Expert panel May 1: How Can We Safely Reopen the Economy? 

Looking Forward: How Can We Safely Reopen the Economy? 

UC Berkeley Expert Panel

Friday, May 1, 12:30-1:30pm

Watch live broadcast here or on Facebook.

This event is part of the Berkeley Conversations COVID-19 Series and is sponsored by the Haas School of Business

Summary: Pressure is mounting to reopen the economy, and some locales are rushing to do so. Deciding how and when it’s safe for people to return to work, school, and public life is a complex topic that involves implementing widespread testing; accurate assessment of exposure risks; ensuring health care system capacity; putting in place procedures and routines to protect workers; setting guidelines for mass behavior changes; and restoring public trust. How can we go about making these decisions and getting plans in place? A panel of experts from the Haas School of Business and the School of Public Health will engage in an interactive discussion on what needs to happen to reopen businesses and get people back to work while protecting public health and preventing a second wave of coronavirus infections.

Panelists:

  • David I. Levine is a Professor and Chair of the Economic Analysis & Policy Group at the Haas School of Business. He previously served as a senior economist with the President’s Council on Economic Advisors and a senior research economist with the U.S. Department of Labor. His research focuses on the effects of investments in health and education and on obstacles to good management. He is currently focused on what businesses need to do to keep workers safe and also to restore public and customer trust.

  • Maya L. Petersen, MD/PhD, is co-Chair of the Graduate Group in Biostatistics and Associate Professor of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. Her research focuses on the development and application of novel causal inference methods to problems in health, with an emphasis on longitudinal data and adaptive treatment strategies, machine learning methods, and study design and analytic strategies for cluster randomized trials. She is currently working on several mathematical modeling and primary data collection projects to inform both our understanding of the pandemic and strategies for returning to public life.

  • Jonathan Kolstad is an Associate Professor in the Economic Analysis and Policy Group at the Haas School of Business, the Economics Department and the Graduate Program in Health Management. His work lies at the intersection of health economics, industrial organization, and public economics, and he is particularly focused on finding new models and unique data to understand the complexity of markets in health care. His current work focuses on the role of AI in improving health insurance markets, the use of large scale administrative claims data to understand health care delivery and health insurance and physician incentives and treatment decisions.

  • Jennifer A. Chatman is a Professor in the Management of Organizations Group, the Associate Dean of Learning Strategies, and Co-Director of the Berkeley Haas Culture Initiative at the Haas School of Business. Her research focuses on how organizations leverage culture to adapt and grow, how leaders’ personalities shape culture, and how diverse teams can excel in high-pressure situations.

  • Moderator: Dan Mogulof, UC Berkeley Assistant Vice Chancellor, Public Affairs

Livestream link: https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/04/24/looking-forward-how-can-we-safely-reopen-the-economy/

Contact:
Laura Counts | Berkeley Haas Media Relations
[email protected] | (510) 643-9977

###

Free “Leading Through Crisis” video series features top Berkeley Haas experts

Leading Through Crisis banner

BERKELEY, Calif.—Berkeley Executive Education has released a free weekly video series featuring top faculty offering insights on leading through crisis.

The short videos feature Berkeley Haas faculty responding to the uncertainty and volatility created by the coronavirus pandemic with expertise across a wide range of fields—from psychology, sociology, and organizational behavior to economics and neuroscience.

Produced while sheltering-in-place, the “Leading Through Crisis” series brings the unique Berkeley and Bay Area perspective on culture, leadership, and innovation to our current challenges.

Videos will be released weekly throughout the spring:

  • Leading Culture Through Crisis with Jennifer A. Chatman, the Paul J. Cortese Distinguished Professor of Management at Berkeley Haas and co-founder and director of the Berkeley Haas Culture Initiative. Chatman is a leading researcher in the area of organizational culture and leadership.
  • Leading in a Time of Crisis with Homa Bahrami, a professional faculty member and international educator, advisor, and author. Bahrami specializes in organizational flexibility, team alignment, and dynamic leadership in global, knowledge-based industries.
  • Organizational Adaptation in a Time of Crisis with Sameer Srivastava, the Harold Furst Chair in Management Philosophy and Values. Srivastava’s research unpacks the complex interrelationships that people forge within and across groups. His work uses computational methods to examine how culture, cognition, and networks relate to career outcomes.
  • The Neuroscience of Work-From-Home Productivity with Sahar Yousef, a professional faculty member who specializes in applying and leveraging cutting-edge neuroscience research to improve productivity, innovation, and wellness.
  • Becoming a Changemaker in a Time of Uncertainty with Alex Budak, a professional faculty member and social entrepreneur who created the highly rated “Becoming a Changemaker” course.
  • Keeping your Head in a Crisis with Don Moore, the Lorraine Tyson Mitchell Chair in Leadership and Communication at Berkeley Haas. Moore’s research focuses on overconfidence—including the consequences of people thinking they are better than they actually are or being too sure they know the truth. Moore is the author of Perfectly Confident: How to Calibrate Your Decisions Wisely.
  • How Do I Show up as a Leader? with Maura O’Neill, a professional faculty member and distinguished teaching fellow. O’Neill was appointed by President Obama to be the first Chief Innovation Officer of the U.S. Agency for International Development, where she had responsibility for inspiring and leading breakthrough innovations in foreign assistance and development worldwide. O’Neill is best known for adapting venture capital and drug discovery methods to development by co-creating the Development Innovation Venture Fund.
  • The Economics of a Cultural Shift with Steve Tadelis, the Sarin Chair in Strategy and Leadership and professor in the Haas Business and Public Policy Group. His current research areas are e-commerce, industrial organization, procurement contracting, and market design.

Additional programs are in production with professors Toby Stuart, Catherine Wolfram, Rich Lyons, Cameron Anderson, Zsolt Katona and Tom Lee; professional faculty members Robert Strand, Susan Houlihan and Bill Pearce; and other renowned faculty members across a range of topics.

Sign up here to receive “Leading Through Crisis” videos weekly.

About Berkeley Haas

As the second-oldest business school in the United States, Berkeley Haas has been questioning the status quo since its founding in 1898. It is one of the world’s leading producers of new ideas and knowledge in all areas of business, inspiring new thinking for the new economy. Two of its exceptional faculty have been honored with the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. Two of its female faculty, Laura D’Andrea Tyson and Janet Yellen, chaired the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. Janet Yellen also recently stepped down as the chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve.

Berkeley Haas offers outstanding management education to about 2,500 undergraduate and graduate students who come from around the world to study in one of its six degree-granting programs and to join the school’s network of 41,000 alumni worldwide. Its distinctive culture is defined by four Defining Leadership Principles: Question the Status Quo, Confidence Without Attitude, Students Always and Beyond Yourself.

About Berkeley Executive Education

UC Berkeley Executive Education serves leaders and organizations who aspire to redefine the future of business.  Our immersive learning experiences, led by renowned UC Berkeley faculty, equip global executives and their organizations with the vision, culture, and capabilities to thrive in an ever-changing world. Leveraging the best resources of the world’s No. 1 public university (Forbes) and the surrounding Silicon Valley business ecosystem, Berkeley Executive Education embraces the Haas School of Business mission to develop leaders who Question the Status Quo, exhibit Confidence Without Attitude, are Students Always, and think Beyond Themselves.

Berkeley Executive Education delivers over 150 programs annually, to a global audience, including Open Enrollment programs in leadership, strategy, finance and entrepreneurship; Comprehensive programs (15 days or longer) in leadership, digital transformation and other emerging topics; Custom programs designed and tailored specifically for a specific company, government or university partner’s objectives and organizational culture; and Online programs, in various languages, which offer a flexible schedule with direct application of practical learning exercises. Read more on the Berkeley Executive Education website.

Contact:
Laura Counts | Berkeley Haas Media Relations
[email protected] | (510) 643-9977

Haas rated among top schools in new Positive Impact Rating

Berkeley Haas rates among the top schools globally in a new rating of business schools’ focus on creating positive social and environmental impact.

