Labor Economist Shaw Joins Faculty

November, 2003

Economist KATHRYN L. SHAW, whose research focuses on understanding the sources of productivity gains within firms, has been appointed the Ernest C. Arbuckle Professor of Economics at the Business School. Shaw, who served on President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, comes to Stanford from Carnegie Mellon University, where she won two teaching awards and served the university as chair of the Faculty Senate.

Shaw is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and she is co-principal investigator for a study financed by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation on the "international differences in the business practices and productivity of multinational firms in advanced capitalist countries." Her research emphasizes the role of innovative human resource management practices, and she has been among the leading researchers in developing the new subfield of "insider econometrics," which uses data from within firms to study the impact of human resource practices. Shaw earned her doctorate at Harvard in 1981. She served on the Council of Economic Advisers from 1999 to 2001.

In addition to Shaw, the Business School has appointed six new tenure-track faculty members. They are KENNETH W. SHOTTS, an associate professor, and assistant professors MANUEL A. AMADOR, JERKER C. DENRELL, YONCA ERTIMUR, WESLEY R. HARTMANN, and MARK T. SOLIMAN.

Shotts' field is political economics. He also is an associate professor of political science, by courtesy, in the School of Humanities and Sciences. Shotts, who earned his doctorate from the Business School in 1999, has been an assistant professor at Northwestern University and a visiting scholar at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton. His research interests include electoral institutions, political leadership, and political economy, including statistical analysis of voting patterns.

Amador was awarded the Solow Prize for Graduate Student Excellence in Teaching and Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received his doctorate in economics this year. His research interests include international economics, macroeconomics, and political economy.

Denrell's field is organizational behavior. He earned a doctorate in economics from the Stockholm School of Economics in 1998 and has been a visiting scholar since at Oxford, the Wharton School of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Stern School of Business at New York University. He has published research on the economics of strategic opportunity and radical organization theory. His interests include organizational learning and evolution, competition and strategy, risk taking, and modeling of adaptive behavior.

Ertimur, the coauthor of several recent articles on market responses to corporate accounting, received a doctorate from New York University this year. Her research interests include financial reporting and disclosure, and the role of stock analysts as information intermediaries.

Hartmann, whose interests are marketing and industrial organization, received a doctorate this year from UCLA. He is studying the intertemporal effects of consumption on demand and the societal effects of conditioning prices on past purchases.

Soliman, a certified public accountant who has worked as an auditor and senior financial analyst, completed a doctorate at the University of Michigan this year. Financial statement analysis, including pro forma earnings, and accounting information and valuation are his research interests.

Cited for his study of business tax reform and for leadership of one of Australia's major banks, Dean ROBERT JOSS was awarded in June the Centenary Medal—presented by the Australian government to citizens who have made major contributions to the nation.

Joss, who holds dual U.S. and Australian citizenship, spent six years as chief executive officer and managing director of Westpac Banking Corporation, one of Australia's largest banks. He also was a member of a national panel that made influential recommendations for changes in Australia's business taxation system.

About two dozen Centenary Medals have been awarded to people in the United States, including publisher Rupert Murdoch, Australian-born NASA astronaut Andrew Thomas, World Bank President James Wolfensohn, and Jacques Nasser, former president and CEO of Ford Motor Co.

In 1999 a report authored by Joss and two other business leaders appointed by the Australian government issued a sweeping call for major changes in business taxes in the nation. Many of these recommendations were later adopted into law. Joss also is credited with refocusing Westpac during his tenure as head of the bank by modernizing and streamlining operations and restructuring the bank's culture to emphasize teamwork, customer focus, open communication, and community support. During his tenure, the institution's share price rose 375 percent.

HAU LEE has been named the 2003 recipient of the Harold Larnder Prize given by the Canadian Operational Research Society to an individual of international distinction in operations research. Lee lectured on the evolution of supply chain management teaching, research, and practice at the organization's June conference in Vancouver. Lee is the Thoma Professor of Operations, Information, and Technology at the Business School, and he codirects the Stanford Global Supply Chain Management Forum.

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SONYA GRIER is one of the inaugural class of scholars in a fellowship program to foster research related to national health. Grier, assistant professor of marketing and the Fletcher Jones Faculty Scholar at the Business School last academic year, is one of 18 scholars awarded the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholars Fellowship. In September, she began the two-year fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, where she will research issues at the intersection of marketing and health.

Global corporations may be evolving from hierarchical structures toward networks of related affiliates, says Sloan Program director and faculty member BRUCE McKERN. As the editor of a new book, Managing the Global Network Corporation, McKern brings together field studies and theoretical work conducted by a group of researchers.

"The environment of global business is today far more complex and competitive than it has been in the past, and this has forced global firms to be more flexible and faster on their feet," he says. They have devolved more responsibility and accountability to managers of business units, and leaders of these units have adopted more lateral management processes, which emphasize individual responsibility at all levels.

Prompted by an explosion in cross-border strategic alliances, joint ventures, and mergers in the eighties and nineties, the research was commissioned by McKern during his tenure as president of the Carnegie Bosch Institute. It deals with the strategies of global network corporations, their organizational evolution, and their operating processes. It also covers innovation and knowledge transfer, integrative processes and socialization, adaptation of strategy and firm evolution, and the roles and competencies needed by managers in networked global companies. McKern says he agrees with other researchers in the book who say that the "organization man" view of the international manager is being replaced with the "individualized corporation" view, in which managers are relatively autonomous actors sharing a common vision of the corporation's future.

What dollar value will the market put on an improvement in a product feature? A research paper co-authored by the Business School's SEENU SRINIVASAN says that some customers who are on the fence in terms of purchasing the product should be weighted more heavily than others. The researchers also give a formula for the market value that when compared against the marginal cost is instrumental in deciding whether the improvement is profitable.

The paper "How Much Does the Market Value an Improvement in a Product Attribute?" by Srinivasan and Elie Ofek of Harvard Business School has received the John Little Award from the Marketing Science Society for the best marketing article published in the journals Marketing Science or Management Science during 2002. The society is part of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. Srinivasan is the Adams Distinguished Professor of Management and director of Stanford's Strategic Marketing Management Executive Program. It is the second time he has won the award.