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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY'S HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS –In its 43-year history, Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, Calif. has evolved as the purveyor of organic, local, and exquisitely prepared food known as California cuisine. Its menu recently featured "grilled Wolfe Ranch quail with chestnuts" and "Comté cheese soufflé with DeeAnn’s garden salad.” Chez Panisse has been buying its quail from the Wolfe Ranch in nearby Vacaville for more than 20 years. And DeeAnn Freitas is a local gardener who harvests her lettuce for Chez Panisse's fresh daily garden salads.  

Chez Panisse’s strategic use of branding its suppliers’ names on the menu is a prime example of the "open innovation” business model at work, according to a case study published in California Management Review.

The case, “Chez Panisse: Building an Open Innovation Ecosystem,” was co-authored by Dr. Sohyeong Kim, a post-doctoral student at Berkeley-Haas; Haas Prof. Henry Chesbrough, who coined the "open innovation" term; and Alice Agogino, professor of mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley.

The authors found that owner Alice Waters’ success was built upon a community of collaborators — employees, suppliers, customers, and even competitors — in which all participants benefit from sharing ideas and building relationships with external teams.

In 1971, Alice Waters set out to reform the way Americans eat at a time when fast food and packaged food convenience reigned. Waters wanted to create a place where people could eat simple, fresh food made with local ingredients.

Chez Panisse’s “open kitchen” model fostered a hearty exchange of ideas and brought chefs and diners together. Waters began communicating a shared vision of the local food ecosystem with suppliers and farmers. Waters talked about taste and quality rather than a crop’s size and price. As the buzz spread, suppliers began sending Chez Panisse whatever fresh ingredients they had.

The open innovation culture also grew from trust. In the case study, Kim and Chesbrough write, “Alice Waters has a management style that can only be described as ‘very Berkeley’, but that approach has meant the staff feels immense loyalty to the restaurant and to one another.” For example, former Chez Panisse busboy Steven Sullivan founded Acme Bread that became the restaurant’s bread supplier – 31 years and counting.

Competitors became collaborators. The open innovation ecosystem extended to involving culinary artists and food journalists, and listening to customer feedback.

In 1996, Chez Panisse’s ecosystem went global. Alumni chefs opened their own restaurants around the world. The Chez Panisse Foundation launched the Edible Schoolyard Project, which uses gardens and kitchens as interactive classrooms. Waters also forged new relationships with international culinary institutions and corporate partners to serve organic, seasonal foods in the workplace.

The case study concludes that Alice Waters’ open innovation strategies made her a cultural entrepreneur and created an “ever-growing global ecosystem” in the world of slow, sustainable food.

 

 

Media Contact:
Ute Frey
Deputy Director, Marketing & Communications
Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley
510-642-0342
[email protected]

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY'S HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business is constructing a new six-story academic building devoted entirely to student learning and interaction, Haas School Dean Rich Lyons announced today. The $60 million structure will be funded with private donations from alumni and friends of the school.

Construction of the building is expected to conclude in Fall 2016.

The nearly 80,000-square-foot North Academic Building will serve as a learning laboratory featuring state-of-the art technology and flexible spaces aimed at transforming the student experience. The building will contain many group study rooms, flexible classrooms, an indoor/outdoor café, a large event space with sweeping views of the San Francisco Bay, and no administrative offices. The building will be able to adapt to new forms of educational technology and learning.

"This new academic building will readily support and improve both on-campus and technology-enabled learning for our undergraduate and graduate students and enable the school to keep pace with rapid changes in the delivery of management education,” said Rich Lyons, dean of the Haas School. "The goal of the new facility is to create the best, most up to date learning experience for our students. It’s all about them.”

He added: “The building also creates a place that will enhance our ability to teach innovative leadership concepts to our students, by providing abundant space for them to collaborate with one another as they learn in teams, and rooms for them to engage in applied innovation learning activities. This is at the core of what differentiates the Berkeley-Haas education.”

Alumni have played a key role in making this building possible. Ned Spieker, BS 66, managing partner of the private real estate firm Spieker Partners, was the school’s lead partner for developing the vision for this building. The Lisa and Douglas Goldman Fund; Robert G. O’Donnell, BS 65 and MBA 66, retired senior VP and director of Capital Research and Management Company; and the late Barclay Simpson, BS 43, who founded and chaired Simpson Manufacturing Co.; among others, also have contributed significant gifts to the campaign.

The North Academic Building was designed by Perkins+Will. The global architecture firm is known for its innovative and award-winning designs including for clients in higher education. Vance Brown Builders, of Palo Alto, Calif., is the general contractor.

The North Academic Building will provide an additional 858 classroom seats through a variety of classroom sizes and styles. By removing tiered seating, the eight larger classrooms can easily convert to flat, flexible use rooms or new classroom designs in the future. Each classroom has the infrastructure to provide video streaming and capture as well as video teleconferencing.

The North Academic Building contains:

• 8 tiered lecture rooms
• 4 flat, flexible-use space for experiential learning
• 28 team-based study rooms
• an indoor/outdoor café
• lounge areas with configurable seating
• a 300-seat event space with sweeping views of campus and the San Francisco Bay

Leveraging its location in the San Francisco/Silicon Valley Bay Area, the Haas School has pioneered many programs and experiences tied to the entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystem of this area. The school’s mission is to develop innovative leaders who can bring fresh ideas to every corner and every function of their organizations, and who do so responsibly.

Because Berkeley-Haas is committed to environmental responsibility, the North Academic Building has been designed to achieve at least certified LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Gold status in recognition of its environmentally conscious design, construction, operation, and maintenance.

The North Academic Building will be the fourth building and an important addition to the existing three-building Haas campus, which includes the newly renovated Robert G. O'Donnell Courtyard and the new Berkeley-Haas Innovation Lab, located across the street at Cal Memorial Stadium.

Thanks to the opening of the current Haas buildings in 1995, the school’s reputation and external rankings have flourished, while enrollment has nearly doubled to more than 2,200 students in six degree programs: Undergraduate, Full-time MBA, Evening & Weekend MBA, Berkeley MBA for Executives, Master’s of Financial Engineering, and PhD in business administration.

More about the North Academic Building

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*The image must be accompanied with the following credit:
Image courtesy of Berkeley-Haas. Illustration: Jeff Stikeman.

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About Berkeley-Haas

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 — which includes the distinction of having two of its faculty members receive the Nobel Prize in Economics over the past 20 years.

The school offers outstanding management education to about 2,200 undergraduate and graduate students each year who come from around the world to study in one of its six degree-granting programs. The school has 40,000 alumni.

The school's mission is "to develop leaders who redefine how we do business." The school's distinctive culture is defined by four defining principles:

• Question the status quo
• Confidence without attitude
• Students always
• Beyond yourself

Being PC helps men and women become more creative colleagues

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY’S HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS –People may associate political correctness with conformity but new research finds it also correlates with creativity in work settings. Imposing a norm that sets clear expectations of how women and men should interact with each other into a work environment unexpectedly encourages creativity among mixed-sex work groups by reducing uncertainty in relationships.

The study highlights a paradoxical consequence of the political correctness (PC) norm. While PC behavior is generally thought to threaten the free expression of ideas, Professor Jennifer Chatman of the Haas School’s Management of Organizations Group and her co-authors found that positioning such PC norms as the office standard provides a layer of safety in the workplace that fosters creativity.

“Creativity is essential to organizational innovation and growth. But our research departs from the prevailing theory of group creativity by showing that creativity in mixed-sex groups emerges, not by removing behavioral constraints, but by imposing them. Setting a norm that both clarifies expectations for appropriate behavior and makes salient the social sanctions that result from using sexist language unleashes creative expression by countering the uncertainty that arises in mixed-sex work groups,” says Chatman.

“Creativity from constraint: How the PC Norm Influences Creativity in Mixed-Sex Work Groups,” forthcoming in Administrative Science Quarterly, is co-authored by Chatman and two Haas PhD graduates, Jack Goncalo, who now teaches at Cornell University, and Jessica Kennedy, now at Vanderbilt University, as well as Michelle Duguid of Washington University.