The Positive Impact Rating surveyed MBA and undergraduate students to explore schools’ effectiveness in energizing positive change through governance and culture, educating students through their programs and learning methods, and engaging the community through student engagement and serving as a role model.

Berkeley Haas is one of only three US schools and the only leading business school rated as playing a “transforming” role in creating positive impact.

Haas students gave their school high marks for governance and culture, pointing among other things to the importance of the Defining Leadership Principles.

The rating was developed by a large group of academics, students, and business school stakeholders from different countries. The full report was announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 22, 2020.

Moskowitz Prize winners explore how socially responsible firms influence supply chain

HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS, UC BERKELEY — The Institute for Business & Social Impact (IBSI) at Berkeley Haas has awarded the 2019 Moskowitz Prize to a trio of researchers who discovered that socially responsible corporate customers can have a strong positive impact on the social performance of firms within their supply chains.

The prize was awarded to Rui Dai, senior research support director in Research Data Services at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania; Hao Liang, assistant professor of finance at Singapore Management University; and Prof. Lilian Ng, Scotiabank Chair in International Finance at York University Schulich School of Business. Their paper, “Socially Responsible Corporate Customers,” is forthcoming in the Journal of Financial Economics.

In the paper, the researchers noted that many large global corporate customers increasingly recognize the importance of integrating social responsibility into their business model to build a sustainable competitive marketplace advantage.

Tapping several international databases, the researchers found evidence that corporate customers often establish supply chain relationships with firms inclined to engage in responsible social and environmental practices. Through their work, they uncovered a “multiplier effect” that has significant policy implications—that increasing one firm’s corporate social responsibility can potentially have a ripple effect across the extensive global supply chains.

This year’s winners will accept the prize at the annual Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) Conference, held November 13-15 in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Lloyd Kurtz, faculty co-chair of the Moskowitz Prize, said the paper stood out for its clarity, the importance of the area under study, and the care taken in its quantitative analysis.

“Corporate leaders have told us for many years that supply chains are vital for corporate social performance, but this outstanding paper is the first we have seen that examines these relationships in-depth,” Kurtz said.

Presented since 1996, the Moskowitz Prize, previously awarded by the Center for Responsible Business at Haas, is the only global award that recognizes outstanding quantitative research in socially responsible investing.

Judges from both academic and investment circles reviewed a total of 40 papers this year before choosing a winner. They judged papers on the practical significance to practitioners of socially responsible investing, appropriateness and rigor of quantitative methods, and novelty of results.

The prize is named for Milton Moskowitz, one of the first investigators to publish comparisons of the financial performance of screened and unscreened portfolios, including The 100 Best Companies to Work for in America.

About the SRI Conference

The SRI Conference is the premier annual gathering of the sustainability/SRI/ESG/impact investing world.  #fromEVOLUTIONtoREVOLUTION is the focus of this milestone conference, which draws an estimated 1,200 attendees. The 30th Annual SRI Conference offers participants the chance to learn from SRI experts, gain insight on policy and future trends, be among the first to know about new SRI products, and enjoy opportunities to network and do business with a diverse range of organizations and leaders at the forefront of investing for social, economic, and environmental progress.

About Berkeley Haas

Berkeley Haas offers outstanding management education to about 2,500 undergraduate and graduate students who come from around the world to study in one of its six degree-granting programs and to join the school’s network of 41,000 alumni worldwide. Its distinctive culture is defined by four Defining Leadership Principles: Question the Status Quo, Confidence Without Attitude, Students Always and Beyond Yourself.

How opioid use spreads in families, worsening crisis

Photo of opioids spilling from bottle
Photo: Getty Images

Berkeley Haas researchers have identified another driver of the opioid epidemic in the United States: family ties.

In a study recently published in American Sociological Review, Assistant Professor Mathijs de Vaan and Professor Toby Stuart show that the likelihood of someone using opioids increases significantly once a family member living in the same household has a prescription. They also find that the chances of a relative obtaining a prescription for opioids within a year after a relative they live with gets one rises by 19 percent to over 100 percent, depending on family circumstances. Individuals from low-income households, for example, are the most likely to secure their own prescription after a family member does.

The study is one of the few analyses of the opioid crisis that finds a causal link between a specific action—in this case, the introduction of painkillers into a home—and their growing use. In all, de Vaan and Stuart analyzed hundreds of millions of medical claims and almost 14 million opioid prescriptions written between 2010 and 2015 and contained in a database operated by the state of Massachusetts. They were able to track family members’ health care through shared medical insurance policy numbers.

“Our research finds huge effects on the likelihood that family members who are influenced by other family members will start using opioids,” says de Vaan, a sociologist who studies social networks. De Vaan and Stuart, who holds the Leo Helzel Chair in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Haas, suggest two reasons for this contagion: when a family member takes painkillers, other relatives in the home observe firsthand its effects. Patients also typically receive more pills than they need, which means relatives may be tempted to experiment with leftovers sitting in the medicine cabinet.

Family members’ exposure to painkillers then increases the likelihood that they will visit a doctor within a year and obtain their own prescription. Other research has shown that Americans are more willing to ask for—and receive—specific treatments than consumers in other countries.

Because of this, de Vaan and Stuart offer a new insight into the role of physicians in the opioid epidemic. While it’s long been believed that physicians who work in the same community or are connected in other ways rely on each other for advice and adopt similar forms of treatment, the authors show that the explosion in opioid prescription rates may be coming from patients, too.

“The actions of one doctor toward one patient affect the requests that that patient then makes of other doctors he or she visits,” says de Vaan. “We find that physicians are not only influencing each other directly when it comes to opioid prescriptions. They’re influencing each other by steering patient demand.”

A causal link

Sociologists have long studied the role that social networks have on people’s health. Smoking and alcohol use are two prominent examples of habits families often share.

The problem with research into social contagion is that most of it identifies correlations, but can’t establish cause and effect. It’s possible that other factors—like genetics or the tendency for people to marry others like them—come into play, too.

De Vaan and Stuart, however, were able to establish a causal link between opioid prescriptions and an increase in the drug’s use within families. They did this by narrowing their research to emergency room visits only, where patients are randomly assigned to doctors who prescribe opioids at vastly different rates—so the likelihood that one patient received a painkiller prescription over another was random. The experiment also eliminated the possibility that family members who later got a prescription got one from the same doctor or that family members were visiting the same provider, such as a primary care physician.

 Finding prevention methods that work

De Vaan and Stuart suggest several steps to address the spread of opioid use within families. To prevent so-called “doc shopping,” states that track prescription drug use and make that information available to doctors could also include data on family members’ access to medications. To avoid violating the privacy of relatives, de Vaan says the program could simply issue a “risk” score that would signal to doctors that their patient has been indirectly exposed to painkillers at home.

Policymakers could also expand upon existing efforts to collect leftover prescription drugs—namely through National Prescription Drug Take Back Day—by paying people to return their excess supply. The upfront costs would likely be offset by the money saved in addiction treatment and other costs, de Vaan says. Doctors should also be trained on how to push back when patients ask for painkillers.

“We’ve identified a specific driver of opioid consumption, so all of these steps make a lot of sense,” de Vaan says.

UC Berkeley launches joint master’s degree in business and engineering

photo of Berkeley students holding a laptop

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY — The University of California, Berkeley’s top-ranked Haas School of Business and College of Engineering have joined forces to launch a concurrent MBA/MEng degree program to equip innovative leaders with the skills to take on complex and technical challenges.

The new program, enrolling for fall 2020, will allow students with sufficient undergraduate technical training to earn both a Master of Business Administration and a Master of Engineering degree in just two years.

The MBA/MEng program is designed for early-career professionals who wish to take their careers to a higher level of leadership, whether at a major firm, a startup, or as an entrepreneur, said MBA/MEng Program Faculty Director Candace Yano, a professor with joint appointments at Haas and Berkeley Engineering.

