Berkeley Haas rose to #10, tied with MIT Sloan, in the 2023 Bloomberg Businessweek ranking of full-time MBA programs. Haas rose four spots this year, up from #14 last year.
Based on input from recent full-time MBA graduates, alumni, and employers, as well as school-provided data, Bloomberg rates MBA programs on what Businessweek considers to be the five fundamental elements of business school education: graduate compensation, learning, entrepreneurship, network, and diversity. Each area is weighted according to its importance among the alumni and employers who are surveyed for the ranking.
In these five areas, Haas ranked:
#6 in entrepreneurship
#6 in learning
#15 in compensation
#15 in networking
#16 in diversity
Among the top 25 schools in this ranking, only one school, Georgia Tech, beat Haas in the learning category. In diversity, Haas was rated third among the top 10 and fifth among the top 20 schools.
Bloomberg Businessweek is known as a volatile ranking — and this year was no different. Harvard Business School, Northwestern Kellogg, MIT Sloan, and Yale SOM dropped by multiple points, leaving room for other schools to rise into the top 10, including Virginia Darden and Michigan Ross, which moved up six spots. Stanford Graduate School of Business remained at #1.
Melissa Little (left) works with her EWMBA classmates to pack up the leftover lunch food before afternoon class starts every Saturday. Photo: Danner Doud-Martin
It’s lunchtime on a recent Saturday and Melissa Little and a group of fellow Berkeley Haas Evening & Weekend MBA students are scooping gluten-free noodles, free-range chicken, and organic salad into large pans after lunch.
“We only have a few minutes to load the last of the bowls before class starts,” said Little, EWMBA 24, an energy consultant who most recently worked as a strategic energy partnerships manager at Google. She and her classmates rush carts of food down the Chou Hall elevators and load up a hatchback whose driver is waiting at the curb.
The group has completed this mad dash since October 2022, when Little kicked off a program to donate hundreds of pounds of the cohort’s uneaten lunch food to the Dorothy Day House in downtown Berkeley, which shelters and services homeless and low-income people in the area.
For Little, the program is a long-awaited feat.
During her first few Saturdays in the EWMBA program, she discovered that most of the leftover lunch food for her Saturday cohort was thrown out— from boxed lunches to trays of turkey meatballs to chocolate chip cookies.
“It drove me crazy for the rest of the school year,” Little said. “I live in Berkeley and ride my bike here past unhoused people who could be eating this.”
Melissa Little transfers hot food into hotel trays that are used to transport the food to Dorothy Day House in Berkeley. Photo: Danner Doud-Martin.
Little worked with Kelly McCartney, a coordinator with campus’s Bancroft Catering, to figure out how she could donate the extra food. While McCartney was eager to help, Little didn’t yet have a partner to pick up the food and make her plan work—until she started a class called Design Thinking, taught by Lecturer Dave Rochlin.
In the class, her breakout group focused on the social sector and chose to address the needs of the unhoused. Little, a member of the Haas Sustainability Task Force, was on a mission to figure out how to donate the cohort’s food to a nonprofit in Berkeley.
Rochlin’s class recommends starting with user-centered research, including on-site visits, which led Little to Dorothy Day, where she met with Executive Director Robbi Montoya.
They talked for an hour straight, discussing the complex needs of the unhoused community and, eventually, how to make a food rescue plan work. Montoya agreed to transport the extra lunches to Dorothy Day every week if Little could meet a driver to get the food to the curb, and help load it.
Melissa Little (left) and Dorothy Day cook Andrea Carroll pack Carroll’s car with food that will used to make 200 lunches and dinners at Dorothy Day House. Photo: Danner Doud-Martin
Andrea Carroll, a cook at Dorothy Day, now transports the food from Haas and helps figure out how to best use it to build between 100-200 dinners that night. “The fact that we don’t have to dip into our storeroom to put out delicious meals is a huge boon to our residents and the folks we provide meals to out of our back door,” she said. “It’s such a good variety of lovely, fresh food that’s really healthy.”
Little recruited classmates, including Kevin Cheng, also EWMBA 24, to help her collect and load the food each week. To stay organized, she designed a logistics system to log communication with the Dorothy Day House volunteers and map out routes from Chou Hall to downtown, even on Cal football days.
A year later, Little and Cheng continue to volunteer together every Saturday. Cheng, who had volunteered with the Berkeley Food and Housing Project as a Cal undergraduate, said he enjoys serving hot meals to the community. So when he learned about Little’s project, he wanted to help give back, as well as use what he’s learned about problem-solving at Haas. “It’s a way to create opportunities for reducing waste and redirect food for good,” he said.
Rochlin said he was thrilled to learn about the successful outcome of an enterprise that had launched in his class. “This is what we hope to see,” he said. “Haas is at its best when the students take what they learn in the classroom and apply it outside in the world —and it’s even better when they create impact for populations in need. It’s a perfect example of Beyond Yourself.”
Haas is at its best when the students take what they learn in the classroom and apply it outside in the world. —Lecturer Dave Rochlin
Little is now working with Danner Doud-Martin, director of Haas Campus Sustainability, to make food rescuing a permanent student role within the Haas Sustainability Task Force. Their goal is to ensure that Little’s work with Dorothy Day will continue after she graduates.
Doud-Martin and Little are also looking to grow the program so that food in other Haas programs won’t go to waste. “The work that Melissa has done this past year on behalf of Haas and the EWMBA program with the Dorothy Day House is nothing less than extraordinary,” Doud-Martin said.
“This is a fantastic partnership,” Carroll said. “We’re saving this food by providing it to people.”
Berkeley Haas welcomed an accomplished group of nearly 700 new full-time MBA, undergraduate, and PhD students to campus, kicking off the start of the fall 2023 semester. (The new evening & weekend and executive MBA classes arrived on campus earlier this summer.)
Full-time MBA program
A total of 244 new full-time MBA students kicked off five days of Week Zero orientation last Monday. Orientation included sessions on academic life at Haas, diversity, equity, inclusion, justice and belonging (DEIJB), team building, and career planning.
Wendy Guild, the new assistant dean of MBA programs at Haas, welcomed the class. “I want to celebrate the fact that you are here,” she said, noting that 2023 is a special year for Haas, marking the school’s 125th anniversary. “We have staying power,” she said. “We’re not going anywhere… We’re just getting better.”
A total of 244 new full-time MBA students in the Class of 2025 arrived last week for Week Zero orientation. Wendy Guild, assistant dean of MBA programs, welcomed the group, noting that Haas is celebrating a special 125th anniversary this year.
The new MBA class is comprised of 41% women; 20% are first-gen.
Prof. Don Moore, acting Haas dean, urged students to reach out to each other and take advantage of the resources at Haas, especially when the curriculum gets tough. "All of us want to see you succeed," he said.
Introducing the Gold Cohort!
Introducing the Axe cohort!
Introducing the Oski cohort!
Introducing the Blue cohort!
The Haas Undergraduate Program team welcomed 421 new students Monday. A total of 3,306 students applied to the program.
The undergraduate class includes103 transfer students and 240 continuing UC Berkeley students.
New students met up in the Haas courtyard throughout orientation.