“Our contention is controversial because many have argued that imposing the PC norm might not just eliminate offensive behavior and language but will also cause people to filter out and withhold potentially valuable ideas and perspectives,” says Chatman, “We suggest that this critical view of the PC norm reflects a deeply rooted theoretical assumption that normative constraints inevitably stifle creative expression—an assumption we challenge.”

The authors designed their experiments taking into account the different incentives men and women have for adhering to the PC norm. Men said they were motivated to adhere to a PC norm because of concerns about not being overbearing and offending women. Whereas one might expect women to perceive a PC norm as emblematic of weakness or conformity, women in the experiment became more confident about expressing their ideas out loud when the PC norm was salient or prominent. In contrast, in work groups that were homogeneous – all men or all women – a salient PC norm had no impact on the group’s creativity compared to the control group.

Study participants were randomly divided into mixed sex groups and same sex groups. Next, researchers asked the groups to describe the value of PC behavior before being instructed to work together on a creative task. The control groups were not exposed to the PC norm before beginning their creative task. The task involved brainstorming ideas on a new business entity to be housed in a property left vacated by a mismanaged restaurant –by design, a project that has no right or wrong strategy.

Instead of stifling their ideas, mixed-sex groups exposed to the PC norm performed more creatively by generating a significantly higher number of divergent and novel ideas than the control group. As expected, same sex groups generated fewer creative outcomes. (Previous studies have found that homogenous groups are less creative because people in these groups are similar to one another with similar ideas and therefore, less divergent thinking occurs.)

See forthcoming paper.

 

 

 

2014 Moskowitz Prize Awarded to Study Supporting Corporate Social Responsibility’s Positive Impact on Shareholder Value

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY’S HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS – Berkeley-Haas’ Center for Responsible Business has awarded its 2014 Moskowitz Prize to the authors of a study suggesting good corporate governance correlates with higher CSR initiatives. And in turn, these increased CSR practices contribute to shareholder wealth.

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

The winning authors of the study, “Socially Responsible Firms,” Allen Ferrell, Harvard Law School, and Hao Liang and Luc Renneboog, both from Tilburg University, Netherlands, were awarded the Moskowitz Prize at the 25^th annual Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) Conference in Colorado Springs, Colo. on November 10.

The costs and benefits of corporate social responsibility (CSR) to shareholders continue to be debated. The paper’s findings –that higher CSR performance is closely related to how much firms retain in cash holdings and higher pay-for-performance returns –support the view that CSR increases shareholder value.

“We’ve known for some time that corporate investment in social responsibility can pay off,” says Lloyd Kurtz, faculty co-chair of the Moskowitz Prize selection committee, “But there have also been legitimate concerns that shareholder money might be diverted to vanity projects or other inappropriate uses in the name of CSR. This study really moves us forward in understanding how companies are investing in CSR, and how that relates to shareholder value creation.”

The authors sought to test two widely acknowledged views concerning CSR. The first view is that firms that practice CSR maximize shareholder wealth in addition to providing societal good. The second view, known as the agency view, argues that CSR can be detrimental by distracting managers from their core responsibilities.

In order to test the validity of both views, the researchers used two independent rating systems, the MSCI’s Intangible Value Assessment (IVA) and Vigeo’s ESG Ratings Database. The systems measure a corporation’s environmental and social risks and opportunities as well as CSR compliance to national and international guidelines, respectively.

While previous research focuses on shareholder reaction to ex post or the actual effects of CSR (such as abnormal stock returns, the cost of capital, and ownership changes), the winning paper considers the ex ante, or future implications, of managerial incentives. By examining the relationship between CSR and managerial pay-for-performance (when managers are given monetary incentives to improve CSR), the study found that CSR can counterbalance the negative effects of managerial entrenchment –when managerial interests outweigh that of their shareholders –and lead to higher shareholder value.

In short, CSR enhances a company’s value.

“This study looks at companies using established corporate governance metrics.  If the agency view (that a corporate’s only social responsibility is to make money) were correct, we would see companies with bad corporate governance having high corporate social responsibility. But we see the opposite,“ says Kurtz, “This is an association, not a specified causal effect, but it is strong evidence that the agency view is less appropriate than the value creation view that promotes societal good.”

The judges from both academic and investment circles reviewed 40 papers. Papers are judged on the practical significance to practitioners of socially responsible investing; appropriateness and rigor of quantitative methods; and, novelty of results.

The 2014 Moskowitz committee also recognized two outstanding papers with Honorable Mentions:

“Employee Satisfaction, Labor Market Flexibility, and Stock Returns Around The World” by Alex Edmans, University of Pennsylvania, The Wharton School, and Lucius Li and Chendi Zhang, Warwick Business School.

“Corporate Social Responsibility and Stock Price Crash Risk” by Yongtae Kim, Haidan Li, and Siqi Li, Santa Clara University, Leavey School of Business.

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.” Sponsors for the Prize include Calvert Group, First Affirmative Financial Network, Nelson Capital Management, Neuberger Berman, Rockefeller and Co., and Trillium Asset Management.

The Center for Responsible Business is an “action tank” that builds on the Haas School of Business’ culture of innovation and UC Berkeley’s tradition to run–not–walk towards social progress. Building on a decade of research, teaching and industry engagement, the Center for Responsible Business brings together students, company leaders, and forward-thinking faculty to redefine business for a sustainable future and resides within the Berkeley-Haas’ Institute for Business and Social Impact.

See summary of the winning study.

See the full paper.

Contact:
Pamela Tom | Berkeley-Haas Media Relations | (510)642-2734 | [email protected]
Lloyd Kurtz |(650) 307-5753 | [email protected]
Robert Strand | (510) 643-0341 | rstrand@ berkeley.edu

NIH and NSF collaborate to accelerate biomedical research innovations into the marketplace

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY’S HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS –The Innovation Corps (I-Corps) @ National Institutes of Health (NIH) program to help commercialize life science innovations, a process known as translational medicine, launched Oct. 6 in Bethesda, Md. in association with UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

The goal of the program is to bring innovations such as improved imaging for cancer surgery or drugs with fewer side effects to market “with lightening speed, ” says Steve Blank, Berkeley-Haas lecturer and National Science Foundation (NSF) principal investigator, who developed the I-Corps curriculum and is teaching the pilot program using methods taught in his Lean LaunchPad course.

I-Corps @ NIH is a branch of the NSF I-Corps that teaches scientists the same Lean Startup techniques that have revolutionized how thousands of startups worldwide are now being built. The Lean LaunchPad method discards traditional business plans for Lean Startup techniques such as customer development, agile development, and the use of the “business model canvas” to track how a startup tests its hypotheses.

This first I-Corps @NIH cohort includes life science and healthcare teams focused on therapeutics, diagnostics and medical devices. Each team is a funded company that has received an NIH SBIR Phase 1 grant.

The 21 NIH teams are learning how to:

• Define clinical utility before spending millions of dollars

• Understand core customers and the sales and marketing process required for initial clinical sales and downstream commercialization

• Assess intellectual property and regulatory risk before they design and build

• Gather data essential to customer partnerships/collaboration before doing the science

• Identify financial vehicles before they need them

UC Berkeley is part of the NSF I-Corps Bay Area Regional node along with UCSF and Stanford University. The Bay Area node, one of seven I-Corps nodes, trained 93 startup teams last year.

“We’ve combined the cutting edge of what we’ve learned about entrepreneurship with the best of National Research Labs. Hold on to your hats because we’re all in for one heck of a ride in a wave of new science startups,” says Andre Marquis, executive director of the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship at Haas and a member of the I-Corps @NIH teaching team. Also teaching the course is Jerry Engel, Berkeley-Haas emeritus adjunct professor and former Lester Center executive director.

According to Blank, I-Corps has become the U.S. standard for commercializing science, training 400 teams of this country’s foremost scientists from the NSF, Department of Energy, and Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. The approach prompts scientists to get out of their labs and speak to potential customers. Nationwide, participating scientists have spoken to over 40,000 customers to test over 15,000 business hypotheses.

“The future of translational medicine at the NIH is Lean – it’s fast, it works and it’s unlike anything else ever done,” says Blank. “In the end we’re going to create new companies that bring life-saving drugs, devices and diagnostics to clinicians and patients faster and cheaper.”