“The program will prepare students to meet industry demands for graduates who are both business- and technology-savvy and can lead technical innovation efforts—a combination of skills needed in Silicon Valley and beyond,” she said.

Haas Dean Ann Harrison said the program will draw from the strength of both schools, allowing students to learn from some of the world’s top minds from a wide range of disciplines. Students will have access to both UC Berkeley’s rich intellectual resources and the Bay Area’s innovation ecosystem.

“With this exciting new program, we’re leaning into our Berkeley strength and uniting two of our top-ranked programs at the engineering and business schools to fill a need to educate leaders who are fluent in both worlds,” Harrison said.

Berkeley Engineering Dean Tsu-Jae King Liu said this kind of technical and business fluency is essential for driving innovation.

“Today’s business leaders increasingly need to understand and harness the transformative potential of engineered devices, systems, and processes,” she said. “This concurrent degree program is aligned with our college’s mission to train graduate students who not only have expertise in their respective engineering subfields, but who also have the skills to succeed as entrepreneurs and as leaders in industries where technological innovation offers a key competitive advantage.”

Graduates with advanced engineering and business skills are in high demand. Companies that have recently hired Berkeley Haas MBA graduates who also have a master’s degree in engineering include Google, Apple, Boston Consulting Group, Citibank, Eli Lilly, Genentech, KPMG, Marvell Semiconductor, and Microsoft. Their typical roles include product manager, principal architect, marketing analytics manager, senior consultant, and manager of strategy and operations.

The MBA/MEng program will launch with a cohort of 20 students and is expected to grow to 30 during the next few years. Applicants will be considered for admission to both departments by a combined committee (students accepted to only one of the two programs may enroll in that program).

The rigorous curriculum will include MBA courses in leadership, marketing, management, finance, data analysis, ethics, and macroeconomics, along with engineering courses in one of seven areas of concentration: Bioengineering, Civil & Environmental Engineering, Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences, Industrial Engineering & Operations Research, Materials Science & Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or Nuclear Engineering. Students will also take courses in managing research and development, project management, and working in teams.

An integral part of the program is a second-year capstone project that asks students to solve real-world challenges for companies or nonprofit government organizations. Examples of these interdisciplinary projects include creating better solar and water reclamation opportunities for greener cities or completing the marketing analysis required to redesign a residential water filter for a manufacturer.

To be considered for the program, applicants must have at least two years of full-time work experience as well as sufficient undergraduate coursework to be successful in master’s level engineering classes. Depending on their intended field, that may include an engineering degree or a degree in physics or mathematics with coursework in computer programming. Applicants can submit either GMAT or GRE scores.

The new program was inspired by Berkeley’s undergraduate Management, Entrepreneurship, & Technology Program (M.E.T.), launched in 2017 and aimed at teaching undergraduates the skills of business and technology in one four-year bachelor of science degree. Haas also has interdisciplinary dual degree programs with public health (MBA/MPH) and law (JD/MBA).

The concurrent degree program was launched with the support of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) in honor of its founder, Morris Chang.

The New Enlightenment: A Call to Arms at Adam Smith’s Panmure House

BERKELEY, Calif. & EDINBURGH, Scotland — Adam Smith is remembered for his disdain for beggar-thy-neighbor “mercantilist” trade policies and for the “invisible hand” theorem of how to use decentralized markets to organize an economy better than any centralized authority could. To many, he is closely associated with laissez-faire economics. But those who actually read his work know that he took a much more nuanced view of markets, businesses, and government, recognizing the moral and social aspects of how individuals behave and how prosperity ensues.

In the spirit of Adam Smith—and in the recently restored Panmure House, where he lived and worked over two centuries ago—leading policymakers, academics and business leaders will come together on July 1–2 for a major international event, The New Enlightenment. The conference program reflects Smith’s holistic view of capitalism and global competition. Invited participants will explore paths forward from the many challenges that face the world’s liberal democracies. Speakers will include former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the historian Niall Ferguson, the economist John Kay, and Weijian Shan, chairman and CEO of the Hong Kong–based private equity firm PAG Group.

 

The New Enlightenment conference is the result of a transatlantic intellectual partnership between Edinburgh Business School, the Haas School at the University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley Research Group (BRG), and Munich-based FWU.

“The conference aims to address the many perplexing management, policy and global governance issues that go to the heart of sustaining the prosperity, vitality and perhaps even the very viability of liberal democracies in the coming decades,” said David Teece, professor at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, chairman of Berkeley Research Group, and the initiator and organizer of the conference. “We hope to begin important conversations that will shape critical policy and management decisions long into the future.”

Smith’s final home, Panmure House, has been rescued and restored by the Edinburgh Business School at Heriot-Watt University. Panmure will now be reliving its heyday as a seat of the Scottish Enlightenment, having formally reopened in November 2018 as a modern hub of economic debate and scholarship. “This is a very special venue for an uncommonly talented and committed group of global citizens and thought leaders,” said Teece, Panmure House’s inaugural Adam Smith scholar-in-residence.

Professor Heather McGregor, executive dean of Edinburgh Business School, said, “We have designed Panmure House to bring the world to Scotland, just as Adam Smith took Scotland to the world. This exceptional gathering will ensure that the ideas debated at Panmure go on to make a practical impact in the world beyond Edinburgh, exactly as they did in Smith’s time.”

In addition to Teece, speakers from UC Berkeley include Professor Ann Harrison, dean of the Haas School of Business, and Professor Barry Eichengreen of the Economics Department.

Further details on the conference can be found at https://www.panmure2019.com.

For Panmure House news and events, visit www.panmurehouse.org.

Contacts

Berkeley Research Group (BRG):

Laura Miller
[email protected] 
312.252.4104

Berkeley Haas:

Laura Counts
[email protected]
510.643.9977

Big data traffic study identifies India’s fastest and slowest cities

Kolkata city top view at night, West Bengal, India. Long exposure photo

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY — The first large-scale analysis of traffic congestion in 154 Indian cities has identified the slowest urban areas, and found that the problem may have more to do with poor road infrastructure than the number of cars on the road.

A team of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and three other U.S. universities used Google Maps to analyze 22 million potential trips throughout India’s largest cities. They pinpointed the cities where traffic moves the fastest, those where it moves the slowest, and those with the longest peak traffic delays or congestion. In the slowest cities, traffic moves at less than half the speed as in the fastest cities, and it’s slow around the clock.

Berkeley Haas Asst. Prof. Victor Couture
Asst. Prof. Victor Couture

“There is a great deal of concern about slow travel in Indian cities, but attempts to quantify the problem have been quite limited so far,” said study co-author Victor Couture, assistant professor of real estate at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. “These findings challenge the conventional wisdom that rush-hour congestion is to blame for slow traffic.”

Kolkata, for example, is the slowest city in India, but it’s only the fifth most congested. Hyderabad is the third slowest city, yet it’s the sixth most congested, researchers determined.

“To our surprise, traffic congestion has a minimal impact outside of the very few largest cities, such as Mumbai and Delhi,” said Gilles Duranton, professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and a study co-author, along with Adam Storeygard, associate professor of economics at Tufts University, and Prottoy Akbar, doctoral researcher at the University of Pittsburgh. “Roughly speaking, this means that cities that are slow relative to other cities at rush hour are also relatively slow at 3 am with few cars on the road.”

The study, published today as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, has important policy implications. While congestion alleviating policies are potentially useful in the few most congested cities, such as Bangalore and Mumbai, they are unlikely to make much of a difference in cities where traffic is chronically slow, such as Varanasi, Storeygard said.

“Uncongested speed in the slowest cities can’t be improved by ride-sharing, congestion pricing or other restrictions, and it may be more beneficial to invest in infrastructure,” he said.