All photos by Jim Block and Noah Berger.
New students participated in a whirlwind of orientation activities—from a scavenger hunt to an ice cream social to cleanup work at a local nonprofit that supports people who are homeless.
The MBA students are an accomplished group, with an average of nearly six years of work experience, with 20% coming the tech sector and 24% from consulting.
Remy Freire, MBA 25, was a consultant at Bain & Company in Washington D.C. before coming to Haas.
“I’m interested in climate tech and renewable energy and I thought that the MBA would be a chance to take classes and do an internship in that area, and get some hands-on experience. A lot of folks are interested in this at Haas and I’ll be meeting people with similar interests to mine.”
Imogen O’Connor, MBA 25
The class boasts 41% women and is richly international, including students from 39 countries.
Imogen O’Connor, MBA 26, worked as an analytical manager with the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK before she came to Haas.
“What really prompted me to do an MBA was around change management and leadership because I was coming up against a lot of barriers in the NHS,” she said. “I really care about health care and just helping people. I think I need to develop certain skills in order to do that properly.”
The class has an average collective GMAT score of 732, and GREs of 163 quant and 161 verbal, and an average GPA of 3.63.
Eric Askins, director of MBA admissions, told the students to expect to learn from peers who come from a variety of backgrounds and experiences. Notably, 20% of the students in this class are the first generation of college students in their families. Fourteen of the new students are pursuing a dual MPA/MPH (public health) degree; nine are enrolled in the MBA/MEng (engineering) program.
Orientation week alumni speaker Lo Toney, MBA 97, founding managing partner at Plexo Capital, shared his wisdom with the class, encouraging students to explore and take advantage of the breadth and depth of the UC Berkeley and Haas campus resources, focus on academics in the first quarter in particular, and reach out to alumni to build a network.
Acting Dean and Professor Don Moore, whose research covers leadership and confidence in business and beyond, welcomed the students.
“You’re joining a community of innovators, renowned researchers, entrepreneurs, and movers and shakers who have made a profound impacts on business and on society,” he said.
“You’re joining a community of innovators, renowned researchers, entrepreneurs, and movers and shakers who have made a profound impacts on business and on society.” – Acting Dean Don Moore
Moore said the long list of leaders who embody the Berkeley Haas Defining Leadership Principles (Question the Status Quo, Confidence Without Attitude, Students Always and Beyond Yourself) includes professional golfer Collin Morikawa, BS 19, who won the 2020 PGA Championship; Nabeela Syed, BS 21, the first Muslim Indian-American and the youngest woman to serve in the Illinois House of Representatives; and gaming entrepreneur Kevin Chou, BS 02, who with his wife, Dr. Connie Chen, provided the largest-ever personal gift to UC Berkeley by an alumni under the age of 40 to help fund Chou Hall.
Undergraduate students mingle in the Haas courtyard. Photo: Noah Berger
Emma Hayes Daftary, assistant dean of the undergraduate program, told the students that “the DLPs will challenge you to shift from what you, as an individual, can achieve, to what we, as a community, can accomplish.”
“We are living in a time of tremendous global transition, and within this time of upheaval and transition comes an urgent call for informed, collaborative, effective leaders,” she said. “There are urgent issues that are facing us—urgent issues that will require extraordinary leadership to develop and execute solutions to solve them.”
PhD program
The PhD program welcomed its largest-ever cohort of 19 new students from around the world—including Russia, China, Ethiopia, India, South Korea, Nigeria, Portugal, Canada, and Germany.
New students include Abdulmuttolib (Abdul) Salako, Ziyi Liu, Sean Chen, Sarah Danner, Hanna Yu, Sara Shemali, Jordan Mickens, Nikita (Nick) Akimov, Wenxiao Yang, Srikanth Janjirala, Yutao Chen, Maggie Ye, Skyler Chen, David Gravanita , William Zhang, Zi Yang Chen, Nathan Godin, Nick Otis, and Fikremariam (Fikre) Gedefaw.
(From back row left-right) Abdulmuttolib Salako, Ziyi Liu, Sean Chen, Sarah Danner, Hanna Yu, Sara Shemali, Jordan Mickens, Nikita (Nick) Akimov, Wenxiao Yang, Srikanth Janjirala, Yutao Chen, Maggie Ye, Skyler Chen, David Gravanita , William Zhang, Zi Yang Chen, and Nathan Godin. Missing from photo: Nick Otis, and Fikremariam (Fikre) Gedefaw. Photo: Jim Block
For decades, a cottage industry of books and workshops has promised to make women better negotiators and help close the gender pay gap. Yet not only does the pay gap persist, but it tends to be larger for women who gain advanced business skills.
New research by Berkeley Haas Professor Laura Kray shows the belief that women don’t ask for higher pay is not only outdated, but it may be hurting pay equity efforts. Contrary to popular belief, professional women now report negotiating their salaries more often than men, but they get turned down more often, Kray found.
“While men in the past may have been more likely than women to negotiate, the gender difference has since reversed,” says Kray, the Ned and Carol Spieker Chair in Leadership. “Continuing to put the blame on women for not negotiating away the gender pay gap does double damage, perpetuating gender stereotypes and weakening efforts to fight them.”
The new paper, co-authored by Vanderbilt University Associate Professor Jessica Kennedy, PhD 12, and Haas post-doctoral scholar Margaret Lee, is in press in the journal Academy of Management Discoveries.
Wage gap increases with higher pay
Overall, the gender wage gap in the United States has barely budged over the past 20 years. Last year, women earned about 22% less than men, on average. But broken down by income level, the situation is more nuanced: The gap for middle- and lower-wage women has actually decreased while the gap for those with higher salaries—where there is often more room for negotiations—has increased.
Statistics for the elite group of women who invest in earning MBA degrees are sobering. Women earn 88% of what men make after finishing their MBA, but only 63% of what men make 10 years later, past research by Kray and others has found. This pay gap among MBA graduates “is especially notable considering the nearly identical skills and qualifications held by men and women at the time the degree is conferred,” Kray and her co-authors write.
Women do ask
The researchers surveyed a nationally representative sample and confirmed the popular perception that women negotiate less than men and are less successful when they do; and that men are more likely to receive better pay without asking for it.
Yet when Kray and her co-authors analyzed a survey of students graduating from a top MBA program between 2015 to 2019, they found that significantly more women than men reported negotiating their job offers—54% versus 44%.
The researchers then delved into a 2019 alumni survey of 1,900 MBA graduates. The survey asked the MBAs for their salaries, and included a multipronged question about whether they had ever asked for raises or promotions; whether those negotiations had been successful; and whether they had received a raise or promotion without asking.
The analysis confirmed that people who ask for higher pay are indeed more likely to get higher pay than those who don’t ask. “People should be encouraged to ask,” they wrote.
But overall, they found that the women earned 22% less than the men. And other than women’s lower pay, the only differences that emerged along gender lines were that more women than men said they had attempted to negotiate, and more women reported that they had been turned down.
“Given women’s greater, not lesser, tendency to ask, a gender difference in negotiation propensity cannot account for the gender pay gap found in these alumni data,” the researchers wrote.