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Haas Media Relations:

Ute Frey | [email protected] | +1.510.642.0342

Berkeley-Haas–Leaving one’s job to become an entrepreneur is inarguably risky. But it may not be the fear of risk that makes entrepreneurs more determined to succeed. A new study finds entrepreneurs are also concerned about what they might lose in the transition from steady employment to startup.

In Entrepreneurship and Loss-Aversion in a Winner-Take-All Society, Professor John Morgan at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and co-author Dana Sisak, assistant professor at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, focused on the powerful impact of loss aversion.

Loss aversion, or the fear of losing one’s salary at a full-time job, along with its prestige, is directly linked to the amount of effort an entrepreneur puts into a startup. Loss aversion, the researchers found, is what drives most entrepreneurs, not a love of risk.

“There is a view that entrepreneurs are often overconfident gamblers, who thrive on risk, yet there is little evidence to support this view,” says Morgan, who studies competition in online markets at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. “Entrepreneurs aren’t Steve Jobs. They’re just ordinary people who want to start a business. I wanted to try to understand a little better what motivated those individuals.”

Many studies focus on what makes a successful entrepreneur different than the rest of us. Morgan sought to learn what motivates individuals to sacrifice a secure job, and what determines an entrepreneur’s effort to succeed.

The study is based on a theoretical model the researchers developed and was inspired by the dramatic stories people like to tell about risk-taking entrepreneurs.

All entrepreneurs have a “reference point,” which defines how they feel about their salary or, say, happiness level, compared to others, Morgan says. That reference point is not connected to profits and losses, but is directly linked to how much or little the entrepreneurs are willing to lose when starting a company.

Morgan and Sisak found an entrepreneur’s level of ongoing concern about loss aversion correlates with entrepreneurial effort. In other words, entrepreneurs who put a high stake on avoiding loss – more so than acquiring new gains – worked harder.

Morgan used a winner-take-all framework, which is common within the Internet startup environment, for his study of entrepreneurs. Startups such as Facebook or Twitter might not offer the best platforms, but still dominate their markets. In markets such as real estate, where there is no clear single winner, this model would be less appropriate, Morgan says. “For every Facebook, there were hundreds of failed ventures,” he says. “We model this aspect of entrepreneurial markets explicitly.” This research can help entrepreneurs gain self-knowledge so they make better decisions and have a clear understanding of “why they’re doing what they’re doing,” Morgan says.

“One of the most important traps entrepreneurs fall into is when they’re not experiencing success and they become increasingly willing to take risks because of where they are psychologically,” he says. “One lesson from the research is to be careful when you are behind. It’s not necessarily the best decision to double down.”

In other words, risk aversion can be a good thing.

Morgan recently presented the paper at the Summer Institute in Competitive Strategy, presented by the Haas Marketing Group and sponsored by the Institute for Business Innovation.

See the paper here: http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/rjmorgan/LossAversion.pdf

Haas Media Relations:
Ute Frey | [email protected] | +1.510.642.0342

The winning paper, “Earnings Transparency and Cost of Capital,” recently published in the Journal of Accounting and Economics, was coauthored with Mary E. Barth (Stanford) and Wayne R. Landsman (University of North Carolina). The trio received the Best Paper Award on August 4, 2014, at the American Accounting Association’s Annual Meeting, Financial Accounting and Reporting Section, held in Atlanta, GA.

The annual award honors the paper that best reflects the tradition of academic scholarship in financial accounting and explores research that is relevant to problems facing the accounting profession and standard-setters.

The paper makes a case for more transparent accounting information from Corporate America by providing evidence that corporations with more transparent earnings enjoy higher stock valuations through a reduction in their cost of capital. A firm’s valuation is often determined by discounting future cash flows by the firm’s cost of capital, Konchitchki explains. The study finds that the cost of capital is negatively related to transparency. In other words, when there is less earnings transparency, the risk to investors is higher, resulting in higher cost of capital. Likewise, if there is more earnings transparency, one has access to more information about a company’s value by observing its earnings, resulting in lower risk and, in turn, lower cost of capital. Ultimately, lower cost of capital equates to higher firm value.

The research has the potential to change how capital market participants consider the quality of accounting data from corporate financial statements because the findings illuminate the importance of transparent corporate accounting for stock valuation, Konchitchki says.

Konchitchki, who joined the Berkeley-Haas faculty in 2011, is the Schwabacher Fellow, Hellman Fellow, and Bakar Faculty Fellow for Distinguished Excellence in Research. Konchitchki specializes in interdisciplinary capital markets research, focusing on the usefulness of accounting information through its links to macroeconomics (e.g., inflation; GDP) and valuation (e.g., financial statement analysis; cost of capital; asset pricing). His research has helped develop a relatively new interdisciplinary area of Macro-Accounting by serving as a starting point for a new line of work on the informational role of the links between financial reporting, valuation, and the macroeconomy. He provides a comprehensive analysis of both macro-accounting “directions”: macro-to-micro (e.g., how overall price-level changes in the economy inform accounting results of individual corporations), and micro-to-macro (e.g., how accounting results of individual corporations inform overall macroeconomic activity).

Konchitchki teaches the core MBA Financial Accounting class and the PhD Financial Accounting Research class. He was recently selected by Poets & Quants as one of the “World’s Top 40 Under 40” business school professors and by his MBA students as the winner of the Haas School’s Earl F. Cheit Award for Excellence in Teaching. For three straight years he won membership in Club Six for teaching excellence.

Read the AAA press release

Read more about the award winning paper

Read more about Yaniv Konchitchki

Contact: Ute Frey | [email protected] | 510.642.0342

Earl F. Cheit, former executive vice chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, and dean and professor emeritus at the Haas School of Business, died of cancer at his home in Kensington, Calif., on Saturday, Aug. 2. He was 87.

Cheit, or “Budd,” as he was known by friends and colleagues, joined the business school in 1957 and stayed until retiring in 1991. While there, he served as dean twice (1976-82 and 1990-91) and presided over the school’s growth and modernization. He was a pioneer in the study and teaching of the impact of business on society.

Cheit held key roles at UC Berkeley, including as executive vice chancellor (1965-69), athletic director (1993-94) and trustee of the University of California Berkeley Foundation. He also served as vice president of financial and business management for the University of California system from 1981-82.

Cheit was born in Minneapolis in 1926 as the son of Russian immigrants and grew up in Hague, N.D. He was the first in his family to attend college and became a staunch advocate for higher education.

His academic writing included ground-breaking studies on the economic impact of and compensation for occupational injuries and social insurance. He wrote in the 1970s about the affordability concerns facing universities. He also noted the need to draw more women to management education and careers.

“The impact of Budd's contributions extends well beyond our school and campus. He sowed many seeds of our school's Institute for Business and Society, which helps for-profit and non-profit enterprises magnify their impact on society,” said Rich Lyons, dean of Berkeley-Haas.

“Budd influenced management education more broadly through his research and teaching on the role of business in society and the potential for markets to create a better world,” Lyons added. “We are deeply in his debt and will miss him dearly as a colleague and friend.”

A man of wide interests, Cheit began an association with Cal Performances and Zellerbach Hall during the hall’s construction in the 1960s. During this time, he created and chaired a board that developed a budget for the new facility. In 1996, he was elected founding chair of the Cal Performances Board of Trustees and remained an active member until his death.

Cal Performances Director Matías Tarnopolsky said that Cheit “had an incredible capacity to bring together the visionary and the practical, with his unabashed advocacy for quality and for the essential importance of the performing arts. His voice at Cal Performances’ board and committee meetings often would be the last heard, and importantly so – summing up the issues in an artistic, historical and economic context which simply made sense, and showed us all a clear path to the future. “

In 2010, Cheit received the Award of Distinction in the Performing Arts from the Cal Performances Board of Trustees.

Cheit attended the University of Minnesota, where he earned his undergraduate Bachelor of Science in Law degree, a J.D. degree from the law school and a Ph.D. in economics. His thesis, “Incentive Effects of Workmen’s Compensation,” disproved a commonly held belief that higher compensation for workers injured on the job would result in “malingering” – employees remaining on worker’s compensation longer than necessary.