Most large transportation studies have relied on household travel surveys, which are expensive and carried out only once every several years—even in wealthy countries. The research team found a cheaper large-scale alternative: real-time travel data from Google Maps, which are based on the location and speed of hundreds of millions of mobile phones running Google’s software. The researchers designed sample trips and tested them at different times over 40 days in 2016, factoring in local holidays and weather conditions. They also used government survey and census data on earnings, population, car access, and average commute distances, as well as various data sources on city shape and road networks.

“Travel survey respondents only report data on the trips they choose to take, not the ones they decide against,” said Akbar. “The Google data give us a much broader sense of the traffic conditions affecting choices.”

While the study did not isolate the exact causes of slow traffic, the results pointed to poor infrastructure as the likely culprit. Cities with more primary roads and those laid out in a more regular grid are faster. For example, Chandigarh—a planned city laid out in a grid—is India’s 12th most congested city, yet it’s also the 7th fastest.

The findings also show that urbanization and rapid growth don’t have to lead to gridlock—in fact, the researchers found that economic development can bring better infrastructure and improve mobility. Indicators such as faster recent population growth, higher income, and higher rates of car use were associated with faster overall traffic speeds, despite worse congestion.

The researchers believe their new approach to studying traffic conditions may be useful throughout the developing world, where there has been a lack of comprehensive data about urban transportation.

“New forms of geographic data have great potential to teach us about urban transport,” Couture said. “We hope our results, methodology, and data sources can help guide policy and future research on urban transportation in developing countries.”

City Rankings 

Table listing Indias fastest and slowest cities

 

RESOURCES & CONTACTS

“Mobility & Congestion in Urban India,” NBER Working Paper

Victor Couture, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley: [email protected]

Adam Storeygard, Tufts University: [email protected]

Gilles Duranton, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania: [email protected]

Prottoy A. Akbar, University of Pittsburgh: [email protected]

Renowned economist and Berkeley alumna Ann Harrison named new Haas dean

Berkeley—Renowned Wharton economist and University of California, Berkeley, alumna Ann E. Harrison has been named the next dean of the Haas School of Business, Chancellor Carol Christ announced today.

Harrison will begin her term on January 1, 2019.

“Professor Harrison is an accomplished administrator as well as a world-class economist who has dedicated her career to creating forward-looking policies in development economics, international trade, and global labor markets,” said Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ. “It is a great honor to welcome her back to Berkeley to become the dean of Haas, and I have no doubt that she will be a wonderful leader for the institution.”

Ann Harrison
Ann Harrison

Harrison, the William H. Wurster Professor of Multinational Management and Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, has deep Berkeley roots. She earned her bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley with a double major in economics and history in 1982. She also served as a professor of Berkeley’s Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics from 2001 to 2011.

Harrison said she is thrilled to return to Berkeley to join its top-ranked business school, and is looking forward to meeting Haas students and alumni, as well as working with the distinguished faculty and staff.

Before joining the Wharton School in 2012, Harrison served as director of development policy at the World Bank. There, she co-managed a team of 300 researchers and staff, reformed the World Bank’s process for allocating research funds and oversaw the institution’s most important flagship publications, including its annual World Development Report. During her tenure, she convinced the World Bank’s president to release all historical records on project loans, a milestone in increasing transparency.

“Ann has a remarkable track record of pioneering research on trade and development, including influential studies of globalization’s effects on jobs and inequality,” said Berkeley economics professor Maurice Obstfeld, who serves as chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and collaborated with Harrison at Berkeley’s Agricultural and Resource Economics Department.

“Based on Ann’s experience at the World Bank, she will be an effective and much-loved manager,” said Sir Angus Deaton, the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of Economics and International Affairs Emeritus at Princeton University who has known Harrison since she was a graduate student. He also is the 2015 Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences for his analysis of consumption, poverty and welfare.

Harrison earned a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University and a diplôme d’études universitaires générales from the University of Paris. She is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a member of the United Nations Committee for Development Policy.

Harrison is one of the most highly cited scholars globally on foreign investment and multinational firms. She is the author and editor of three books, including Globalization and Poverty and The Factory-Free Economy. In 2017, Harrison and her co-authors were awarded the prestigious Sun Yefang Prize by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The prize, given every two years, is considered one of China’s most important honors in economics.

About Berkeley Haas

As the second-oldest business school in the United States, Berkeley Haas has been questioning the status quo since its founding in 1898. It is one of the world’s leading producers of new ideas and knowledge in all areas of business, inspiring new thinking for the new economy. Two of its exceptional faculty have been honored with the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. Two of its female faculty, Laura D’Andrea Tyson and Janet Yellen, chaired the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. Janet Yellen also recently stepped down as the chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve.

Berkeley Haas offers outstanding management education to about 2,500 undergraduate and graduate students who come from around the world to study in one of its six degree-granting programs and to join the school’s network of 41,000 alumni worldwide. Its distinctive culture is defined by four Defining Leadership Principles: Question the Status Quo, Confidence Without Attitude, Students Always and Beyond Yourself.

Download a high-res photo of Ann Harrison.

Environmental regulations drove steep declines in U.S. factory pollution

Berkeley — The federal Clean Air Act and associated environmental regulations have driven steep declines in air pollution emissions over the past several decades—even as U.S. manufacturers increased production, a study by two University of California, Berkeley economists has shown.

The study, forthcoming in the American Economic Review, found that polluting emissions from U.S. manufacturing fell by 60 percent between 1990 and 2008—a period in which manufacturing output grew significantly—primarily because manufacturers adopted cleaner production methods in tandem with increasingly strict environmental regulation.

UC Berkeley Assoc. Prof. Joseph Shapiro
Joseph Shapiro

“In the 1960s and 1970s, people worried that Los Angeles, New York and other U.S. cities would have unbearable air pollution levels by the end of the 20th century,” said Joseph Shapiro, an associate professor of agricultural and resource economics who co-authored the study with Reed Walker, an associate professor in the Haas School of Business and economics department. “Instead, air pollution levels have plummeted, and the evidence shows that environmental regulation and the associated cleanup of production processes have played important roles in those steep declines.”

Shapiro and Walker analyzed newly available data on over 1,400 different products produced by U.S. plants between 1990 and 2008. They combined this with plant-level pollution emissions data over the same period. The authors then categorized reductions in overall emissions into those that can be explained by changes in manufacturing output, changes in the types of goods produced or changes in production technologies.

The researchers found that most of the decreases in emissions of important pollutants from manufacturing—such as nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide and carbon monoxide—came from changes in production technologies.

Reed Walker

“People often assume that manufacturing production pollutes less today because manufacturing output has declined, when in fact output was 30 percent greater in 2008 than in 1990,” said Walker. “Others argue that manufacturing has shifted towards cleaner, high-tech products or that the manufacturing of ‘dirty’ products like steel has moved to China, Mexico or other foreign countries. Our analysis showed that changes in the product-mix of U.S. manufacturing do not explain much of the reduction in emissions. Instead, manufacturers are producing the same types of goods, but they’ve taken significant steps to clean up their production processes.”

The researchers sought to identify the key driver of the change in production technology. They quantified the importance of reductions in tariffs and other trade costs, improved productivity and environmental regulation in explaining decreases in air pollution emissions. Then they showed that the stringency of environmental regulation for manufacturing firms nearly doubled between 1990 and 2008. The researchers demonstrate that this increase in regulatory stringency, rather than improvements in manufacturing productivity or trade exposure, accounted for most of the decreases in pollution emissions.

The study was funded in part by grants from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. Shapiro conducted much of the research in his former position at Yale University.

RELATED INFORMATION

CONTACTS

Joseph Shapiro, [email protected], (617) 821-4333
Reed Walker, [email protected], (510) 965-3298
Laura Counts, Berkeley Haas Media Relations: [email protected], (510) 643-9977
Robert Sanders, UC Berkeley Media Relations[email protected], (510) 643-6998

New Equity, Gender, and Leadership Center at Haas Receives Gift From Zendesk

Berkeley, CA —  The Center for Equity, Gender, and Leadership (EGAL) at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley today announced a $1 million gift from customer service software maker Zendesk.