Revisiting past conclusions
Kray and her co-authors also used an updated statistical approach to revisit a 2018 meta-analysis that concluded that women were less likely to initiate negotiations—focusing on the nine prior studies published from 1982 to 2015 that measured gender differences in initiation of salary negotiations.
In their new analysis that parsed out changes in negotiation propensity over time, the researchers concluded that men did report higher rates of negotiating versus women early in the era. However, the gender difference appeared to disappear around 1994 and reversed beginning around 2007.
The trend has continued to grow since then, Kray says.
“There’s a good-news story here. Both men and women are negotiating more, and the increase is much greater for women than men,” Kray says. She noted that many factors may have contributed to women’s greater assertiveness over the past two decades, including the emphasis on negotiating and the “lean-in” movement sparked by Sheryl Sandberg’s book.
Blaming the victim
Still, the downside of messages such as lean-in has been to “blame the victim,” Kray says—putting the onus on women to fix the pay gap by working more and trying harder.
“If people believe men have better outcomes simply because they negotiate and women don’t, then they think we just need to train women to negotiate better rather than fixing a discriminatory system,” Kray says. “We call this a ‘legitimizing myth.’”
To explore attitudes about the causes of the pay gap and support for possible solutions, the researchers next conducted a series of experiments. In one, they asked 500 college-educated people with managerial experience to read a paragraph on the post-MBA pay-gap increase, and asked questions about what they think drives it.
About 15% mentioned differences in negotiation rates, and almost half mentioned women’s choices—including beliefs that women may be less ambitious, work fewer hours, or have less experience. About 64% mentioned lack of fairness, discrimination, and structural issues, such as the “old boys’ network,” or a glass ceiling preventing women from rising to the top.
Men were more likely to blame women’s choices for their lower pay, while women were more likely to mention discrimination. But over and above those explanations, men and women thought negotiation rates were a significant contributor to pay disparities. Those who believed more strongly that women’s lower negotiation rates contributed to the pay gap for MBA graduates were less likely to support legislation that prohibits employers from asking prospective employees about their current or past salaries—aimed at correcting past inequities—and more likely to justify the current system.
How gender-based messages can backfire
In one final experiment, Kray and her colleagues showed that messages intended to promote equality in negotiations can contribute to sexist stereotypes. After reading a passage from a book aimed at getting women to negotiate, people were more likely to endorse gender stereotypes than those who read from a gender-neutral negotiations book.
“Negotiating for pay or promotions is clearly beneficial, and given that negotiation rates are pretty low, there is a lot of room for everyone to do more negotiating,” Kray says. “But it’s time to end the notion that the pay gap occurs because women don’t ask.”
Kray is continuing to investigate the relationship between negotiations and outcomes, including whether the higher rates of women asking but being turned down leads to higher turnover, and whether this reflects negatively on employers. She is collaborating with Haas Dean Ann Harrison, who is focusing her sabbatical this fall on researching the causes of the gender wage gap.
The M.E.T.ia summer program is for rising high school juniors and seniors with an aptitude for math and science. (Photo by Adam Lau/Berkeley Engineering)
The UC Berkeley M.E.T. (Management Entrepreneurship and Technology) Program this summer launched a pre-collegiate program that brings high school students to campus to explore how engineering and business intersect.
Fifty rising juniors and seniors in the new M.E.T. Innovation Academy (M.E.T.ia) took residence on the Berkeley campus for two weeks in July for the program, which is designed to provide real-world experience in solving business and technology challenges.
The program is designed to provide real-world experience in solving business and technology challenges.
Students visited world-renowned corporations and organizations, interacted with successful entrepreneurs from the heart of Silicon Valley, and met Berkeley M.E.T. student entrepreneurs. M.E.T. is a dual degree program launched in 2017 by the Haas School of Business and the College of Engineering at UC Berkeley. The program, designed for students with a strong aptitude for math and science, was held July 17-28.
“As a school we are mission-driven to change society for the better—and the Innovation Academy gives us a chance to expose a diverse group of students to new ideas that could potentially change the world,” said Saikat Chaudhuri, faculty director of the undergraduate M.E.T. program.
Students in the M.E.T.ia summer program pitched during a Shark Tank style session at UC Berkeley’s Blum Hall over the summer. (Photo by Adam Lau/Berkeley Engineering)
The group participated in interactive workshops focused on topics such as how to think like an entrepreneur; self-driving and energy-saving cars; developing business plans and resumes; accessing venture capital, and launching startups.
The students also headed off campus for visits to Berkeley-based Ambi Robotics, an AI-powered robotics company with UC Berkeley roots, and to San Francisco-based audiovisual company Dolby.
The program wrapped up with a Shark Tank-style pitch session, with student teams presenting their capstone projects to a panel of judges. Judges included serial entrepreneur Nilesh Bhandari; Sibyl Chen, general manager at UC Berkeley SkyDeck; and Darren Cooke, executive director of the UC Berkeley Life Sciences Entrepreneurship Center.
Sahil Puranik, a rising high school senior from Fremont, California, pitched an idea to turn food waste into energy. Pitching during the program helped boost his confidence in presenting and collaborating, he said. “Before, I never really had the confidence to talk to people I didn’t know,” he said. “But after this program, I found it a lot easier to just reach out to people who have shared interests.”
M.E.T.ai drew 50 students who lived on campus for two weeks while participating in the new program. (Photo by Adam Lau/Berkeley Engineering)
“Not only has this program shown me the importance of learning from others, but also about passing down what I have learned from my experiences—skills and lessons that I hope to teach to others,” student Jay Ananth added.
Another program highlight was an IPO simulation led by Michael Grimes, BS 87, EECS, the head of Global Technology Investment Banking at Morgan Stanley and the M.E.T. program’s founder. The session taught students about how an IPO works in the real world. “It was fascinating to see the different forces manipulate the price, but all within a set of rules,” M.E.T.ia student Kaelen Cazzell said.
Due to strong interest in the program, next year’s M.E.T. class size will increase to 70. Chaudhuri said he looks forward to what the students will accomplish.
“There are so many existential challenges right now,” Chaudhuri said. “There’s climate change, geopolitical tensions, transportation that needs to be disrupted, and healthcare that isn’t covering everybody. I think there are incredible opportunities for students to affect change.”
From top left, clockwise: New Berkeley Haas Assistant Professors Eben Lazarus, Cailin Slattery, Shawn Kim, Samuel Kapon, Erica Bailey, returning Professor Alexandre Mas, new Assistant Professor Rachel Gershon, and Antoine Levy (pictured in the middle).
Berkeley Haas is welcoming eight new professors this fall to the academic faculty. They bring expertise ranging from urban economics to consumer judgment to social influence, with research interests that include alternative work arrangements, pricing of risky assets, and ESG disclosure.
The new tenure-track faculty will be joined by 20 new professional faculty members, with five additional lecturers starting in spring. The academic faculty also welcomes four new post-doctoral researchers and three visiting faculty members: Jillian Grennan, David Hart, and Benjamin Hébert.
We checked in with our new faculty members to learn more about their background, research, and what they’re looking forward to as a part of the Berkeley Haas community.