After practicing law and labor arbitration, in addition to teaching at the University of Minnesota, Cheit accepted an academic post with the Department of Economics at Saint Louis University.

In 1957, Cheit came to UC Berkeley’s Institute of Industrial Relations to head a three-year research project on occupational disability that was funded by the Ford Foundation. This research was captured in his seminal book “Injury and Recovery in the Course of Employment.”

Cheit’s work at the institute also led him to organize in 1964 one of the first multi-disciplinary academic conferences in the nation on business and society. It resulted in the book “The Business Establishment,” which Cheit edited.

After becoming a tenured professor at UC Berkeley, Cheit helped develop courses in the emerging area of the social and political environment of business. A recipient of the campus’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 1989, he also taught industrial relations, labor law and labor economics classes.

In 1964 at UC Berkeley, during the Free Speech Movement, Cheit was elected to the Emergency Executive Committee of the Academic Senate. The following year, he was appointed executive vice chancellor of the campus. In 1965, he also chaired the Wage Board of the California Industrial Welfare Commission.

While on sabbatical with the Carnegie Commission, Cheit studied the financial situation of 41 U.S. colleges, leading to his book “The New Depression in Higher Education” (1971), which made national headlines and resulted in a two-year follow-up study. He served from 1972–73 as the Ford Foundation’s program officer in charge of higher education.

In 1976, Cheit was named dean of UC Berkeley’s business school during a time of state funding cuts and campus enrollment cutbacks. To transition the school from an academic department to a professional school, he sought to increase the autonomy and standing of the school and to forge closer relationships with the business community, according to a book on the history of Berkeley-Haas written by Sandra Epstein that is due out early next year.

Cheit took first steps toward securing a new home for the business school, which was named for Walter A. Haas Sr., a 1910 graduate of the school and former president and chair of Levi Strauss & Co. In Cheit’s honor, the school named its teaching award the Earl F. Cheit Award for Excellence in Teaching and one of the building’s classroom wings Earl F. Cheit Hall.

Cheit was a family man and avid hiker who also loved the arts, music and sports. In addition to his roles over the years at the university, he served as a program manager for higher education and research at the Ford Foundation and was a Mills College trustee, chairman of Shaklee Corp., director of CNF Transportation Inc., director of Simpson Manufacturing Co. Inc., associate director of the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education and senior advisor for Asia-Pacific relations for The Asia Foundation.

He is survived by his wife of 63 years, June (Andrews) Cheit; four children, Danielle (Wendy) Cheit of Kensington, Calif., David Cheit of Davis, Calif., Ross Cheit of North Kingston, R.I., and Julie Ross of New York, N.Y.; and three grandchildren.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to the Haas School of Business or to Cal Performances at UC Berkeley. A celebration of Cheit’s life will take place on campus this fall. Details will be announced later.

Cheit’s life and work also is captured in an oral history conducted by the Regional Oral History Office at UC Berkeley and available at the Bancroft Library.

By Kathleen Maclay, UC Berkeley Media Relations

 

BERKELEY — Measuring the nation’s economic health has long been a slow, costly and imprecise exercise, but researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have helped develop a new way to measure real-time consumer behavior that could vastly improve economic policymaking.

The findings by Sachar Kariv, a professor of economics and chair of the UC Berkeley Economics Department, along with co-author Steve Tadelis, an associate professor of business and public policy at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, and researchers from the University of Michigan and Arizona State University appear in today’s issue of the journal Science.

Traditionally, the researchers said, economic analysts have been forced to rely on large-scale surveys such as the Consumer Expenditure Survey or the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. But such surveys are complex and expensive to implement, so they are conducted infrequently and with modest-sized samples, with results released after substantial time lags.

Because it is now possible to obtain fast, accurate, reliable, detailed, real-time and comprehensive information about daily personal financial spending and saving actions, government agencies and research organizations can capture rapidly-changing economic information generated by households and businesses and adjust course if necessary, the researchers said.

“The data generated by online and mobile financial applications such as Check, as well as data from social media, online marketplaces and e-commerce sites can be analyzed to address questions that policymakers, firms and individuals must answer to make better decisions,” said Tadelis.

Together, the research team examined the transactions over 10 months of about 75,000 users of the free mobile payments app, Check, who were randomly selected from a pool of 1.5 million U.S.-based users with at least one financial account – such as a credit card, bank account, insurance policy, utility bill, mortgage, pension or investment account – that the app can access regularly.

The sample recorded more than 61 million transactions, with individuals using an average of about six different accounts, and spending with credit cards about half as often as with checking accounts. The researchers, working with Check, developed a data infrastructure to estimate with precision individual spending in relation to anticipated income.

Findings of the paper, “Harnessing Naturally-Occurring Data to Measure the Response of Spending to Income,” effectively test a major economic theory called the Permanent Income Hypothesis (PIH), which maintains that the timing of anticipated personal income doesn’t relate to spending.

The study showed that on average, an individual’s total spending actually rises substantially above their average daily spending the day a paycheck or Social Security check arrives, and stays high for at least another four days. But that pattern occurs primarily with those constrained in their ability to borrow, or by the interest rates they have to pay.

Armed with this information and new ways to collect amounts of personal financial data, the research team concluded that leaders considering how and when to stimulate the economy can do a better job choosing policies that match more exactly how individuals will respond.

“Policy prescription … depends on precise estimates,” the researchers write in Science. “The value of tax rebates aimed at stimulating the economy, for example, depends critically on whether the spending rate is 20 percent, versus 50 percent, among what categories of expenditure, and over what time horizon.”

Emmanuel Saez, a UC Berkeley economist and head of the Center for Equitable Growth at UC Berkeley, called the study “pathbreaking” for its use of a dataset with real time and detailed information on incoming and spending.

“This is a great example,” he said, “of how new technologies are generating new big data that can also have incredible value for scientific research. UC Berkeley is ahead of the curve on big data, having recently launched the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, which will cut across many disciplines, including economics.”

The Check data is collected on accounts daily and organized intuitively so users can get a comprehensive view of their financial situation via computer, smartphone or tablet. The study sample covered a wide range of ages, geography and incomes.

 

California’s landmark cap-and-trade system for regulating greenhouse gases could be vulnerable to price spikes and market manipulation, according to a study released today by scholars affiliated with the Energy Institute at Haas. But the state’s air-quality regulators can prevent that outcome with three straightforward reforms, the study says.

Specifically, the California Air Resources Board should consider (1) strengthening the new market’s price collar—the so-called allowance price containment reserve—(2) allowing permits to be converted from one compliance period to another and (3) providing more public information on emissions and emissions-allowance holdings. 

“With a couple of straightforward adjustments, California’s course for addressing climate change with a market mechanism would be a model for other states and countries,” says Prof. Severin Borenstein, the study's principal investigator and research associate, Energy Institute at Haas, UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

In addition to Prof. Borenstein, the study’s authors are Prof. James Bushnell at UC Davis, Prof. Frank A. Wolak at Stanford University and Matthew Zaragoza-Watkins, a doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley. Profs. Borenstein, Bushnell and Wolak are members of the Market Simulation Group that advised the Air Resources Board.

There is a small, but significant, risk that manipulation could occur if large emitting entities were to buy and hoard excess permits in hopes of inflating the price and then selling, the new report says. 

To minimize risks price spikes and manipulation, the Air Resources Board must ensure that it has a large enough reserve of permits for release whenever the price hits the ceiling, the report says. It should also allow emitters to pay a fee to be able to transfer permits intended for use in later compliance periods to earlier ones. 

These measures would add up to “an unambiguous policy that credibly limits the maximum allowance price,” the report says. Such a policy “is important to market stability and a strong deterrent to attempts at market manipulation.” 

The Energy Institute at Haas, a part of UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, unites research and curricular programs on energy business, policy, and technology commercialization. It aims to bridge the gap between the frontiers of economic and scientific energy research and the marketplace.

California’s landmark cap-and-trade system for regulating greenhouse gases could be vulnerable to price spikes and market manipulation, according to a study released today by scholars affiliated with the Energy Institute at Haas. But the state’s air-quality regulators can prevent that outcome with three straightforward reforms, the study says.