The four-year gift strengthens funding for EGAL, which is part of the Institute for Business and Social Impact (IBSI) at the Haas School. EGAL received a founding corporate gift from Gap Foundation in November 2017. The Zendesk gift brings total funding for EGAL from Gap, Zendesk, and other corporate partners and individual donors to about $3 million.

“We’re so proud to have Zendesk as a partner,” said Kellie McElhaney, founding director of EGAL. “We are educating equity-fluent leaders to ignite and accelerate change through our center. Zendesk’s efforts around diversity, inclusion, and leadership make it a stand-out in the tech industry. Together, we’re working to create high-growth companies and a more equitable business world.”

“EGAL’s work on these critical equity, gender, and leadership issues that impact corporate America is inspiring,” said Haas alumna Elena Gomez, BS 91, Zendesk’s CFO, and a member of EGAL’s Founding Advisory Council. “Our industry demands change, and the work we’ll do with and through EGAL is intended to accelerate this change.”

With IBSI support, McElhaney launched EGAL last year with the goal of developing leaders who are “equity fluent”—able to engage in difficult and uncomfortable conversations, and empowered to design creative solutions. The center is advancing thought leadership in this area through multiple “Diversity Playbooks” and by partnering deeply with the business sector. The center will also serve as a hub for fostering leaders by educating students, supporting faculty research, and working with companies and organizations to train their leaders, broaden their missions, and develop strategies.

For Zendesk, equal access, opportunity, and belonging are necessary to cultivate a sustainable and meaningful culture. In addition to taking measures to reach gender pay parity globally and racial pay parity in the U.S., the company fosters equity by supporting relationship building and mentorship programs among women and people of color. It also works with organizations to diversify the talent pipeline, and nurtures internal spirit with initiatives such as employee resource groups.

“The relationship that EGAL has forged with Zendesk will support and broaden our research efforts in gender, equity, and leadership, and help to develop new leaders at Haas and beyond,” said Interim Haas Dean Laura Tyson, who is also the faculty director of IBSI. “We aim to make all of our graduates equity fluent, able to engage in difficult and uncomfortable conversations, and empowered to design creative solutions and lead. Collaborations like these will help pave the way to creating a new kind of workplace, where equity on many levels—from equal pay for equal work to promoting more women to senior management and leadership positions—is the norm rather than the exception.”

McElhaney, who teaches a course called “The Business Case for Investing in Diversity and Inclusion” conducted 2016 research with Genevieve Smith on the zero-percent pay gap between men and women at Gap Inc., developing an ongoing relationship that led to Gap’s founding gift.

The EGAL leadership team includes Prof. Laura Kray, who studies gender stereotyping and negotiations, and Prof. Tyson, who served as chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers during the Clinton administration and has written extensively about the need to address the worldwide economic disparity between men and women.

Since its launch last November, EGAL has held its first diversity and inclusion pitch competition; hired a post-doctorate researcher who will be working closely with faculty; and named its first EGAL fellow, an incoming MBA student who has shown deep commitment to diversity and inclusion.

McElhaney, along with EGAL Program Director Jennifer Wells, leads the AmpEquity Leadership Series, a forum to amplify the conversation around workplace equity. The series brings leaders from a variety of business sectors to share their perspectives on leadership, lessons learned, and strategies with the Haas community.

About Berkeley Haas

As the second-oldest business school in the United States, the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley has been questioning the status quo since its founding in 1898. Berkeley Haas is one of the world’s leading producers of new ideas and knowledge in all areas of business, inspiring New Thinking for the New Economy. That includes the distinction of having two of its exceptional faculty honored with the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.

Berkeley Haas offers outstanding management education to about 2,300 undergraduate and graduate students who come from around the world to study in one of its six degree-granting programs and to join the school’s network of 40,000+ alumni worldwide. Its distinctive culture is defined by four defining leadership principles: Question the Status Quo, Confidence Without Attitude, Students Always, and Beyond Yourself.

About Zendesk

The best customer experiences are built with Zendesk. Zendesk’s powerful and flexible customer service and engagement platform scales to meet the needs of any business, from startups and small businesses to growth companies and enterprises. Zendesk serves businesses across a multitude of industries, with more than 125,000 paid customer accounts offering service and support in more than 30 languages. Headquartered in San Francisco, Zendesk operates worldwide with 15 offices in North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America. Learn more at www.zendesk.com.

Contact: Kim Girard, [email protected], (510) 643-0259

 

Berkeley Haas Professor Laura Tyson Named as Business School’s Interim Dean

Laura Tyson, interim dean of Berkeley Haas
Laura Tyson, interim dean of Berkeley Haas. Photo: Karl Nielsen

University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business—June 28, 2018—Laura D’Andrea Tyson, renowned economist at the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business, has been named the school’s interim dean as of July 1, Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ announced today.

Tyson joined the Berkeley Economics Department in 1977 and the Haas faculty in 1990. She was the dean of the Haas School from 1998 to 2001. She also served as dean of London Business School from 2002 until 2006. She has graciously agreed to serve as interim dean at Berkeley Haas while the chancellor’s office continues to work on recruiting a permanent dean. The chancellor’s office hopes to have a new dean named and in place this fall.

“We are so fortunate that somebody as able and uniquely qualified for this role as Professor Tyson is willing to step in and help the school during this leadership transition,” said Chancellor Christ. “When Laura was dean of Berkeley Haas, she initiated many important programs that laid the foundation for the school’s financial and reputational strengths today. Haas couldn’t be in better hands.”

Tyson succeeds Professor Richard K. Lyons, who has served as the Haas School dean for 11 years. Lyons will to return to his full-time faculty position at Haas next year following a well-deserved sabbatical.

“The Berkeley Haas community recognizes and appreciates the enormous contributions that Dean Lyons has made during his deanship,” said Tyson. “I am honored by the opportunity to serve our community during the transition to the new dean.”

Currently, Tyson is a Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School and serves as the faculty director of the Haas School’s Institute for Business and Social Impact, which she launched in 2013. The Institute houses the Centers for Responsible Business (CRB), Social Sector Leadership (CSSL), and Equity, Gender & Leadership (EGaL); the Global Social Venture Competition, BOOST and BBAY. Tyson also chairs the Board of Trustees at the Blum Center for Developing Economies at UC Berkeley.

Tyson is an influential scholar of economics and public policy and an expert on trade and competitiveness. She served as Chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1993 to 1995 and as Director of the White House National Economic Council from 1995 to 1996. She was the first woman to serve in these two positions.

Tyson is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She serves on three corporate boards and as an advisor to or member of several advisory boards for nonprofit and for-profit organizations.

Tyson has devoted some of her policy attention to the links between women’s rights and national economic performance. At the World Economic Forum (WEF), she is the co-chair of the Global Future Council on Education, Gender and Work and is a Stewardship Board member of the System Initiative on Education, Gender and Work. She is the co-author of the WEF Annual Global Gender Gap Report, which ranks nations on economic, political, education, and health gender gaps. She is also the co-author of Leave No One Behind, a report for the United Nation’s High-Level Panel on Women’s Economic Empowerment (2016).

Much of Tyson’s recent research focuses on the effects of automation on the future of work. She is the co-organizer of WITS (Work and Intelligent Tools and System), an interdisciplinary faculty group created to explore the impacts of digital technologies and artificial intelligence on working, earning, and learning.

About Berkeley Haas

As the second-oldest business school in the United States, the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley has been questioning the status quo since its founding in 1898. Berkeley Haas is one of the world’s leading producers of new ideas and knowledge in all areas of business, inspiring New Thinking for the New Economy. That includes the distinction of having two of its exceptional faculty honored with the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.