Assistant Professor, Management of Organizations (MORS)
Pronouns: she/her
Hometown: Pittsburgh, Pa.
Education:
PhD, Management, Columbia University
BS/BA (specialization in economics), The Ohio State University
Research focus: Authenticity and self-perception
Introduction: I am originally from Pittsburgh, born into a big, loud Italian/Irish family of die-hard Steelers fans. Before I became an academic, I had a weird assortment of jobs including being a dishwasher, pizza maker, waitress, consultant, podcaster, and legislative aide. I love a good book (usually fiction), running a fun experiment, and eating Thai food.
Teaching: Leading People (MBA)
Most excited about: I’m excited to be in a place that is so research-active and at the center of so many important initiatives in making science more reliable, replicable, and inclusive.
Education:
PhD, Marketing, Washington University
BA, Philosophy, Neuroscience, and Psychology, Washington University
Research focus: Consumer judgments and decision making, social influence, prosocial behaviors, health-related judgments and behaviors
Introduction: I study social and psychological influences of consumer judgments and behavior across a wide range of topics including polarization, vaccine hesitancy, word-of-mouth, mental health, and voting decisions. I collaborate with businesses and nonprofits to translate laboratory findings into practical applications in real-world settings.
Teaching: Social Influence and Word of Mouth
Most excited about: I’m most excited about the research being done at Haas, and to learn from and work with my new colleagues.
Fun fact: I love backpacking and rafting and I’m rafting the Copper River in Alaska later this year. I also enjoy hiking around the Bay Area (send me recommendations please!). Some of my favorites so far are the Dipsea trail and Purisima Creek.
Assistant Professor, Business & Public Policy (BPP)
Pronouns: he/him
Hometown: Fair Lawn, NJ
Education:
PhD, Economics, New York University
BA, Economics and Mathematics, Brandeis University
Research focus: Mechanism design
Introduction: My work primarily focuses on mechanism design applied to public policy enforcement and regulation. In recent work, my co-authors and I partnered with a municipality in Peru to apply insights from mechanism design to the collection of property taxes. In a series of ongoing projects, I study the design of leniency and amnesty policies in a variety of contexts, including antitrust and tax collection.
Teaching: Political Economy – Frameworks (MBA)
Most excited about: I am excited to join a remarkable research community, and to work with the amazing faculty in the BPP group.
Fun fact: After failing to grow tomatoes for years in New York, I am excited to have a chance to succeed in California.
Education:
PhD, Accounting, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
BSc in Economics, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Research focus: ESG disclosure and corporate governance
Introduction: I’m excited to be a new assistant professor of accounting at the Haas School of Business. My research interests are focused on ESG (environmental, social, governance) disclosure, governance and incentives, and voluntary disclosure. In my dissertation, I examine how investors with heterogeneous preferences respond differently to companies’ carbon net-zero pledges and to the credibility of these pledges. I show that while some green funds seem to carefully examine the credibility of companies’ net-zero commitments and respond accordingly, there exist other green funds that seem to focus on the label, rewarding companies for simply announcing these pledges.
When I’m not working, I enjoy playing and watching tennis.
Teaching: Managerial Accounting (Undergraduate)
Most excited about: The people at Haas! (and perfect weather)
Fun fact: I have begun to learn and hone my skills in the art of Texas-style barbecue.
Education:
PhD, Economics, Harvard University
BA, Economics, University of Pennsylvania
Research focus: Asset prices and financial markets, macroeconomics, behavioral economics, and econometric methodology
Introduction: My research uses financial markets to answer questions about the underlying structure of the economy, with a particular focus on people’s beliefs and preferences about future risks. For example, why are risky asset prices so volatile, and what can we learn from this volatility about how people update their beliefs when they receive new information? How are shorter-term risks perceived relative to longer-term risks? While these projects are all related to asset pricing, they also reflect my interests in macroeconomics, behavioral economics, and econometrics. I’m really excited to continue this work—and branch out into new areas—with the exceptionally talented and diverse community of students and researchers at Haas.
Teaching: Introduction to Finance (Undergraduate), Investments and Derivatives (MFE)
Most excited about: I’m really excited to engage with both the Haas community and the Department of Economics, where a ton of exciting work is being done in all of my areas of research interest. I’m also thrilled to be at a university with such a rich history and tradition of faculty engagement with the world around them. And on a personal level, I’ve lived on the East Coast nearly my whole life and am excited to explore the Bay Area.
Fun fact: I have a dog named Pluto—named after the Greek god of the underworld, not the non-planet or cartoon dog—who’s also excited to explore the trails around Berkeley. Otherwise, I love reading (and very occasionally writing) short fiction.
Education:
PhD, Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
MA, Economics, Paris School of Economics
MSc, Management, HEC Paris
BA, Economics, Paris-Sorbonne University
École Normale Supérieure Ulm, Élève normalien
Research focus: Urban economics and public finance
Introduction: I am a French economist, specializing in public finance and urban economics. I would describe my research as being about “places and policies, and the way they interact.” That means understanding the role that economic geography plays in the differential impact of public policies across cities and regions. In recent research, I’ve applied this investigation of the feedback loops between government interventions and the geography of an economy to the impact of housing subsidies and taxation, to retirement policies, and to international trade patterns.
Teaching: Urban and Real Estate Economics (Undergraduate and MBA)
Most excited about: Haas is a world-class institution, harboring many of the top experts in the type of work I’ve been doing: combining large-scale datasets to better understand people’s geographic mobility and financial decisions. Berkeley as a whole is also a fantastic beehive of economists, not only at Haas but throughout the university’s various schools, and that makes it a stimulating environment to work in and produce high-quality research.
Fun fact: When quite young, I appeared on a French reality TV show called “Who wants to be the President?”, a version of American idol for politics.
Education:
PhD, Economics, Princeton
BA, Macalester College
Research focus: Labor market topics including; alternative work arrangements, fairness considerations and norms in the labor market, unemployment, social interactions, neighborhood segregation, the labor market effects of credit market disruptions, and unions.
Introduction: I am returning this year to Haas after a 14-year detour at Princeton University. From 2009 to 2011, I served as the associate director for economic policy and chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget in the Executive Office of the President, and as chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor.
Teaching: Data Analytics (MBA)
Most excited about: The intellectual energy.
Fun fact: My first job in high school was playing the toy soldier at FAO Schwarz. I was the only applicant who fit in the costume.
Assistant Professor, Business & Public Policy (BPP)
Pronouns: she/her
Hometown: Nyack, NY
Education:
PhD, Economics, University of Virginia
BA, Economics and Math, Washington and Lee University
Research focus: I am an economist working at the intersection of public finance, industrial organization, and political economy.
Introduction: My research centers on the relationship between local governments and firms. My current projects in the U.S. setting involve state and local economic development policy, state procurement policy, and state regulation of automobile dealers. Before joining Haas, I worked at Columbia Business School as an assistant professor.
Teaching: Strategy (EWMBA)
Most excited about: I am excited for the amazing colleagues in the BPP group at Haas, and the broader economics community in Berkeley. I’m lucky to already be working with two co-authors who are at Berkeley, and finally we can have our meetings in person! I am also looking forward to taking advantage of the local amenities, and have many weekend trips planned: Yosemite, Sonoma, Point Reyes, etc.!