Specifically, the California Air Resources Board should consider (1) strengthening the new market’s price collar—the so-called allowance price containment reserve—(2) allowing permits to be converted from one compliance period to another and (3) providing more public information on emissions and emissions-allowance holdings. 

“With a couple of straightforward adjustments, California’s course for addressing climate change with a market mechanism would be a model for other states and countries,” says Prof. Severin Borenstein, the study's principal investigator and research associate, Energy Institute at Haas, UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

In addition to Prof. Borenstein, the study’s authors are Prof. James Bushnell at UC Davis, Prof. Frank A. Wolak at Stanford University and Matthew Zaragoza-Watkins, a doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley. Profs. Borenstein, Bushnell and Wolak are members of the Market Simulation Group that advised the Air Resources Board.

There is a small, but significant, risk that manipulation could occur if large emitting entities were to buy and hoard excess permits in hopes of inflating the price and then selling, the new report says. 

To minimize risks price spikes and manipulation, the Air Resources Board must ensure that it has a large enough reserve of permits for release whenever the price hits the ceiling, the report says. It should also allow emitters to pay a fee to be able to transfer permits intended for use in later compliance periods to earlier ones. 

These measures would add up to “an unambiguous policy that credibly limits the maximum allowance price,” the report says. Such a policy “is important to market stability and a strong deterrent to attempts at market manipulation.” 

The Energy Institute at Haas, a part of UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, unites research and curricular programs on energy business, policy, and technology commercialization. It aims to bridge the gap between the frontiers of economic and scientific energy research and the marketplace.

 

Contact:

Lauren Russell
Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA)
[email protected]
(442) 299-0480

Kathleen Maclay
UC Berkeley Office of Public Affairs
[email protected]
(510) 643-5651

Pamela Tom
Haas School of Business
[email protected]
(510) 642-2734

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY'S HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS — In the Friday (May 30) edition of the journal Science, researchers find that early childhood development programs are particularly important for disadvantaged children in Jamaica and can greatly impact an individual’s ability to earn more money as an adult.

The 20-year study, “Labor Market Returns to an Early Childhood Stimulation Intervention in Jamaica” by University of California, Berkeley, professor Paul Gertler, an economist at the Haas School of Business and the School of Public Health, and Nobel Prize winner James Heckman of the University of Chicago, tracks the employment status of adults who once lived in the poor Kingston neighborhood as toddlers in the 1980’s. Those exposed to high-quality psychosocial stimulation have positive earnings and better economic status today.

In the program, designed by Sally Grantham-McGregor of University College London and Susan Walker of the University of West Indies, community health workers made weekly home visits and taught mothers how to play and interact with their children in ways that promote cognitive and emotional development. For example, mothers were encouraged to talk with their children, to label things and actions, and to play educational games with their children, emphasizing language development and the use of praise to improve the self-esteem of mothers and children.

Mirroring the mission of the Head Start program in the United States, this simple intervention focused on reducing developmental delays faced by children in poverty.

Twenty years later, the researchers interviewed 105 of the study’s original 127 child participants who were now adults. They found that children randomized to participate in the program were earning 25 percent more than those in the control group, enough of an increase to match the earnings of a non-disadvantaged population. The intervention compensated for the economic consequences of early developmental delays and reduced later-life inequality.

“To our knowledge, this is the first long-term, experimental evaluation of an early childhood development program in a developing country,” said Gertler, who also works with the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA), a UC Berkeley-based research network designing anti-poverty programs for low- and middle-income countries.

This study adds to the body of evidence, including Head Start and the Perry Preschool programs carried out from 1962-1967 in the U.S., demonstrating long-term economic gains from investments in early childhood development.

"Head Start programs are critical to breaking the cycle of poverty,” said U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), a member of the Labor and Education Appropriates Committee. “By investing in the academic and developmental needs of young children, we are preparing them to thrive in the economy of the future."

Results from the Jamaica study show substantially greater effects on earnings than similar programs in wealthier countries. Gertler said this suggests that early childhood interventions can create a substantial impact on a child’s future economic success in poor countries.

“We now have tangible proof of the potential benefits of early childhood stimulation and the importance of parenting in a developing country. At a time when inequality around the globe is increasing, it is encouraging to see how much good can be accomplished with early intervention,” Gertler said.

CEGA designs and tests solutions for the problems of poverty, and draws on a network of faculty researchers at UC, Stanford University and the University of Washington who combine randomized trials, behavioral experiments, data analytics, and novel measurement technologies with expertise in international agriculture, health, education, engineering and the environment.

RELATED INFORMATION

·         Paul Gertler’s profile with CEGA can be found at http://cega.berkeley.edu/faculty/paul-gertler/.

·         For copies of the study or for photos, please call (442) 229-0480.

 

Haas Media Relations:
Ute Frey | [email protected] | +1.510.642.0342

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY’S HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS – UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business is providing an executive-level program that presents a Silicon Valley perspective on business, innovation, and leadership topics to top Chinese leaders. The program is taught by Berkeley-Haas faculty starting today, May 6, 2014.

This Partnership for CELAP and Berkeley-Haas is a three-year pilot program between UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and the China Executive Leadership Academy Pudong (CELAP) in Shanghai, according to a memorandum of understanding signed by Berkeley-Haas Dean Rich Lyons and Professor Feng Jun, executive vice president of CELAP. CELAP is one of three preeminent Chinese government leadership academies and provides international, contemporary leadership development for China’s senior officials.

"We are creating a powerful educational partnership by bringing together the #1 public research university in the US with China's premier leadership academy for developing high-level public officials," said Rich Lyons, dean of Berkeley-Haas. "Our partnership is further strengthened by the culture we share, one that emphasizes innovative leadership and a commitment to long-term, positive impact on our societies."

Four times a year, a member of the Berkeley-Haas faculty will travel to Shanghai to teach an intensive, course focusing on current issues in business, innovation, and public policy.

As part of the first course Professor Andrew K. Rose, Haas Associate Dean for Faculty, is presenting on the impact of European and US monetary policy on the Chinese economy for Chinese ministers and district governors from May 6 to May 7. Dean Rich Lyons is scheduled to present the next course on innovative leadership in September.

Haas board member Mr. Wu Hsioh Kwang, executive chairman and director of Straco Corporation Limited Singapore, was a key driver and architect of the partnership, conceptualizing the program and engaging CELAP senior management to help bring this partnership to fruition.

Professor Teck Ho, chair of the Haas Marketing Group and faculty director of the Haas School’s Asia Business Center, coordinates the curriculum. The collaborative nature of the partnership means the sessions are designed based on input from CELAP senior management and participants.

“The partnership is a win-win situation,” says Ho, “We are excited to have the opportunity to work with China’s leading academy for training the country’s senior government officials.”

The partnership will also help Berkeley-Haas explore future opportunities for providing internships, scholarships, international education programs, and study trek trips for its students to participate in CELAP programs.

Partnership for CELAP and Berkeley-Haas is made possible by Mr. Wu Hsioh Kwang and the Wu Hsioh Kwang Family Foundation.
 

About the China Executive Leadership Academy Pudong (CELAP)

CELAP is a Shanghai-based national institution funded by the central government of the People’s Republic of China. By the synergy of “Value Education, Capacity Building, and Behavior Orientation”, CELAP strives to be an international, contemporary and innovative leadership academy at the cutting-edge of leadership training to foster and sustain strong, ethical and effective leadership for coordinated development of economy and society, mutual understanding of different cultures, and promotion of global peace and prosperity. Its training focuses on social improvement and economic development for high level leaders from government and top executives from the business community.

About the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley

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 — which includes the distinction of having two of its faculty members receive the Nobel Prize in Economics over the past 20 years. The school offers outstanding management education to about 2,200 undergraduate and graduate students each year who come from around the world to study in one of its six degree-granting programs. The school has 36,000 alumni.

The school's mission is "to develop leaders who redefine how we do business." The school's distinctive culture is defined by four defining principles:

• Question the Status Quo
• Confidence Without Attitude
• Students Always
• Beyond Yourself

 

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Haas Media Relations:
Pamela Tom | [email protected] | 510.642.2734

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY’S HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS – According to Elance.com, the online workplace lists more than three million registered freelancers worldwide, and each month it posts 100,000+ freelance jobs ranging from computer programming and web design to finance and engineering. As an increasing number of freelancers depend on the virtual workplace, how can they make themselves more attractive to potential employers?  