Berkeley Haas offers outstanding management education to about 2,300 undergraduate and graduate students who come from around the world to study in one of its six degree-granting programs and to join the school’s network of 40,000+ alumni worldwide. Its distinctive culture is defined by four defining leadership principles: Question the Status Quo, Confidence Without Attitude, Students Always, and Beyond Yourself.

Download a high resolution photo of Laura Tyson here.

Contact:

Kim Girard
+1 415-298-6336
[email protected]

Ute Frey
+1 510-642-0342
[email protected]

Berkeley Haas Partners with Ripple to Accelerate Innovation in Blockchain & Cryptocurrency

Berkeley, CA – 4th June – The Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley today announced its participation in the University Blockchain Research Initiative, a new program founded by Ripple to support academic research, technical development, and innovation in blockchain, cryptocurrency, and digital payments.

Berkeley Haas will receive a multi-year, multi-million-dollar gift from Ripple to build on the school’s leadership in advancing understanding of how these technologies are transforming multiple industries, and in educating leaders who will bring them to market. The school will develop a comprehensive program focused on blockchain and distributed systems, as well as cryptocurrency and digital payments.

“This is the perfect partnership: Berkeley with our triple strengths of an outstanding business school, outstanding STEM education and research, and our location in the Bay Area—the heart of innovation—and Ripple, with its remarkable leadership in remaking how global payments are done,” said Haas Dean Rich Lyons.

Berkeley Haas is one of 17 prestigious universities around the world and one of only two business schools in the U.S. partnering with Ripple on the $50 million University Blockchain Research Initiative.

Housed within the Institute for Business and Social Impact (IBSI) in collaboration with the #1-ranked Master of Financial Engineering Program, the Berkeley Haas blockchain research program will link to the wide array of expertise and initiatives underway across campus. These initiatives include strategic collaborations with other UC Berkeley schools and departments including the engineering and law schools; a new Haas FinTech Center under development; as well as student-led initiatives such as the Haas FinTech Club and Blockchain at Berkeley. The program will support pioneering academic research examining the changes these technologies are bringing to a wide range of industries and the financial system, and how they might be harnessed to reduce poverty and enhance the greater good.

“Exploring and advancing uses of blockchain to solve business and societal problems are core to the mission of Berkeley Haas and its Institute for Business and Social Impact,” said IBSI Faculty Director Laura Tyson. “This partnership with Ripple comes at the perfect time for ​UC Berkeley​, as our students across campus are demanding even more classes, research opportunities, and activities related to blockchain.”

The Berkeley Haas program will provide financial support for academic research, graduate and undergraduate research projects, student experiential learning, and events and student activities such as competitions, conferences, and guest speakers. Berkeley Haas will determine the research topics and areas of focus. In addition to financial resources, Ripple has committed to providing strategic guidance and technical resources as needed.

Eric van Miltenburg, Ripple’s senior vice president of Global Operations, said the initiative will help meet the growing demand for talent, learning, research, and project-based experience in blockchain and fintech more broadly.

Academia has traditionally been a critical driver of technical innovation. The University Blockchain Research Initiative is an acknowledgment of the vital importance of the unique role universities will play in advancing our understanding and application of cryptography and blockchain technology.  It also speaks to the reality that university graduates will fuel a continually evolving and maturing financial marketplace and workforce,” said Eric van Miltenburg, SVP of Global Operations at Ripple. “Much of the enthusiasm and activity to date around blockchain is disconnected from real use cases that result in clear benefits to businesses or civil society. While Ripple won’t dictate research parameters, we are excited to play a role in helping to support faculty and student-led projects that explore increasingly useful applications of blockchain and cryptocurrencies.”

Berkeley Haas’ ability to reach across campus departments and disciplines will help fuel diverse teaching, research, and technical developments that will contribute to the global blockchain ecosystem. The school is also committed to increasing diversity and inclusion across all its programs, most recently with the addition of a new chief diversity officer and the launch of the Center for Equity, Gender and Leadership.

Contact:
Laura Counts, Assoc. Director, Media Relations & Faculty Research
[email protected] | (510) 643-9977

About the Haas School of Business

As the second-oldest business school in the United States, the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley is one of the world’s leading producers of new ideas and knowledge in all areas of business. The school offers outstanding management education to about 2,300 undergraduate and graduate students each year who come from around the world to study in one of its six degree-granting programs.

About the University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley is one of the world’s most iconic teaching and research institutions. Since 1868, Berkeley has fueled a perpetual renaissance, generating unparalleled intellectual, economic and social value in California, the United States, and the world. Considered among the best universities in the world and the top public university in the United States, Berkeley has more departments ranked in the top 10 than any other school.

About Ripple

Ripple provides one frictionless experience to send money globally using the power of blockchain. By joining Ripple’s growing, global network, financial institutions can process their customers’ payments anywhere in the world instantly, reliably and cost-effectively. Banks and payment providers can use the digital asset XRP to further reduce their costs and access new markets. With offices in San Francisco, New York, London, Luxembourg, Mumbai, Singapore and Sydney, Ripple has more than 100 customers around the world.

When Disaster Doesn’t Strike: New Book Explores the Study of Highly Reliable Organizations

Every day, airlines fly millions of people safely to their destinations, hospitals perform intricate surgeries that save lives, and commercial nuclear power plants pump out billions of kilowatt hours of electricity without incident.

All are complex organizations that conduct risky operations under time pressure yet operate largely free of major error—except the ones that don’t.

Rangaraj Ramanujam and Karlene H. Roberts
Rangaraj Ramanujam and Karlene H. Roberts

A new book edited by researchers at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management and the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business offers research insights from the study of Highly Reliable Organizations (HROs), a field that has emerged over the past three decades and has changed the way high-profile disasters are evaluated and prevented.

Organizing for Reliability – A Guide for Research and Practice,” edited by Rangaraj Ramanujam, the Richard M. and Betty Ruth Miller Professor of Management at the Owen School, and Karlene H. Roberts, Professor Emeritus at the Haas School, was released Feb. 27 by Stanford Business Books, an imprint of Stanford University Press. Read a Q&A with the editors here.

“We believed it was time to take stock of some of the most important research in one place, both for researchers to identify gaps and next steps, and for practitioners to pick up strategies to help them in making their organizations more reliable,” said Roberts, chair of the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management at the University of California, Berkeley. “Catastrophic accidents are still happening more often than anyone would like.”

Through 12 chapters from leading researchers on Highly Reliable Organizations (HROs), the editors showcase what has been learned over the past 30 years, in order to drive new research interest in the area and offer practitioners a guide to improving safety and reliability in their own organizations.

Organizing for Reliability book coverPrior to the 1980s, accident analysis mostly centered around identifying technical and/or human causes of failures and resolving them through technological changes or training. Roberts was one of the first researchers to identify and examine highly reliable organizations—those that operate in extreme settings with no room for error—and uncover the systems, processes, and cultures that facilitated their success.

“The task of keeping organizations reliable is intensely social. It requires lots of people interacting and coordinating with each other, so the quality of the social interactions affects the reliability of the outcomes,” says Ramanujam.

Adds Roberts, “It’s no longer informative to look at individuals in producing reliable and safe behavior in complex organizations. You have to look at the individual embedded in the group, the group embedded in the organization, and the organization embedded within its system of organizations, regulations, and other constraints.”

As interest in the field has grown, the impact of HRO research has extended beyond the world of academia. Major accident investigations, like that of the Columbia space shuttle, draw on it for analysis and recommendations, and industries such as nuclear power and chemicals have developed HRO operating manuals.

“I think that more organizations in more industries are facing shrinking margins of error,” says Ramanujam. “When it comes to reliability, organizations that used to operate with some flexibility are finding a less tolerant public.”

Chapters one and two, penned by Roberts and Ramanujam, respectively, offer an overview of HRO research history and perspective on reliability models. From there, HRO experts review the different facets of reliability, including mindful organizing, resilience, conflict, learning, communications, and inter-organizational reliability.