Fun fact: In my free time I enjoy running, playing tennis, and spending time with my husband and daughter.
Meet the post-docs
Luisa Cefala
Luisa Cefala
PhD institution: UC Berkeley
Area of study: Development and behavioral economics
Hometown: Treviglio, Italy
Felix Owusu
Felix Owusu
PhD institution: Harvard University
Area of study: Public policy (economics track)
Hometown: Techiman, Ghana
Antonia Paredes
Antonia Paredes
PhD institution: Yale University
Area of study: Political economy and development
Hometown: Santiago, Chile
Paul Vicinanza
Paul Vicinanza
PhD institution: Stanford Graduate School of Business
Building on three years of fundraising momentum, Berkeley Haas raised more than $56 million for the school in fiscal 2023.
Under the leadership of Dean Ann Harrison, the Berkeley Haas Development and Alumni Relations team (DAR) team reported a record three-year period in the school’s history, raising more than $171 million from alumni, faculty, staff, students, parents, and friends.
“The Haas community continues to come together to provide incredible support to the school,” Harrison said. “These generous gifts will be used to help us continue to expand our faculty, enrich our students, and empower our alumni as we work for a more sustainable and equitable future. We are truly grateful.”
The total amount raised in 2023 includes $4.1 million from 3,554 donors to the Haas Fund, which is used to retain faculty and provide student scholarships, as well as to support alumni programs and career services.
Haas also achieved its UC Berkeley-wide Light the Way campaign goal of raising $400 million in July, six months before the close. Launched in 2014, The Light the Way campaign is a historic effort to raise $6 billion. The campaign ends on December 31, 2023.
More notable highlights this year for Haas include:
Raising four gifts of more than $5 million in a single year, a first in the school’s history.
Launching an HBCU MBA Fellowship with founding gifts from five alumni. The first-of-its-kind endowment will provide tuition support to MBA students who have attended a Historically Black College or University.
Funding a new Berkeley Haas entrepreneurship hub, which is slated to open in fall 2024.
Posting more than $500,000 in challenge matches during an epic Big Give one-day online fundraiser.
Alumni engagement highlights from the past year:
Alumni volunteers, advisors, mentors, and speakers again stepped forward to serve the school in the past year, in efforts including:
Serving as speakers at events and in classrooms, and as case competition judges throughout the year.
Sharing their stories on 27 episodes of the OneHaas podcast (with a total of 21,622 downloads)
Advising students in all of our degree programs with career and admissions support.
Sourcing and sharing 619 job posts through the alumni—powered Hire Haas campaign.
Berkeley Haas also returned to a full slate of alumni events this year, hosting three special regional events with Dean Ann Harrison in London, Los Angeles, and New York. Over 2,400 Haas community members participated in our signature events, with more than 1,200 returning for the annual MBA Reunion Weekend and Alumni Conference.
“We are incredibly grateful to all of our generous donors and alumni volunteers who continue to support our short- and long-term vision as a top business school,” Assistant Dean and Chief Development Officer Howie Avery said.
This spring, I embarked on an in-depth study of the captivating realm of cottage industries around the world. I was driven by my desire to understand how cottage industries can be integrated into a country’s economic development. Take the example of India as a developing country. As India shifts from a largely agrarian to an industry-driven economy, it will face formidable challenges. The crux of addressing this transformation lies in understanding and effectively managing the process, attentively considering the heterogeneous necessities and historical legacies of the populace, rather than resorting to mere mechanization of traditional industries.
Surprisingly, about 60% of India’s population relies on agriculture as their primary source of livelihood, particularly in rural enclaves. As the economy develops, India must address the question of what is next for agrarian workers. In this context, cottage industries or handicrafts emerge as indispensable facets, exemplified by the exquisite hand-knotted rugs handcrafted by artisans in Jaipur. These industries serve as crucial pillars, supporting the livelihoods of myriad Indians, with an estimated 200 million individuals (equivalent to the entire population of Brazil!) deriving their sustenance from the intricate tapestry of cottage industries. Consequently, the pressing inquiry emerges: How can these industries be seamlessly assimilated into the future trajectory of economic growth without merely advocating for wholesale mechanization?
Preserving the essence
The beauty of cottage industries lies in their traditional methods. They bring a unique characteristic and value to their products that can’t be replicated through modern means. Imagine a painting made by a machine versus one crafted by a passionate artist. The artist’s creativity and personal touch make it priceless. So, as we look to the future, we must find ways to preserve and uplift these traditional skills and values.
Boosting productivity and modernization
To integrate cottage industries into the speed of the modern economy, we need to focus on enhancing productivity and modernizing certain aspects of these industries. Often, traditional processes lack certain efficiency and modernization elements that can assist in better integration with modern markets. By leveraging technology and innovative processes, we can eliminate unnecessary manual labor and allow artisans to focus on the activities that truly add value. This shift can transform the way work is done, positively impacting everyday tasks and income generation.
Streamlining the value chain
Let’s not forget the importance of the entire value chain in this integration process. Many cottage industries face challenges in terms of inefficient systems that hinder their products from reaching the right places. By creating avenues that deploy modern business practices, we can revolutionize the way these industries operate. Imagine more professional and passionate individuals working to solve these pressing problems. Together, we can unlock the full potential of cottage industries and pave the way for inclusive development.
Embracing change for a better future
In a rapidly changing world, we must avoid creating a social imbalance by merely mechanizing cottage industries. Instead, let’s focus on integrating them into new business models and approaches that consider the preservation of traditional value while embracing productivity enhancements and modernization. By doing so, we can foster a balanced and inclusive economic development in India.
A dynamic journey
Let’s remember that the journey towards progress and development is a dynamic one. It requires us to find ways to embrace change while honoring the rich heritage of our cottage industries. Through innovative thinking, skillful integration, and a passionate commitment to inclusive development, we can build a future where cottage industries thrive, traditional skills are valued, and social imbalance is avoided. Together, let’s pave the way for a brighter and more sustainable world!
Hitesh Kenjale, MBA 23, is a graduate of the full-time MBA program. He is the founder of DesiHangover, a venture focused on driving grassroots supply-chain innovation to enable legacy artisans to bring authentic crafts to formal markets.
Haas this year is celebrating 125 years of reimagining business. Our Defining Leadership Principles , including Question the Status Quo, are etched in the stone of the Haas courtyard. Photo: Jim Block
Berkeley Haas this month is kicking off its anniversary celebration of 125 years of reimagining business. The festivities commemorate a significant milestone in the school’s history as a leader in advancing management education, corporate responsibility, innovation, and entrepreneurship.
Founded in 1898 as the College of Commerce with just three students, Haas has expanded to nearly 3,000 students across six programs, all of which rank in the top 10 and boast a world-renowned global faculty. Haas has 44,000 living alumni worldwide, spanning more than 20,000 organizations in 81 countries.