New research suggests freelancers who demonstrate work commitment through an incremental career path, by moving between similar — but not identical — types of jobs, are the most likely to be hired. The findings also conclude that competitors who work on only one type of job or on too many disparate types of jobs are disadvantaged when it comes to winning assignments.

The study, “Dilettante or Renaissance Person? How the Order of Job Experiences Affects Hiring in an External Labor Market” by Ming D. Leung, assistant professor, UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business,  appears in the February issue of the American Sociological Review.

“Previous findings would suggest that freelancers should specialize in a particular type of work so prospective employers know what they're good at,” says Leung, “But I was curious about how freelancers can demonstrate their skills and commitment in an online world to acquire more jobs. My research suggests that employers on Elance.com appear to value freelancers who demonstrate their commitment by making incremental moves between jobs.”

Leung observes that nuances in the online workplace will continue to affect hiring trends in the future.  For workers, direct competition with other freelancers searching for online work presents new challenges.  And in the virtual workplace, Leung says employers are often concerned with how engaged and committed a virtual, non-local worker will be despite the availability of information, such as a freelancer’s job history and ratings/feedback from prior employers.

To understand how employers navigate the uncertainty of not meeting a potential hire in person, Leung analyzed millions of job applications and more than 100,000 worker profiles around the world from a 2007 Elance.com data set. Leung began by calculating how similar jobs on Elance were to one another. He then looked at the jobs each freelancer completed and found that those who exhibited some movement in their past history — by taking jobs that were similar to one another but not the same — were more likely to get hired through the website than those freelancers who accumulated experiences from dissimilar jobs or from jobs that were identical.

An adviser to Elance.com, Leung says the rise in contract and temporary employment is leading employers to increasingly embrace such a virtual workforce for specific skills and flexible employment arrangements. He also notes that in contrast to past characterizations of contract employees being low skilled and low paid, today’s freelancers are performing highly skilled tasks.

This study suggests virtual labor markets will continue to change employment and career opportunities. By better understanding the market’s dynamics, Leung says, freelancers will be more prepared to demonstrate their credibility and competence to employers.

About the American Sociological Association and the American Sociological Review
The American Sociological Association (www.asanet.org), founded in 1905, is a non-profit membership association dedicated to serving sociologists in their work, advancing sociology as a science and profession, and promoting the contributions to and use of sociology by society. The American Sociological Review is the ASA’s flagship journal.

See abstract.
The full paper is available by request for members of the media.

 

 

Haas Media Relations:
Pamela Tom | [email protected] | 510.642.2734

Watch Prof. Tadelis talk about his research.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY'S HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS –Businesses spend billions to reach customers through online advertising but just how effective are paid search ads? Using data from eBay, economist Steven Tadelis at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business compared whether consumers are more likely to click on paid ads than on free, generic search results and found that advertisers may not be getting their money’s worth.

 “We found that when you turn off the paid advertising, almost all of the traffic that came through the paid search is just substituted by the other free channels,” says Tadelis, associate professor in the Haas Business and Public Policy Group.

Tadelis conducted the study, “Consumer Heterogeneity and Paid Search Effectiveness: A Large Scale Field Experiment,” at eBay. The study was co-authored by Thomas Blake, an economist in the economics research team that Tadelis started at eBay, and former eBay economist Chris Nosko of the University of Chicago.

To measure the effectiveness of paid search, the researchers turned off eBay’s paid search in 68 direct marketing areas in the U.S. In other words, if a consumer typed in the search term “white blouse” while online in these markets, he or she would only see the generic search results at the top of the list; not the paid ad that typically appears in a shaded box at the top of the search. She would not see any retail ads by eBay for “white blouse” but only from other advertisers who bid on the “white blouse” keywords.  

At the end of 60 days, Tadelis and his colleagues compared sales of two groups: one group that received no paid search results and another group in which paid search remained untouched. Again, consumer sales as a result of the paid search showed no measurable increase off those who made purchases via unpaid channels (such as organic searches, or directly visiting ebay.com).

In order to ensure the robustness of their results, in a second experiment, the researchers also eliminated eBay’s paid keyword searches throughout the country and then compared sales for that period to an equivalent period with paid search on.

“If advertising is indeed a strong driver of sales, we should have seen sales plummet," says Tadelis. "But the impact on sales was indistinguishable and not significantly different than zero.” 

Furthermore, for “brand” keywords such as “eBay” or other company name keywords, paid ads sit just above the generic search results. For example, a search for “Macy’s” results in a Macy’s free search below the Macys paid ad.  Consequently, Tadelis says the paid search result adds no additional benefit to the advertiser. “It’s not that clicking on the result caused engagement, it’s that the intent to engage caused people to click on it,” says Tadelis.

On any given day advertisers, including eBay, bid on millions of keywords. Tadelis hopes their work will encourage other e-commerce businesses to conduct this type of microeconomic research to better measure the impact of paid search traffic on the web.

See full paper.

 

Contact:
Pamela Tom | [email protected] | 510.642.2734

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY’S HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS –Berkeley-Haas Dean Rich Lyons today announced the launch of the Berkeley-Haas Case Series, which extracts lessons for success from unconventional management strategies and disruptive trends.

Insights into Netflix’s pricing strategies, a startup’s search for the right market for its new technology, and Genentech’s use of culture to drive business are just a few of the 20 Berkeley-Haas cases that debuted on the Harvard Business School Publishing website. The Haas School will add 10 to 15 new cases every year.

See: Berkeley-Haas Case Series at Harvard Business Publishing for Educators

“The aim of our new Berkeley-Haas Case Series is to incite business innovation by clarifying disruptive trends and questioning the status quo,” says Rich Lyons, dean of the Haas School of Business.

The Berkeley-Haas Case Series will provide a new resource for business professors, practitioners, and policy makers, as well as students and alumni wanting to learn how questioning the status quo can lead to innovation and success.

The Haas cases intentionally align with the school’s mission to develop the next generation of innovative leaders who drive fresh thinking at every level of their organizations. Some of the cases draw on lessons learned in Haas’ experiential learning courses focused on applied innovation.

Netflix: Pricing Decision 2011 takes a look back at Netflix’s decision to split its streaming video and DVD subscription services.

Alphabet Energy: Thermoelectrics and Market Energy tracks the young company’s effort to determine the right market for its new technology that turns heat into electricity.

Genentech … Culture Change to Drive Business Results  follows a senior vice-president in her quest to merge four franchises by first changing the company culture.

Zoosk: Pivoting to Win the Dating Game couples analysis of the romantic social network’s startup launch and how a fortuitous pivot based on external factors changed the company’s future.  

Upcoming: Maersk Line: B2B Social Media –‘It’s Communication, Not Marketing’ explores how the container shipping company charted the new waters of social media to reduce print advertising and sponsorships.

The Berkeley-Haas Case Series is produced by UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, which also publishes the California Management Review, a quarterly peer-reviewed management publication.

Harvard Business Publishing (HBP) is a not-for-profit, wholly-owned subsidiary of Harvard University, reporting into Harvard Business School. Its mission is to improve the practice of management in a changing world.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY'S HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—Douglas E. Goldman, M.D. received the Berkeley-Haas Business Leader of the Year award at a gala on Nov. 15 in San Francisco. The honor recognizes Goldman's successful business career, philanthropy, and commitment to the University and the Haas School of Business.

“I am both thrilled and honored to be named Berkeley-Haas Business Leader of the Year,” said Goldman, “I shared an extremely close and endearing relationship with my grandfather, Walter Haas, and receiving this special award from the institution that bears his name is especially meaningful to me and my family.”

Goldman is chairman and founder of Certain, Inc., a leading global provider of enterprise-level, event-management, SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions; president and co-founder of the Lisa and Douglas Goldman Fund, a private charitable foundation that provides support for numerous organizations in the Bay Area and beyond; chairman and CEO of the Stern Grove Festival Association; and immediate past president of the Goldman Environmental Foundation, which awards the Goldman Environmental Prize –aka the “Green Nobel” –to grassroots environmental organizations around the world.