The final three chapters explore the application of the research, in disaster response situations, the healthcare industry, and other areas. A chapter penned by W. Earl Carnes includes perspectives from over 30 practitioners from various industries. Ramanujam and Roberts conclude the book with an epilogue that uncovers common themes and directions for future research.

“From a research standpoint, we hope readers will get an understanding of this active line of research with many important open questions, and we hope it will encourage them to undertake research to help answer them,” says Ramanujam. “From a practitioners standpoint, we hope this will alert them to advances being made on the research side and the resources available to them.”

 

Press Contacts:

Haas School of Business Media Relations
Laura Counts (510) 643-9977  [email protected]

Vanderbilt University News and Communications
615-322-NEWS (6397)

Breakthrough Center for Gender, Equity & Leadership launches at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business

Kellie McElhaneyUNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY’S HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business today announced the opening of the Center for Gender, Equity & Leadership (CGEL) to foster leadership, support deep faculty research, and advance meaningful corporate change.

The Center has raised more than $1.6M in gifts from Haas alumni and friends, as well as from its first corporate foundation donor, Gap Foundation.

“The economic case for supporting workplace diversity and women in business has never been stronger,” said Assoc. Adj. Prof. Kellie McElhaney, the Center’s founding director. “Women, underrepresented minorities, and the LGBTQ community face systemic structural, cultural, and individual barriers to opportunities and advancement. We will work to identify and tackle these problems and develop an evidence-based playbook.”

The Center will partner with companies and organizations to host leadership symposia and action labs on change strategies; conduct and disseminate cutting-edge research; teach courses on gender leadership; integrate modules on equity into existing courses in all Haas degree programs, including executive education; and produce multimedia content and case studies of companies that are leaders in gender equity.

“We’re incredibly proud of Gap Foundation’s achievements over the past 40 years, and we’re honored to continue to champion the values instilled by Gap Inc. founders and equal partners, Don and Doris Fisher. Discrimination and disparity hampers us all–not only in the business community, but society as a whole–and these obstacles require diverse perspectives and voices in decision making,” said Art Peck, chairman of Gap Foundation and president and CEO of Gap Inc.

The CGEL leadership team also includes Prof. Laura Kray, who studies gender stereotyping and negotiations, and Prof. Laura Tyson, who served in the Clinton administration as chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers and has written extensively about gender equity and the need to address the worldwide economic disparity between men and women.

CGEL will have no shortage of timely issues to focus on, from pay equity to maternity leave to the continued low representation of women in leadership roles. Women hold only 20 percent of board seats in Fortune 500 companies.

“The majority of CEOs include gender equity among their Top 10 priorities, yet boardrooms and C-suites are not changing quickly enough,” said Haas Dean Rich Lyons. “While they have a commitment to diversity and inclusive work environments, too few have a handle on solutions. Our new Center will work toward immediate change in these areas and pave the way for future generations.”

The Center’s goals include bringing leaders from diverse political and corporate backgrounds together to discuss advancing gender equity and diversity in business and public policy; engaging male and female allies and uniting people of all ethnicities, races, and classes around a shared goal of gender equity and diversity; and developing leaders who understand that gender is a spectrum, not a binary construct.

The Center will also support and serve as a hub for deep research into these subjects from leading Haas faculty members.

McElhaney, who teaches a course called “The Business Case for Investing in Women,” conducted 2016 research with Genevieve Smith on the zero-percent pay gap between men and women at Gap Inc. Research by Prof. Clayton Critcher detailed the multiple negative consequences of concealing one’s sexual orientation at work; Kray’s recent work outlined how fixed beliefs about gender roles preserve the status quo; and research by Prof. Jennifer Chatman found that political correctness in the workplace encourages men and women to be more creative by reducing uncertainty in relationships.

Jamie Breen, assistant dean of the MBA program for working professionals at Haas and a CGEL founding advisory council member, said she is looking forward to gaining new insights from the Center’s work—such as a better understanding why the drop-off rate for women on the path to upper leadership tracks increases significantly at the VP to SVP level.

“We used to think that getting women into very senior leadership positions was a pipeline issue—if we got women into the pipeline, it would take care of itself,” she said. “We now know that is not the case. We have systemic issues, and we need to understand the unwritten rules and practices that drive these outcomes and, more importantly, how to make them explicit and change them.”

Knowledge Management Pioneer Ikujiro Nonaka to Receive Berkeley-Haas’ Lifetime Achievement Award

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY’S HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—Dr. Ikujiro Nonaka, one of the world’s top academic management scholars, will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, on November 3, 2017, during the school’s annual gala. Dr. Nonaka has been a pioneer in creating the field of knowledge management and studying the impact of knowledge creation on product development and innovation.

Ikujiro Nonaka

Berkeley-Haas Dean Rich Lyons applauded Nonaka’s lasting impact on the business world. “Nonaka has transformed how people drive innovation together,” said Lyons. “Applying a humanistic lens and practical wisdom to his research, he has developed new frameworks for how organizations can transcend simply managing data to using the knowledge within their organizations to create better outcomes. We are proud to call him an alumnus and even more honored to celebrate him with this much-deserved award.”

“No one has done more to shape knowledge management than Ikujiro Nonaka, and he is one of Berkeley’s most esteemed alumni in Asia,” said UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ.

“He has remained a loyal and passionate supporter of the University and the free exchange of ideas by hosting faculty and students in Japan as well as by arranging access to data and research contacts. He is a national treasure in Japan, but the impact of his insight and wisdom has been deeply felt at Berkeley and beyond.”

Nonaka, 82, a professor emeritus at the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy at Hitotsubashi University, worked for many years at Fuji Electric in Japan, where he created the company’s first management development program. He came to Berkeley in 1967, earning an MBA in 1968 and a PhD in business administration in 1972. At Berkeley, he also studied sociology, which heavily influenced his theories on business throughout his career.

“Dr. Jiro Nonaka has contributed enormously to the theory and practice of innovation management and has deepened our understanding of knowledge creation in large organizations,” said David Teece, the Thomas W. Tusher Professor in Global Business and faculty director of the Tusher Center for The Management of Intellectual Capital at Berkeley-Haas. “Dr. Nonaka is well known to leading executives in Asia, Europe, and North America. He has helped businesses learn and transform, just as he himself has learned and transformed over his long and successful career. The global recognition he has received is quite remarkable and is a wonderful tribute to his graduate education at Berkeley-Haas.”

Along with his longtime collaborator, Harvard Business School Professor Hirotaka Takeuchi, MBA 71, Ph.D. 77, whom he met at Berkeley-Haas, Nonaka argued that knowledge creation within companies is a source of competitive advantage. The two introduced the concept in an influential article, “The Knowledge-Creating Company,” published in Harvard Business Review in 1991. Their subsequent book, The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation (Oxford University Press, 1995), won the Association of American Publishers’ Best Book of the Year Award in business and management and has proved important in advancing the field of management.

In 2009, the Economist’s “Guide to Management Ideas and Gurus” credited Nonaka as one of three such “gurus” who “connected Japanese industry and management with that of the rest of the world.” In 2011, Nonaka and Takeuchi’s article, “The Wise Leader,” published in Harvard Business Review, argued that the best executives strive for the common good. In 2013, Nonaka won the Thinkers50 Lifetime Achievement Award and was inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame.

In Japan, Nonaka has earned a Purple Medal of Honor from the government for his contribution to academia and delivered an Imperial New Year’s Lecture by invite of the Emperor of Japan, the first-ever Japanese professor in the field of business administration and management to be asked to do so.

Nonaka is perhaps best known for his creation of the Socialization-Externalization-Combination-Internalization (SECI) model to explain how firms can best generate knowledge and understanding and bring new products to market. The model rejects the linear model of idea creation in favor of Nonaka’s SECI spiral, which describes a ceaseless flow of cyclical interaction between tacit and explicit knowledge among groups and individuals. The model can facilitate the development of innovative products.

