Carlson School Welcomes 11 Faculty Members

Eleven faculty members from a range of disciplines, including accounting, finance, and strategic management, joined the Carlson School this fall semester.

The incoming group brings expertise to the school in subject areas from consumer behavior to copyright laws, with many of them having research published in top journals including the Journal of Accounting Research, the Annals of Statistics, and the Journal of Political Economy.

Please join us in welcoming the newest members of the Carlson School and see how they’re shaping the future of business.

Abdifatah Ali

Work and Organizations

Assistant Professor Abdifatah Ali teaches Leading Others, Organizational Behavior—Foundations of High-Impact HR, and Diversity. His research interests are in workplace behavior. His focus is on understanding how individuals with stigmatized identities make sense of and communicate about those identities across different stages of the employee-organization relationship. He also studies workplace diversity and inclusion with an emphasis on establishing equitable employment opportunity practices, and how motivation and emotions shape behavior in organizations.

He is a member of the Academy of Management and the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. He holds a BA in psychology from San Diego State University, and an MA and PhD in organizational psychology from Michigan State University.

Moshe Barach

Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship

Assistant Professor Moshe Barach teaches Business Strategy. His research focuses on the strategic human capital decisions of firms as well as the firm-founding decisions of individuals. His research has been featured in numerous journals and conferences, as well as being the subject of articles by The New York Times. Prior to joining the Carlson School, he was a visiting assistant professor at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business, and he worked as an economist as part of the data science team at oDesk.com. He has also worked as an economic consultant at Chicago Partners. He holds a BS in mechanical engineering and an MBA from Washington University in St. Louis and earned a PhD from UC Berkeley’s Hass School of Business.

Xuan Bi

Information and Decision Sciences

Assistant Professor Xuan Bi teaches Advanced Issues in Business Analytics and Business Analytics Experimental Learning. His research focuses on the interface of statistics and machine learning, with a special interest in recommender systems and personalized marketing. His research has been published in the Annals of Statistics, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, and Statistica Sinica. Before joining the Carlson School, he was a postdoctoral associate at Yale University, where his work was dedicated to imaging genetics. Bi also worked as an instructor and statistical consultant while at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He holds a BS in mathematics from Tsinghua University and a PhD in statistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Jacelly Cespedes

Finance

Assistant Professor Jacelly Cespedes teaches Investments. Her research interests include corporate finance, household finance, financial intermediation, and FinTech. Her current work examines the credit contract decisions made by borrowers, and whether their credit choices can be used for screening purposes in credit markets. She has experience working as a researcher in finance. Cespedes holds a BA in economics from Universidad de Carabobo in Venezuela, an MBA from IESA in Venezuela, and an MS in finance and a PhD from the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin.

William Hedgcock

Marketing

Associate Professor William Hedgcock teaches Buyer Behavior. His teaching and research focuses on consumer behavior and the neuroscience of choice. His long-term goals are to link basic neuroscience research to decision-making models to improve decision-making theories and to integrate this research with teaching. His primary research stream involves identifying cognitive declines that affect financial decisions in seniors and the physiological and neural correlates of these declines. He has worked for companies like the Carlson Marketing Group, Radisson Hotels, Country Inn and Suites, Great Clips, and Visa, analyzing their marketing programs. He holds a BA in economics and psychology from Macalester College and a PhD in marketing from the Carlson School.

Nan Li

Accounting

Assistant Professor Nan Li teaches Introduction to Financial Reporting. His research primarily focuses on debt contracting and corporate governance. He also studies how legal institutions and capital market regulations interact with accounting information in international settings. His paper, “Debt Contract Enforcement and Conservatism: Evidence from a Natural Experiment” was published in the Journal of Accounting Research. Another paper, “The Effect of Option-Based Compensation on Payout Policy: Evidence from FAS 123R,” is forthcoming in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. He holds a BS in finance from Binghamton University, an MA in economics from Duke University, and an MPhil and PhD in accounting from Columbia University.

Xiaoji Lin

Finance

Associate Professor Xiaoji Lin teaches Portfolio Management and Analysis for MBA, MS in Finance, and undergraduate students, as well as Topics in Asset Pricing for PhD students. His research focuses on asset pricing, corporate finance, and macroeconomics. Lin has published in leading academic journals, including the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Monetary Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Review of Financial Studies. His doctoral thesis won the Trefftzs Award at the 2008 Western Finance Association annual meeting. Before joining the Carlson School, he taught at the London School of Economics and at The Ohio State University. Lin holds a BA and MA in economics from Nankai University in China and a PhD in finance from the Carlson School.

Veronica Marotta

Information and Decision Sciences

Assistant Professor Veronica Marotta teaches Intro to Programming along with Descriptive and Predictive Analytics. Much of her research focuses on economics of information systems and technology, digital markets, and online privacy. More specifically, she explores how online and data-intensive technologies affect consumer behavior and business. Her research has been presented at numerous conferences and academic venues. Marotta holds a BA in economics and an MS in European economy and business from the University of Rome Tor Vergata; an MS in econometrics and mathematical economics from Tilburg University; and an MPhil in public policy and management and a PhD in information systems and management from Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University.

Anant Mishra

Supply Chain and Operations

Associate Professor Anant Mishra’s research interests are empirically focused and derive from contemporary policy-related issues in the areas of public-sector operations, global supply chain management, project management, and open innovation. He has designed and taught Executive MBA, MBA, and undergraduate courses in Operations Management, Project Management, and Business Statistics. He holds a Btech in industrial engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, an MS in statistics from the University of Minnesota, and a PhD in operations management from the Carlson School. Before pursuing a PhD, he acquired valuable experience in software development working for Tata Consultancy Services—a premier multinational IT service provider firm.

Jeremy Watson

Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship

Assistant Professor Jeremy Watson teaches Managerial Economics. His research has focused on the music industry and the copyright laws that govern it. He has presented research at various conferences and meetings around the world, including at the Music Industry Research Association, the Toulouse School of Economics and the Universite de Bordeaux in France, and two National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) meetings. His interests also include the economics of digital platforms, as well as pharmaceutical innovation. Prior to joining the Carlson School, Watson was a lecturer at Boston University. Watson holds a BS in biochemistry from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a PhD in strategy and innovation from Boston University.

Haiwen (Helen) Zhang

Accounting

Associate Professor Haiwen (Helen) Zhang teaches Intermediate Financial Accounting to undergraduate students, Data Analytics in Financial Reporting to MAcc students, and doctoral seminars. Her primary research interests include security regulation, accounting rule making, corporate risk management behavior, and accounting for financial institutions. Her research has been published in top-tier accounting journals such as the Journal of Accounting and Economics, The Accounting Review, Review of Accounting Studies, and Contemporary Accounting Research. She has visited the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as a financial economist and participated in the SEC rulemaking process. She received her PhD in accounting from the Carlson School and previously was a faculty member at the Fisher College of Business at The Ohio State University.