The fourth of five generations of Cal alumni in his family, Goldman has remained engaged with the University since his days on campus when, in 1974, he earned a BA in psychology. He has served as a trustee of the University of California, Berkeley Foundation and as an advisory board member at the Haas School of Business, among other volunteer roles. Of numerous commitments to academics, he and his wife supported the Lisa and Douglas E. Goldman Scholarship Fund and the College of Letters & Science’s cross-disciplinary “Big Ideas” curriculum, bringing prominent professors from divergent disciplines together to teach undergraduate courses focused on a single vital concept or controversy.

Since 1970, Berkeley-Haas has annually presented the Business Leader of the Year or Lifetime Achievement Award to a graduate or notable business leader in recognition of professional accomplishment, business leadership, and service to the University and Haas School. Federal Reserve Board Chair nominee and Berkeley-Haas Professor Emeritus Janet Yellen received last year’s award.

Also honored at the 12th annual Haas Gala: Revolution Foods co-founders and Berkeley-Haas alumni Kristin Groos Richmond and Kirsten Saenz Tobey. The team received the Leading through Innovation Award for helping transform the way K-12 students eat at school. Their company serves one million healthy meals every week to students in nearly 1,000 schools across the US and recently expanded into retail with a line of natural Meal Kits. Richmond and Tobey each earned an MBA from Berkeley-Haas in 2006.
 

Media Contact:

Ute Frey
Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley
+1 510.642.0342
[email protected]

 

November 4, 2013

Berkeley-Haas to Boost its Efforts in Creating Social and Environmental Impact
With Vibrant Hub for Research, Learning, and Practical Innovation

 

NOTE: EMBARGOED FOR PUBLICATION UNTIL WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2013, AT 12:00 AM E.T.

 

Berkeley, Calif. — The Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley will significantly boost its efforts to inspire creative and effective business solutions to address some of the world’s most pressing problems, when it launches its new Institute for Business and Social Impact on November 6. The institute will be led by Professor Laura Tyson, economist, policy maker, and former Haas School dean.

“Our students are determined to make a difference in the world, but the answers are not simple or obvious,” says Tyson, whose extensive public service roles include being Chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers and Director of the White House National Economic Council under President Clinton.

During her tenure as dean (1998-2001), Tyson was instrumental in renewing the Haas School’s attention to teaching and researching topics around social responsibility in business that date back to the 1950s, launching several key initiatives in this area that continue to this day.

One of the focal points of the institute is helping students define career interests in social impact. “We will provide students with the tools and vision they need to design pathways to fulfilling careers so that they can help create a more prosperous, equitable, inclusive, and sustainable society,” adds Tyson.

Alumni who have forged similar pathways thanks to their Haas courses and activities include Rob Kaplan, MBA 07. Kaplan started building his business case for social and environmental responsibility while at Haas, where he was on the MBA team that developed a green-marketing strategy for Fetzer Wines. Today, as Director for Product Sustainability, he has helped put Walmart on track to meet its 2015 goal of eliminating 20 million metric tons in carbon emissions. More examples at https://haas.berkeley.edu/IBSI/ouralumni/profiles.html

Research will also be an important aspect of the institute’s role, galvanizing the Haas faculty’s thought leadership in areas ranging from corporate social responsibility and multi-sector leadership to fraud, corruption, and ethics; environmental governance; poverty; health efficacy; gender parity; and more.

The institute will house several of the school’s current centers and programs that already provide courses, activities, and research spanning the for-profit, nonprofit, and public sectors. They include :

§  The Center for Nonprofit and Public Leadership, which works with organizations whose mission is to improve social and environmental sustainability.

§  The Center for Responsible Business, which integrates social and environmental goals into the business models of for-profit enterprises.

§  The Graduate Program in Health Management, which trains students for the future of health finance, health systems and new innovations in health care.

§  The Haas Global Social Venture Competition, which is the nation’s largest student-run competition for approaches to social and environmental challenges.

The Institute is also launching an initiative on the impact of women on business and the economy. Through classes, applied research, a speakers' series, and seminars with leading executives, this program will explore strategies to foster the advancement of women in corporate management, entrepreneurship and nonprofit leadership.

Beyond its centers and programs, the institute will provide a vibrant hub for collaboration with other groups at the Haas School and UC Berkeley around shared goals.

“The social importance of what we do has always been a part of our school’s DNA,” says Haas School Dean Rich Lyons. “The tools of business can and should be applied to bend the many unsustainable paths our world is on, such as the rising cost of healthcare, public education, access to clean water, carbon use, obesity, clean air, etc. Bending these paths will require the combination of skills and mindsets we aim to deliver at Berkeley-Haas. The Institute for Business and Social Impact is the next level of how we develop these pathbending leaders.”

The Haas School's commitment to exploring the relationship of business and society began in the late 1950s when Professor and Haas School Dean Emeritus Earl F. Cheit laid a scholarly foundation for the study of the social impact of business through his teaching and research, and by organizing the first national symposium on this subject at UC Berkeley.

Tyson renewed these efforts during her deanship by launching the Forum on Corporate Philanthropy in 2000 and raising the initial funding to expand the effort into what became the Center for Responsible Business. She also launched and raised funds for the Social Venture Competition and partnered with Columbia and London business schools to grow it into a global competition. It is the longest-running social entrepreneurship competition in the world.

The institute launch is being supported by donations from Haas School alumni: Allan Holt, MBA 76 and a managing director at the Carlyle Group, and his wife, Shelley, gave a $1 million endowment. Margo Alexander, BS 68 and chairman emeritus of the Acumen Fund, gave a $100,000 gift.

The institute’s launch will be celebrated on Nov. 6 with an alumni panel discussion for the Haas community on how Berkeley-Haas has helped them build distinguished careers that foster a more inclusive, equitable and sustainable society. The event is sold out. Additional institute events for the spring are being planned now.

More about the Institute for Business and Social Impact at: https://haas.berkeley.edu/IBSI

 

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Jo Mackness, Center for Responsible Business Executive Director
510-642-6099 | [email protected]

2013 Moskowitz Prize Winner for Socially Responsible Investing Unveiled at the 24th Annual SRI Conference 

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY'S HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS -Adopting corporate social responsibility (CSR) shareholder resolutions leads to large increases in shareholder value and operating performance, according to the study winning the 2013 Moskowitz Prize for Socially Responsible Investing.

The award was presented today at the 24^th annual SRI Conference in Colorado Springs to researcher Caroline Flammer for a paper titled, "Does Corporate Social Responsibility Lead to Superior Financial Performance? A Regression Discontinuity Approach.”  See paper here.

The Moskowitz Prize is awarded annually by the Center for Responsible Business at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. The only global award recognizing outstanding quantitative research in the field of sustainable and responsible investing, the prize was named for Milton Moskowitz, one of the first investigators to publish comparisons of the financial performance of screened and unscreened portfolios.

In her winning paper, Flammer found that corporate financial performance improved sharply in the immediate wake of shareholder-sponsored CSR proposals that were “close calls” – those passing by a small margin of votes. Studying close call proposals is appealing since the outcome of the vote is as good as randomized and cannot be anticipated prior to the vote.

Specifically, Flammer’s results show that the stock market reacts positively to the passage of close call CSR proposals (e.g., reducing CO2 emissions, implementing equal employment opportunities policies, etc.). She further documents a significant increase in the company’s return on assets (ROA) and net profit margin (NPM).  Flammer’s method of research, comparing outcomes just above and below a discontinuous threshold, is known as “regression discontinuity design”. 

Lloyd Kurtz, chief investment officer at Nelson Capital Management and lecturer at Berkeley-Haas, and Nadja Guenster, visiting professor at Berkeley-Haas, serve as the Faculty Co-Chairs of the Moskowitz Prize. They lead the prize selection committee, an expert panel of judges from both academic and investment circles. Commenting on the winner, Guenster said: "Dr. Flammer's study is an outstanding and unique contribution to the large amount of literature on the link between CSR and financial performance. Her innovative approach allows her to overcome the endogeneity problems that affect most previous studies. She can provide convincing empirical evidence that advance our understanding of the value of active ownership and show that companies adopting CSR proposals have seen financial benefits as well."