Another of Nonaka’s contributions to the field of management was the recognition of the key role middle managers can play in knowledge creation within a company. During downsizing in the 1990s, when many U.S. firms were laying off middle managers to save costs, Nonaka argued they could be a vital bridge in translating the vision of upper management into execution by frontline staff.

In 1997, Nonaka became the Haas School’s first Xerox Distinguished Professor in Knowledge, the first professorship in the nation dedicated to the study of knowledge and its impact on business. He has remained a passionate champion of Berkeley, which he has called “the Athens of the Pacific” and has continued to support the school with visits, academic exchanges, and participation in co-hosting conferences.

The school’s highest honor, the Berkeley-Haas Lifetime Achievement Award is reserved for exceptional leaders who have made a significant impact through their professional accomplishments and who embody the Defining Principles of Berkeley-Haas: Question the Status Quo, Confidence Without Attitude, Students Always, and Beyond Yourself. The award has only been given four times before, to financier and philanthropist Warren Hellman; Blum Capital Partners Chairman Richard Blum; World Bank President Tom Clausen; and Levi Strauss CEO Peter Haas. Nonaka is the first academic professor to receive the award.

Berkeley-Haas’ Institute for Business Innovation and the Tusher Center for the Management of Intellectual Capital will follow up the November celebration by hosting a Festschrift in Nonaka’s name on campus in 2018.

The 22nd Annual Fisher Center Real Estate Conference to Examine the Future of California’s Real Estate Market Under A Trump Presidency

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY’S HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—The 22nd Annual Fisher Center Real Estate Conference, to be help May 8 in San Francisco, is a full-day conference for real estate and finance professionals to learn from and network with industry experts as they explore and examine the driving forces in the economy, particularly in California and the Bay Area.

The conference will focus on how the new White House administration’s policies may impact state and local real estate. How will President Trump’s policy changes affect the real estate market in California and the Bay Area? What is the future of real estate finance? Will uncertainty about healthcare insurance impact property values and investments for medical facilities?

The conference is sponsored by the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Full agenda.

WHEN

Monday, May 8, 2017, 8 am. to 5 p.m.

WHERE

Hotel Nikko San Francisco
222 Mason Street, San Francisco CA 94102 | Map

WHO

Keynote Speakers:
“State of the State” — John Chiang, State Treasurer, State of California
“Surveying and Anticipating Real Estate Markets” — Tim Sullivan, Managing Principal, Meyers Research
“Real Estate Outlook: The Impact of Regime Change” — Christopher Palmer, Assistant Professor, Berkeley-Haas

Opening remarks by Professor Robert Edelstein, Co-Chair, Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics

CONTACT

Liz Linton
Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics
UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business
[email protected] | (510) 643-6106

How After-Hours Trading Sheds Light on Investor Sentiment

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY’S HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—During the day, the stock market is a busy place but according to a new study, paying attention to overnight returns may help investors develop profitable trading strategies.

Omri Even Tov, an assistant professor of accounting at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, found that overnight market activity—between the time the market closes and re-opens the next day—provides a goldmine of information about investor sentiment at the firm level, or pertaining to specific stocks rather than the broader market.

Even Tov measured how much returns moved after the market closed and found that in the short term, up to 12 weeks, prices continued to trend in the same direction; what financiers called price “persistence.” The effect was even stronger for firms that are typically more difficult to value.

The findings likely reflect investor sentiment because private investors are more likely to place orders when the market is closed. Also, private investors tend to rely more on sentiment and less on underlying fundamentals (a firm’s intrinsic, not market, value) when making their trading decisions.

The study, “Overnight Returns and Firm-Specific Investor Sentiment,” forthcoming in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, is co-authored with David Aboody and Brett Trueman of the UCLA Anderson Graduate School of Management and Reuven Lehavy of the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.

“Previous sentiment measures proposed in the literature focus on market-wide sentiment,” says Even Tov. “In contrast, overnight returns allow us to capture what individual investors think and expect at the firm level.”

The researchers studied overnight returns in the U.S. stock market between July 1992 and December 2013. In addition to short-term persistence, they also studied how stocks performed overnight over the longer term, or 12 months. High overnight returns underperformed while those with low overnight returns outperformed. The 12-month return on a strategy of buying and selling stocks based on overnight returns yielded a premium of 7.4 percentage points.

“People want to know the extent to which prices are efficient. Our measure is useful for investors by giving them a new way to determine whether stocks are overpriced or underpriced, which can help them make better decisions,” says Even Tov.

 

Wikipedia Readers Get Shortchanged by Copyrighted Material

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY’S HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—When Google Books digitized 40 years worth of copyrighted and out-of-copyright issues of Baseball Digest magazine, Wikipedia editors realized they had scored. Suddenly they had access to pages and pages of player information from a new source. Yet not all information could be used equally: citations to out-of-copyright issues increased 135 percent more than issues still subject to copyright restrictions.

Those are the results of a new study, “Does Copyright Affect Reuse? Evidence from Google Books and Wikipedia,” conditionally accepted in Management Science. By studying how copyright laws restrict the free exchange of information, author Abhishek Nagaraj also found pages that could benefit from copyrighted information received 20 percent less traffic than pages that could benefit from out-of-copyright information. That presents a significant disadvantage to Wikipedia readers. Copyrighted images suffered even more lack of distribution or reuse because they cannot be paraphrased and repurposed like written information.

Perhaps more importantly, the study’s findings suggest how an Internet without copyrighted material may be better used to create new content, and not just allow people to consume what’s already out there.

“There is a big debate about what copyright restrictions do to the diffusion of knowledge. Some people say copyright laws have not caught up with the digital age,” says Nagaraj, an assistant professor of management at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

With just about everything available online now, Nagaraj chose to study Baseball Digest for several reasons. First, it is one of only a small number of publications that Google Books digitized in its entirety in 2008. Second, Baseball Digest ‘s copyright status changed over time; the copyright of issues published before 1964 was never renewed and therefore, all pre-1964 issues entered the public domain 28 years after their respective publication dates. At the same time, issues published in 1964 and after are not subject to renewal and remain under copyright, at least until 2020. These conditions gave Nagaraj the ability to study citation variation—under copyright and not under copyright—of the same publication. Third, Nagaraj contends that baseball’s popularity would make his experiment “economically meaningful.”

Nagaraj created two samples based on the digest’s publication years and on 541 players’ Wikipedia pages. The players were all nominated for the Baseball Hall of Fame and made their professional debuts between 1944 and 1984. By creating a “quality metric” for each player based on the number of times they played in an all-star game, Nagaraj ensured that each player in the sample had a significant baseball career. The result was a dataset that counts the number of citations to Baseball Digest on each player’s Wikipedia page as well as the number of images and word citations.

The data revealed three primary results: 1) There was no variation in using information from copyrighted and out-of-copyright sources before the Google Books digitization process; 2) After Baseball Digest was digitized, Wikipedia editors started using both non-copyrighted and copyrighted information but moreso of the former; and 3) The effects varied by the type of content. Text material was reused regardless of its copyright status. For example, factual information that Babe Ruth hit a homerun moved from the Digest to Wikipedia smoothly because it could be rewritten. However photos of players and teams were reused more rarely because they could not be reproduced with any variation unrestricted by copyright protection.

“Well-known players like Yogi Berra were less affected by this variation because there are enough alternative sources of information besides Baseball Digest,” explains Nagaraj. “But there are many players for whom we have limited information. People seeking information about these players are most hurt by copyright law.”

This deficiency in the transfer of knowledge impacts not only Internet users who are looking for information but also users seeking to create new content. Nagaraj hopes his work will provide evidence for re-evaluating the value of copyright laws.

“The loss from future copyright extensions is likely to be high. If we want to incentivize new creative work using historical information, we need to fix the system,” says Nagaraj.