“A 125th anniversary is a remarkable achievement for any business school, especially given the immense changes that business and business education have gone through,” said Berkeley Haas Dean Ann E. Harrison. “As the world’s number one mission-driven business school, we take pride in developing innovative business leaders who consider the long-term impact of their actions—and increasingly, that requires a lens for sustainability and inclusion.”
Cora Jane Flood gave the university’s then-largest gift to establish the “College of Commerce” in 1898.
Haas has always been a pioneer. It is the first business school founded at a public university, and the second-oldest in the U.S. It is the only leading business school to be founded by a woman, Cora Jane Flood.
It’s also the first top business school to be led by two female deans, Professor Laura Tyson (1998–2001 and 2018), and Harrison (since 2019).
And from the start, the school has had a distinctive culture.
That culture was formally codified in 2010, when the school unveiled its Defining Leadership Principles (DLPs): Question the Status Quo, Confidence without Attitude, Students Always, and Beyond Yourself. Shepherded by then-Dean Rich Lyons and anchored by the organizational culture research of Professor Jennifer Chatman, the DLPs are a source of pride for the community—and a competitive advantage.
Senior Assistant Dean Courtney Chandler, Haas’s Chief Strategy and Operating Officer, described the principles as much more than mere aspirations or platitudes. They are, rather, aligned tightly with the school’s strategy. “Powerful leaders think about culture all the time,” Chandler said. “If done well, everything relates back to the culture, from how we set priorities to how we get buy-in from people to how we show up as a community.”
“Powerful leaders think about culture all the time. If done well, everything relates back to the culture, from how we set priorities to how we get buy-in from people to how we show up as a community.” — Senior Assistant Dean Courtney Chandler, BA 90, MBA 96.
Life-changing Research
The Haas legacy includes generations of researchers and teachers who have changed how industry leaders think and do business. That legacy includes two Nobel laureates. The late John Harsanyi won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1994—along with John Nash from Princeton University and Reinhard Selten from Bonn, Germany—for advancing the study of game theory, and in particular, how parties act in negotiations with incomplete information.
The late Oliver Williamson became the school’s second Nobel laureate—along with Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University—in 2009 for bringing together economics, organization theory, and contract law to invent the field of transaction cost economics, fundamentally reshaping understanding of how firms operate in the marketplace.
Prof. Oliver Williamson with his Nobel coin.
Many other Haas faculty members have ushered new ideas into the world, including Henry Chesbrough, PhD 97, who created the novel theory of Open Innovation; and David Aaker, the father of modern branding, who defined brand equity and the idea of the brand portfolio.
Professor David Teece established his groundbreaking theories of dynamic capabilities in 1997; and Ikujiro Nonaka, MBA 68, PhD 72, a knowledge management expert, envisioned knowledge as a living and breathing entity that must be shared among workers to reach its full potential.
Finance Professor Ulrike Malmendier, who researches how individual biases affect corporate decisions, stock prices, and markets, illuminated many ways in which human psychology and systematic biases influence economic behavior. For her work, Malmendier won the prestigious 2013 Fischer Black Prize.
Women at Haas have also made pioneering contributions as visionary leaders—since Mary Dickson became the first woman to get a degree from the school in 1906. Professor and former Dean Laura Tyson served on President Clinton’s cabinet, and was also the first woman to chair the Council of Economic Advisers and direct the National Economic Council.
Professor Emeritus Janet Yellen, who taught macroeconomics at Haas for 25 years, is now the first woman to serve as U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and was the first to chair the Federal Reserve.
Accelerating Innovation
Berkeley Haas has also been a hub of innovation and a launching ground for entrepreneurs over the years. In 2022, for the fourth straight year, UC Berkeley was named the nation’s best public university for startup founders, and the second-best university among both private and public schools, according to Pitchbook’s annual ranking.
In 2022, for the fourth straight year, UC Berkeley was named the nation’s best public university for startup founders
In 1970, six years before Apple Computer was founded, Dean Richard Holton taught one of the country’s first entrepreneurship classes at Haas with Leo Helzel, MBA 68. Lecturer Steve Blank took the teaching of entrepreneurship in a cutting-edge new direction in 2011 with his Lean LaunchPad method. Blank taught students to build a company by developing business models rather than traditional business plans, iterating models quickly based on customer feedback. This approach is now accepted practice for entrepreneurs.
SkyDeck in downtown Berkeley, where many Haas students collaborate with founders from across the campus.
Haas students have been honing startup skills for years in programs like the UC Berkeley LAUNCH accelerator; SkyDeck, a partnership between the Haas School of Business founded in 2012 with the College of Engineering, and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research; and The Cleantech to Market accelerator program, which for 15 years has been pairing students with entrepreneurs to help bring promising climate tech innovations to market.
Visionary entrepreneurs
Over the years, Haas students and alumni have founded hundreds of companies as part of the UC Berkeley startup ecosystem. Among the school’s notable alumni entrepreneurs:
John Hanke, MBA 96, CEO of Niantic Labs, was instrumental in creating Google Earth, Maps, and Street View, which brought sophisticated geospatial data visualization to the masses. Hanke then masterminded the wildly popular augmented reality Pokémon Go game.
Paul Rice, MBA 96, founded Fair Trade USA, whose Fair Trade Certified seals signify products made according to fair trade standards.
The late Priya Haji, MBA 03, co-founded Free at Last, a national program for substance abuse treatment and HIV/AIDS intervention; World of Good,a sustainable/fair trade product marketplace acquired by eBay in 2010, and served as CEO at SaveUp, a rewards game for saving money and reducing debt.
Patrick Awuah, MBA 99, launched Ashesi University, Ghana’s first liberal arts college, in 2002, which pioneered a multidisciplinary core curriculum that challenged the dominant rote-learning culture in many African schools.
Danae Ringelmann and Eric Schell, both MBA 08, co-founded Indiegogo with Slava Rubin, building a crowdfunding platform for all creative, cause, and entrepreneurial projects.
Danae Ringelmann and Eric Schell, MBA 08s, began working on Indiegogo, one of the world’s first crowdfunding platforms, while students at Haas and used their Haas connections to develop the company. Photo by Genevieve Shiffrar.
Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez, both BS 09, grew mushrooms from used coffee grounds in their Haas class, which led to their startup Back to the Roots—now a national brand with products sold in thousands of stores.
Jason Bellet, BS 14, along with engineering alumni Connor Landgraf, BS 13, MEng 14 (bioengineering), and Tyler Crouch, BS 14 (mechanical engineering), founded Eko in 2013 and developed an FDA-cleared platform of AI-powered stethoscopes for early detection of cardiovascular disease.
Roots of social responsibility
The Haas tradition of educating leaders who prioritize the social impact of business dates back more than 100 years.
The school is named for Walter A. Haas, Sr., BS 1910, whose family at Levi Strauss & Company outfitted Western miners in a new kind of work pants that evolved into Levi’s iconic blue jeans. Haas Sr.’s views on social welfare and public affairs were influenced by the school’s first female instructor, Jessica Peixotto, and led him to grow this apparel manufacturer into one of the country’s largest socially responsible businesses. Later, as Levi’s CEO, he noted that the company “owes responsibility to the communities in which we do business.”