Caroline Flammer, PhD is an assistant professor in general management at Ivey Business School at Western University in London, Ontario.  She specializes in CSR research, social entrepreneurship and international business and teaches business strategy and sustainability for Ivey’s Honors Business Administration (HBA) program. Before joining Ivey, Flammer was a postdoctoral researcher at MIT Sloan School of Management. She holds a PhD in economics from the University of St. Gallen, located in St. Gallen, Switzerland. For more information on the winner, go to: http://www.ivey.uwo.ca/faculty/directory/caroline-flammer/.

Steve Schueth, producer of The SRI Conference and president of First Affirmative Financial Network said: “The entire Sustainable, Responsible, Impact investment industry is both pleased and proud that the academic research continues to bolster the business case for responsible corporate citizenship and our long-held belief that CSR is a proxy for good management and a way to identify good investment opportunities.”

In the 18-year history of the Moskowitz Prize, 2013 set a record for the number of award submissions. Kurtz remarked: “The Moskowitz Prize and the recognition afforded to the winner each year have gained a lot of traction among academics working in the field of sustainable investing. This past summer was a busy time for us, with 11 judges reviewing 49 studies to select a winner. Dr. Flammer can take credit for a strong research effort that impressed us all.”

Since its inception in 1996, the Moskowitz Prize has been awarded annually at The SRI Conference, the largest and longest running conference serving investors and investment professionals in the sustainable, responsible, impact (SRI) investment industry in North America. The SRI Conference is produced by First Affirmative Financial Network.

The 2013 Moskowitz Prize sponsors are Calvert Group, First Affirmative Financial Network, Nelson Capital Management, Rockefeller and Co., Neuberger Berman, and Trillium Asset Management. More information about the prize is available at: http://responsiblebusiness.haas.berkeley.edu/programs/moskowitzresearchprogram.html.

About the Center for Responsible Business at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley

The Center for Responsible Business (http://responsiblebusiness.haas.berkeley.edu) is an “action tank” that builds on the Haas School of Business’ (http://www.haas.berkeley.edu) culture of innovation and UC Berkeley’s tradition to run–not walk–towards social progress. Building on a decade of research, teaching and industry engagement, the Center for Responsible Business brings together students, company leaders, and forward-thinking faculty to redefine business for a sustainable future.

About The SRI Conference

The 24th annual SRI Conference (http://www.SRIconference.com), the leading North American forum for investors and investment professionals involved in sustainable, responsible, impact (SRI) investing, is October 28-30, 2013 at The Broadmoor in Colorado Springs, Colorado (http://www.broadmoor.com/). For more information about the conference or about supporting the conference as a sponsor, please contact Krystala Kalil, at 888-774-2663 or [email protected].

About First Affirmative Financial Network

First Affirmative Financial Network, LLC (http://www.firstaffirmative.com) is an independent Registered Investment Advisor (SEC File #801-56587) offering investment consulting and asset management services through a nationwide network of investment professionals who specialize in serving socially conscious investors. First Affirmative produces The SRI Conference (http://www.SRIconference.com).  

 

MEDIA ADVISORY

Contact: Ute Frey | (510) 642-0342 | [email protected]

Mobile First Platform Means More Flexibility and Efficiency for Busy Berkeley Executive MBA Students

Berkeley, CA — EmpoweredU and the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley today announced the roll-out of a new mobile learning platform for the Berkeley MBA for Executives program.

EmpoweredU’s mobile learning platform provides the tools, mobility, and ease of the iPad for a mobile learning experience. The partnership is the result of a recently completed pilot program that allowed students in the Berkeley MBA for Executives Program to test out the mobile education technology.

The platform features built-in functionalities and tools for streaming content via the Internet, course site creation, on-line lectures, assignment, test administering, grading, user publishing, live chat, peer-to-peer interaction, discussion forum, development of student portfolios, messaging, and news and web-content access. Initially, these will be applied to the following courses: Finance; Leading People; Marketing; and Building Trust based on Relationship; plus an additional four courses per semester to be added later.

The platform greatly enhances student-to-student communication and student-to-instructor communication. Haas students will be able to access the platform’s mobile discussion boards and social learning tools. The mobile platform allows for audio, video, and essay creation. It also integrates key iPad features like Notifications and Facetime.

“We are so proud to have gone from demo to pilot to deployment in just a few months and we are now helping Haas students get an online mobile experience unlike anywhere else,” said EmpoweredU CEO Steve Poizner. “This partnership merges the best innovation of Silicon Valley with one of the premier executive MBA programs in the world.”

The Berkeley MBA for Executives offers a general management program much like the Full-time and Evening & Weekend Berkeley MBA programs. However, the program is specifically tailored to seasoned executives who have an average of 12 years professional experience. Classes meet every three weeks on Thursdays through Saturdays over the course of 19 months to allow students to continue working while getting their graduate degrees. The new mobile learning platform allows students to stay in touch with classmates in between class sessions and facilitates juggling coursework with career and family commitments.

“Our executive MBA program will be the first degree program to experience the benefits of this mobile learning experience,” said Adam Berman, who heads the Haas School’s initiatives in learning technologies. “For senior professionals on the go, having this kind of technology means getting the most out of their MBA experience, using their time most efficiently, and deepening their ties to their classmates.”

“EmpoweredU’s mobile first technology breaks students away from being tethered to a desktop with full-time internet access. We provide a mobile platform that students can use both in and out of WiFi zones,” said Poizner. “This kind of flexibility enhances productivity, allowing students to complete coursework anywhere, anytime, whether that be at lunch, at the beach, waiting in a parking lot, or picking up kids from soccer practice.” 

About EmpoweredU

EmpoweredU enables universities to deliver their highest quality academic or training courseware through our next-generation mobile learning environment. Thanks to low-cost and feature-rich mobile devices, broadband, and recently developed interactive and engaging learning platforms, today’s online education is vastly different than the self-paced videos and instructor-disconnected online education of the past.

Learn more at www.empoweredu.com

About Berkeley-Haas

The Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, is one of the leading producers of new ideas and knowledge in all areas of business — which includes the distinction of having two of its faculty members receive the Nobel Prize in Economics over the past 20 years. The school offers outstanding management education to about 2,200 undergraduate and graduate students each year who come from around the world to study in one of its six degree-granting programs. One of the first business schools to teach entrepreneurship, starting in 1970, the Haas School later established the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship to foster academic programs, community outreach and campus-wide collaboration in new venture creation, entrepreneurship, and venture capital. The school has nearly 40,000 alumni. The school's mission is "to develop leaders who redefine how we do business." The school's distinctive culture is defined by four defining principles: Question the Status Quo, Confidence without Attitude, Students Always, and Beyond Yourself. Visit https://haas.berkeley.edu/

MEDIA ADVISORY

Contact: Jo-Ellen Pozner | (510) 643-1413 | [email protected]

WHAT

UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business’ 2013 Fraud and Misconduct Conference is the first event of its type ever organized by a business school. Assistant Professor Jo-Ellen Pozner developed the conference with other Haas professors to create a center of scholarship around wrongdoing in organizations.

“People who come will get a very clear picture of what state-of-the-art research is telling us across multiple disciplines about wrongdoing of all sorts, whether in corporations, in the nonprofit world, or even in the Catholic Church,” says Pozner, a Haas Management of Organizations group faculty member specializing in organizational misconduct, corporate governance, and ethics and leadership.

The 12 papers will be presented from various disciplines –organization behavior, finance, accounting, economics, sociology, and law –including:  

·         Do private equity funds game returns?

·         Cleaning house: The impact of information technology monitoring on employee theft and productivity

·         Losing the faith: stakeholder reactions to misconduct in the Catholic Church

·         Managerial ability and financial reporting discretion

For more information: http://groups.haas.berkeley.edu/accounting/fraudconference/index.html

WHEN

Thursday, October 24 and Friday, October 25, 2013

WHERE

Claremont Hotel Club & Spa  | 41 Tunnel Rd, Berkeley, CA 94705 | (510) 843-3000

WHO

Keynote speech presented by Mike Wilkins, founding and managing partner of Kingsford Capital Management, Richmond, CA. Wilkins specializes in short selling the stock of companies that are overvalued or show symptoms of fraud.