Five Tenure-Track Professors
Added to Business Faculty
October 2009
STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS —With recessionary pressures on budgets, the Business School hired fewer new faculty members than in recent years but was able to recruit three experienced professors and two who recently completed their doctorates. Their research and teaching address many contemporary issues.
Charles I. Jones, the STANCO 25 Professor of Economics, is a macroeconomist noted for his work on long-run economic growth. He has examined sources of growth in incomes over time and the reasons underlying the enormous differences in standards of living across countries.
Charles M. C. Lee, the Joseph McDonald Professor of Accounting, is an expert on the workings of markets who has been an accountant, a visiting economist at the New York Stock Exchange, and a managing director at Barclays Global Investors, as well as a professor in the business schools at Cornell and Michigan.
Steven Callander, associate professor of political economy, studies the behavior of voters and candidates in elections as well as the design of electoral systems. He focuses on understanding how uncertainty and learning affects political outcomes in a variety of institutional settings. His research has appeared in leading journals of economics and political science. He earned his doctorate at Caltech and previously taught at the Kellogg School of Management.
Jones, who is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, is the author of two macroeconomic textbooks as well as numerous research papers. He has used his expertise in macroeconomic methods to study the economic causes behind the rise in health spending and longevity. He began his teaching career in Stanford’s Department of Economics in 1993 and comes to the Business School from the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley.
Lee, who spent last year at the Business School as a visiting faculty member, has a long resume that includes biblical studies and work as a KPMG accountant. He is fluent in Mandarin Chinese and also serves as cochair of the accounting department at Guanghua School of Management at Peking University.
Two more newcomers are John-Paul Ferguson, assistant professor of organizational behavior, and Ali Yurukoglu, assistant professor of economics.
Ferguson’s recent research dissertation work at MIT was honored as the best graduate work in two categories by the American Sociological Association. He studies the effects of hostile environments on new organizations. His research on trade-union formation, for example, shows how greater company opposition to unions has encouraged employees to favor diversified rather than specialized unions.
Yurukoglu, whose PhD is from New York University’s Stern School of Business, applies statistics and game theory to the study of regulatory policy and imperfect competition in the media and telecommunications industries. Recently he worked on a topic of strong interest among consumers – a la carte pricing regulations in cable television, and negotiations and mergers between cable channels and cable distributors.
Broadly speaking, he is interested in the effect of human cognitive constraints on market participants, as well as the dynamic process by which markets incorporate information into prices. Besides his numerous honors for research, he has received many for effective teaching, and lectures on that topic to faculty in his field.