The company “owes responsibility to the communities in which we do business.” — Walter A. Haas, Sr., BS 1910
During the late 1950s, Earl F. Cheit, the future dean, ushered in the study of corporate social responsibility through research and teaching. Cheit organized the first national symposium on the subject in 1964, and Berkeley’s coursework became the model for other leading business schools with support from Professors Dow Votaw and Edwin Epstein.
Earl F. Cheit ushered in the study of corporate social responsibility The Haas annual Award for Excellence in Teaching is named for him.
Decades later, The Center for Responsible Business in 2002, brought Haas into the modern corporate social responsibility and business sustainability movements. Six years later, TheFinancial Times named Haas number one in the world in this area.
Prioritizing inclusion
Socioeconomic mobility is core to both the UC Berkeley and Haas missions. Over the past six years, Haas has made substantive changes to increase diversity and representation, engender lifelong learning around equity and inclusion, and cultivate belonging.
Chief DEI Officer Élida Bautista leads a team building a learning environment where everyone belongs and everyone can thrive.
When Harrison joined as dean, she made Diversity Equity Justice and Belonging (DEIJB) a priority by meeting with student leaders; significantly increasing student support; modifying the core MBA curriculum to require a course on leading diverse teams; and diversifying the Haas faculty and Haas School Board.
Haas also appointed Chief DEI Officer Élida Bautista to oversee a six-person team focusing on admissions, community-related DEIJB issues, and, uniquely, faculty support.
Building on the Defining Leadership Principles, the school’s DEI Strategic Plan, first drafted in 2018 and updated in 2021, outlines aspirations for a learning environment where everyone belongs and everyone can thrive. The plan aims to equip all members of the Haas community to effectively lead diverse teams. (Research from Haas faculty and the work of the Center for Equity, Gender, and Leadership (EGAL) makes the business case that diversity on teams can drive performance.)
The Heart of What’s Next
Looking forward, Haas continues to build on its academic strength in undergraduate, graduate, and non-degree executive education offerings.
The school also continues to embrace new ideas. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the school’s foray to digital education, inspired by Berkeley Executive Education’s early adoption of virtual classroom teaching.
Students from the top-ranked Berkeley Haas Master of Financial Engineering Program in the classroom. Linda Kreitzman launched the program in 2001 with John O’Brien. Photo: Noah Berger
The virtual classrooms now anchor the Flex MBA program,—now in its second year—which combines academic courses in a live online environment with the option to come to campus for electives. At the undergraduate level, the school’s two-year program is expanding to become the four-year Spieker Undergraduate Program. The first four-year cohort will enroll in August of 2024.
Stepping up to address the severity of climate change, Haas created the Office of Sustainability and Climate Change to support teaching and research across agriculture, real estate, energy, finance, and corporate sectors. The school’s investment in sustainability includes the greenest academic building in the U.S., Chou Hall, having earned TRUE Zero Waste certification at the highest possible level along with a LEED Platinum certification for its energy efficient design and operation. Plans are now underway to launch a joint MBA/master’s in climate solutions degree with Berkeley’s Rausser College of Natural Resources.
Grads at 2022 MBA Commencement at the Greek Theatre.
Many of the school’s advancements have been made possible through the support of its loyal alumni, who continue to make Haas stronger through their engagement as teachers, mentors, employers, partners, and donors to the school.
Harrison said she is looking forward to celebrating the school’s many milestones and to what the future will bring, noting, “We look back with pride, but we move forward to have impact.”
Watch for more details about the anniversary in the forthcoming summer issue of the Berkeley Haas Magazine or read more Haas history on the website.
Professor Jennifer Chatman has won a lifetime achievement award for “research on culture that has changed the field of organizational behavior,” according to an announcement from the Academy of Management’s Organizational Behavior Division.
Professor Jennifer Chatman
Chatman, the Paul J. Cortese Distinguished Professor of Management and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Berkeley Haas, will receive the award at the OB@AOM conference in Boston next month.
Chatman has “pioneered new theoretical and conceptual approaches to the topic and continues to do so. She also has been a strong mentor to many doctoral students over the years. Finally, beyond her own work and the work of her students, she has contributed to the field as an editor…and editorial board member at almost all of our top journals,” according to the announcement.
In the early 1990s, Chatman co-created the field’s leading quantitative research tool, the Organizational Culture Profile, with Charles O’Reilly, MBA 71, PhD 75, and Dave Caldwell. It illustrated how organizational culture can be quantified, has defined the agenda for the scientific study of culture for decades, and remains the most robust and reliable measure of organizational culture to date.
In nominating Chatman, colleagues noted that she “owns the topic” of culture research and is a “household name” in the field. They also noted that her achievements span beyond being purely scholarly: “For more than 30 years, Jenny has been one of those rare scholars who are triple threats. They are able to be world class scholars over time even as they are leaders in our profession and their host institution,” describing her as “an icon in the field of organizational behavior, as a scholar, as an instructor, and as a mentor. Her career stretches long, well over 30 years, and during that time her work has been nothing short of pathbreaking” and the “ultimate exemplar of a completely involved modern OB researcher, educator, and contributor to the larger world of work and working.”
Chatman will continue to expand her leadership when she steps into the role of interim dean this fall, filling from October-December while Dean Ann Harrison is on sabbatical.
The award is given biennially to a scholar who has made a seminal contribution to the development of the field of regulatory studies.
“As an American, it’s a great honor to have my work on regulation, much of which has focused on Europe, be recognized by an association of European scholars,” said Vogel.
Vogel, who holds the Soloman P. Lee Chair Emeritus in Business Ethics, has focused his career on subjects ranging from regulating health, safety, and environmental risks in Europe and the United States to global challenges in responsible business. He has examined the differences between environmental policy in the United States compared to that of the European Union. In his book, “The Politics of Precaution: Regulating, Health, Safety and Environmental Risks in Europe and the United States” (Princeton University Press, 2012), he decribed how the U.S. and the E.U. “flip-flopped their position in risk regulation: Whereas before the 1990s the US had often the stricter standards, nowadays EU standards are stricter in many instances,” said Professor Eva Ruffing of Germany’s Osnabrück University, in a speech presenting the award.
Vogel is the author of eight other books, including “California Greenin’: How the Golden State Became an Environmental Leader” (Princeton University Press, 2018). Other books include: ; “Global Challenges in Responsible Business” (Cambridge University Press, 2010); and “The Market for Virtue: The Potential and Limits of Corporate Social Responsibility” (Brookings, 2005).
Vogel has taught both Ethics & Responsibility in Business at Haas and Public and Private Global Business Regulation at UC Berkeley. Since 1982, he has served as editor of Berkeley Haas’ management journal, The California Management Review. He has taught classes and lectured on environment management in the U.S., Europe and Asia.
Subtle shifts in how people use language can foretell big changes in how we think about the world. For example, when followers of astronomer Copernicus stopped calling the sun a planet, it signaled the beginning of the end of the belief that the earth was the center of the universe.
Getting out ahead on far-sighted ideas can yield big financial or reputational rewards, but these can be difficult to spot, even though signals about the next big idea may be lurking in everyday language. Advances in natural language processing are now making it possible.
