School Welcomes 12 New Faculty

The GSB attracted a large group of new faculty in 2001, including accounting professors Madhav Rajan (left) and Stefan Reichelstein.  Photograph by Saul Bromberger and Sandra Hoover

The Business School's 12 new faculty members this academic year include two professors of accounting, an associate professor of marketing, and nine assistant professors.

The accounting specialists are Madhav Rajan, who comes from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and Stefan Reichelstein from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. Rajan’s research interests include optimal choice of performance measures, performance measurement and learning, organizational design and management control, and incentives in interfirm relationships. He will teach the MBA core course Managerial Accounting and an accounting elective. Reichelstein works primarily in the interface of management accounting and economics. He is interested in the way firms should do accounting and why they do accounting in particular ways. He will also teach Managerial Accounting as well as a doctoral course in accounting research.

Stanford alumnus Dale Griffin, who joins the faculty as an associate professor of marketing, earned his doctorate in psychology at Stanford in 1988. He comes from the School of Commerce and Business Administration, University of British Columbia. His research centers on marketing and consumer behavior; specifically, judgmental prediction, constructive processes in social judgment, and individual differences in construal biases. He will teach an MBA elective course in consumer behavior and a doctoral course in marketing.

The new assistant professors cover a wide range of specialties.

Daniel Byrd completed his doctorate in corporate strategy and international business at the University of Michigan Business School. His research in interorganizational relations within the field of organizational psychology focuses on the manner in which organizations learn from each other and to what extent learning affects performance and organizational change. He will teach the MBA core course Strategy and Organization in the Global Economy.

Michaela Draganska completed her doctorate in marketing at Northwestern University. She uses econometric techniques to study firms’ choice of product scope. She will teach an MBA elective course in marketing research.

Leslie Hodder completed her doctorate in accounting at the Graduate School of Business, University of Texas at Austin. The current focus of her research in financial reporting is on financial services firms. She will teach the MBA core course Managerial Accounting and an accounting course for the economics department.

Mikolaj Piskorski completed his doctorate in organizational behavior at Harvard Business School. In the field of organization theory and strategy, his work covers such areas as networks, economic sociology, corporate governance, and venture capital. He will teach the MBA elective course Managing Organizational Networks and the doctoral course Perspectives on Organization and the Environment.

Katja Seim, who completed her doctorate in economics at Yale University, researches the empirical and theoretical analysis of ways in which firms differentiate their products. She will teach the MBA core course Data and Decisions.

Tunay Tunca, who completed his doctorate in operations, information, and technology at the GSB, studies the structure and performance of financial markets to examine how the mix of rational liquidity-motivated traders and insiders affects market performance. He will teach the MBA course Management in an Information Age.

S. Christian Wheeler completed his doctorate in marketing at Ohio State University. His research centers on repeated auctions and price adjustment processes, with an interest also in the area of stereotyping and decision making. He will teach the MBA core course Marketing Management.

Justin Wolfers completed his doctorate in economics in the Harvard economics department. He conducts research spanning the area from labor economics to political economy. He will teach the MBA core course Strategy in the Business Environment.

Eric Zitzewitz, who completed his doctorate in industrial organization and international business at MIT, studies industrial organization, particularly in the application of theory and empirical methodologies to economics, strategic management, and finance. He will teach the MBA elective course Competitive Strategy.

Joanne Martin, the Fred H. Merrill Professor of Organizational Behavior, recently received three honors. She was named International Woman of the Year by the International Biographical Centre, received an honorary doctorate from Copenhagen Business School, and was named to the advisory board of the International Centre for Research in Organizational Discourse, Strategy, and Change of the Universities of Melbourne, Sydney, and London and at McGill University.

Darrell Duffie, the James Irvin Miller Professor of Finance, has agreed to join a new academic research and advisory committee assembled by Moody’s Investors Service and Moody’s Risk Management Services. The committee is an outgrowth of Moody’s past support for academic research in credit and credit-ratings–related areas of finance and economics, said Moody’s President John Rutherfurd. Two Moody’s researchers will also be part of the group, which will include seven European and North American academic experts. Members will review each other’s research findings, generate new research projects, and explore collaborative projects. Duffie also has been appointed a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The Leadership Education and Development Program (LEAD), which helps prepare minority students for careers in business, has named Assistant Professor Sonya Grier one of three outstanding persons among its 6,000 alumni/ae. A national partnership of leading U.S. corporations and graduate business schools, LEAD recognized Grier not only for her professional contributions but for her continued service to the organization. Grier was in the first LEAD program in 1982. Her work is in the area of consumer and target marketing.

The International Foundation for Asset Management and Financial Engineering honored Ming Huang, assistant professor of finance, for coauthorship of the best paper in 2000 in the foundation’s area of expertise. The paper related asset pricing to prospect theory.

Based on the number of articles he has published in the Academy of Management journals, that academic organization recently awarded Charles O’Reilly its 2000 bronze medal for research publications. The Business School’s Frank E. Buck Professor of Human Resources Management and Organizational Behavior, O’Reilly also received the academy’s award for the best paper on organizational behavior in 1999.