from Calcutta University, and received an MBA in accounting and finance from the International Management Institute in New Delhi, India, and a PhD in accounting from the Kellogg School of Management.

Mozaffar Khan

Assistant Professor

Mozaffar Khan joins the Carlson School from the MIT Sloan School of Management, where, since 2005, he has been an assistant professor in the economics, finance, and accounting areas.

He has broad interests in accounting and financial economics, and his recent research focuses on long-short equity investment strategies, insider trading, equity issuances and repurchases, mergers and acquisitions, and poor accounting quality and its consequences. He has developed measures of accounting conservatism and has written on the mispricing of accruals.

Khan holds a PhD from the University of Toronto, and serves as associate editor of the Journal of Accounting and Economics and the Asia-Pacific Journal of Accounting and Economics.

Dushyantkumar Vyas

Assistant Professor

Dushyantkumar Vyas' research interests include accounting in financial institutions, financial reporting quality, and international issues in accounting and finance. He holds a PhD in accounting from the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, an MBA in international business from the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade in New Delhi, and a BE in mechanical engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology & Science in India. His dissertation focused on write-downs by U.S. financial institutions during the financial crisis.

Department of Finance

Philip Bond

Associate Professor

Prior to joining the University of Minnesota, Philip Bond was an assistant professor of finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. His previous appointments include Northwestern University and Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study.

His research focuses on the role of financial institutions in the economy and on the regulation of credit markets. His work has appeared in journals such as the Review of Economic Studies, the Journal of Economic Theory, the Journal of Finance, the Review of Financial Studies, and the Journal of Financial Economics. He is an associate editor of Economic Theory.

Bond holds a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago and a BA in mathematics from the University of Oxford.

Department of Information and Decision Sciences

Akhmed Umyarov

Assistant Professor

Akhmed Umyarov received his PhD from New York University's Stern School of Business in 2010. He also holds an 

MSc in mathematics with highest distinction from Moscow State University.

His work focuses on how to improve predictions in recommender systems, and he has been honored with the Marcus Nadler Fellowship from the Stern School of Business. His industry experience includes serving as a quantitative researcher for Moody’s Corp. on Wall Street, as a research and software engineer for Samsung Electronics in South Korea, and as a research engineer for Neurocom in Moscow.

Department of Marketing and Logistics Management

Rachel Shacham

Assistant Professor

Rachel Shacham received her PhD from the Stern School of Business at New York University after graduating from Harvard with a BA in applied mathematics and from NYU with an MA in economics. She has worked as a financial analyst for Donaldson, Lufkin, and Jenrette, and her research interests include the development of empirical models for dynamic choice processes involving new products. She has also done fascinating work on whether a consumer’s vices act as substitutes or complements, and has presented her work at the Marketing Science and Marketing in Israel conferences.

Department of Operations and Management Science

Mili Mehrotra

Assistant Professor

Mili Mehrotra received a doctoral degree in operations management at the School of Management, The University of Texas at Dallas. Her research interests are in supply chain management and discrete models in operations management. Her current research is on identifying sources of inefficiencies in supply chains and devising effective coordination mechanisms to remove or alleviate them. Her work studies the impact of some recent policies implemented by the Federal Reserve for the recirculation of physical cash, and her papers have been accepted in leading academic journals such as Management Science, Operations Research, and Production and Operations Management.

Department of Strategic Management and Organization

Mary Benner

Associate Professor

Mary Benner joins the Carlson School from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, where she was an assistant professor of management.

Her research at the intersection of organization theory and strategic management explores how firms innovate and adapt to technological change. She has studied the effects of systematic process management practices such as ISO 9000 and Six Sigma on firms’ innovation and responses to new technologies, and is currently examining the influence of financial markets and securities analysts in how established firms adapt to technological change. Her research is published in leading academic journals and her work has won several awards, including the Academy of Management Review’s Best Paper Award. She serves on the editorial boards of the Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, and Organization Science.

Benner holds a PhD in management from Columbia University, an MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, and a BS in economics from the University of Minnesota.

Martin Ganco

Assistant Professor

Martin Ganco earned his PhD in business administration with a concentration in strategic management and entrepreneurship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests focus on the causes and consequences of entrepreneurship and innovation. His dissertation examined how the nature of technology within incumbent firms affects employee entrepreneurship decisions. His work has been recently published in the Strategic Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, and the Research Methodology in Strategy and Management book series. He also was a recipient of the 2009 Kauffman Dissertation Fellowship awarded by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. Martin’s dissertation essay, “Employee Entrepreneurship versus Mobility: The Effect of Technological Interdependence,” received the best PhD Student Paper Award at the 2009 Strategic Management Society Conference.

Richard Wang

Assistant Professor

Richard Wang's research interests lie in empirical analysis of competitive strategy and management of innovation. His current projects include studying how firms position themselves against their rivals, and how socioeconomic incentives shape innovation activities by firms and individuals. His latest article, “Tournaments for Ideas,” was recently featured in the California Management Review.

Before earning his PhD from Berkeley, Wang accumulated several years of professional experience as an engineer, consultant, and entrepreneur in Hong Kong and mainland China. He also spent a year volunteering with a nonprofit organization to implement community development and engineering projects in rural villages in Hebei and the Inner Mongolia regions of China.

Wang holds a BS in aeronautics and astronautics from the University of Washington, a SM in mechanical engineering from MIT, and an MBA from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.