Berkeley Haas Professor Sameer Srivastava and co-authors have developed a deep learning model that can identify where and when prescient ideas—those that go against convention but later become widely adopted—first emerge.
By parsing millions of public utterances by senators, judges, and executives, they found that far-sighted ideas tend to emerge not from established leaders but rather in the language first used by those on the fringes.
“This is a way to go back and actually find when somebody first used an idea in a way that became prescient,” says Srivastava, whose research with Stanford’s Paul Vicinanza and Amir Goldberg was published in PNAS Nexus. “Our results suggest that those people were more likely to be on the periphery, rather than center, of their field.”
Upstarts or Apple?
Social scientists have long grappled with the question of where paradigm shifts originate, but evidence about where such world-changing ideas originate has often been anecdotal and contradictory. The theory of disruptive innovation, for example, assumes that the ideas behind revolutionary products or business models come from industry upstarts. Yet Apple released its groundbreaking iPhone when it was already a dominant company. And in the law, it’s the Supreme Court—the pinnacle of the establishment—that is generally seen as issuing landmark rulings.
Srivastava and his co-authors used a deep neural network known as Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) to unearth the linguistic markers of prescient ideas and trace how they became mainstream. They first defined “contextually novel ideas” as words or phrases that are used for the first time in a new context, and that also reframe the dominant assumptions in a particular field. Those that prove to be prescient ideas are “contextually novel” at the time they are uttered but later become commonplace. In other words, they foreshadow big changes.
Political outsiders
Among nearly five million floor speeches delivered by members of the U.S. Congress from 1961–2017, the model flagged Mississippi Senators John Stennis as the most prescient and James Eastland as the least prescient. Both fiercely opposed civil rights legislation in the 1960s, but the well-connected and powerful Eastland made his case with overtly racist rhetoric. Stennis, meanwhile, was “among the first to base his objections on the principles of ‘color blindness,’ limited government, and individual freedom,” the researchers wrote. This indirect set of arguments proved highly prescient, “laying the groundwork for contemporary conservative talking points on race relations in the U.S.”
Landmark lower courts
The same idea held true for the law.
In examining 4.2 million digitized federal and state legal rulings, the researchers found that landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions, such as legalizing gay marriage or affirming the Affordable Care Act, tend to originate in lower courts. In fact, the most prescient decisions—those with the highest number of citations—were 22 times more likely to come from state appellate courts than the U.S. Supreme Court.
They also found that the likelihood of authoring a highly prescient decision declines as a judge is promoted from district court to appeals court. This lends further credence to the idea that novel ideas tend to come from those outside the center of a field, Srivastava said. “It’s hard to imagine that a judge would get promoted on the basis of becoming less prescient over time.”
Prescient businesses
In the business world, the researchers had a smaller dataset to work with, analyzing transcripts of the Q&A portion of public quarterly earnings conference calls. In these calls, managers often reveal strategy not found in press releases or official filings. The model flagged smaller firms as more prescient than larger, more established players. Highly prescient firms, according to the model, had above-average stock returns. (The authors are doing more work on business figures to expand the data pool.)
Implications
The findings have implications across many disciplines, says Srivastava, the Ewald T. Grether Professor of Business Administration and Public Policy. Rather than, for example, just examining article or patent citations, which may accrue disproportionately to those who have resources or social status, the language-based approach allows researchers to trace the context in which an idea is first born.
This may pave the way, he says, to more recognition for people who have been historically marginalized—such as women and minorities. “They may be the ones generating a lot of the ideas, even if they aren’t getting credit for all of them.”
Startup: FlowGPT Co-founders: Lifan Wang, MBA 22, and Jay Dang, a former UC Berkeley Computer Science major
Lifan Wang, MBA 23, co-founder of startup FlowGPT (Wang used Lensa AI to generate the image.)
In this interview, Lifan Wang discusses how he met his FlowGPT co-founder, Jay Dang, at UC Berkeley, and why speed was critical for his startup in entering the AI market.
How did you come up with the idea for FlowGPT?
We started this project in January. We both were power users of ChatGPT when it first came out. We would spend around 10 hours a day exploring different use cases of ChatGPT prompts and trying to leverage AI to increase our productivity. As we used it more, we realized that there are so many more use cases that people haven’t discovered. So we started doing extensive research by talking to people who use ChatGPT and prompts. We talked with approximately 100 people from various online communities, such as Discord channels and found that people constantly post and share ChatGPT prompts with each other, which gave us the idea to create a dedicated platform for prompt creators to share their prompts.
How did you get started in entrepreneurship at Haas?
Haas is a great place for aspiring entrepreneurs. I’ve taken several entrepreneurship classes, including a class with Rhonda Shrader, executive director of the Berkeley Haas Entrepreneurship Program, that helped me understand the process of launching a startup — from searching for ideas to conducting user research to creating a prototype.
Haas is a great place for aspiring entrepreneurs.
In the Business of AI, taught by Pieter Abbeel, a renowned professor in the engineering school, I interacted with generative AI and learned about neural networks and the GAN (Generative Adversarial Network), which pits two different deep learning models against each other in a game. I also explored various technical imaging technologies. I firmly believe that AI, especially generative AI, is going to be a significant trend that will revolutionize the world.
Where did you meet your co-founder?
Jay and I met during our time at UC Berkeley SkyDeck, where we attended various events. Jay was seeking funding for his startup in his freshman year. As a part-time venture partner, I was interested in potential investment opportunities. He pitched me his startup, which connected to the work I had previously done in the industry. We had extensive discussions and got to know each other well.
Are you both seeking funding right now?
We secured our C round of funding in May and are currently preparing to launch a new funding round this month or next. Our user base has experienced robust growth, and based on the data we’ve gathered, now is the perfect time to accelerate expansion.
With every technological advancement, there are inherent risks. When computers were introduced, illegal activities emerged on websites and regulations evolved. Our aim is to empower people to be more productive and generate a positive impact while prioritizing safety. We must ensure the safe use of AI, which will become a powerful tool, similar to the internet and software. Many people are already leveraging new AI tools like ChatGPT and Prompt Engineering to increase their productivity. At FlowGPT, we use ChatGPT daily for coding, product management, messaging, and marketing, covering various aspects of our operations. AI represents the next generation of powerful tools that elevate human productivity to new heights.
Our aim is to empower people to be more productive and generate a positive impact while prioritizing safety.
Do you have any advice for aspiring entrepreneurs?
Execution is crucial. That is the most important thing I learned from Jay, my co-founder.
We launched the product in January, just one and a half months after ChatGPT’s release. Unlike many competitors, who were still in the ideation stage, we were already ahead. When competitors attempted to imitate us, we had already iterated three times and gained a million users.
My advice is to start building right away. You don’t have to be an expert at product development to get started. During my time at Cal, I noticed many people getting stuck in the same phase. Some might say, “I’ve got all the business plans figured out, and all I need is one programmer to build the product.” However, as time passed, they were still searching for programmers. The ability to launch is crucial, especially in the initial stages.
Anastassia Fedyk at home with her son. She wears a traditional Ukrainian embroidered vyshyvanka. (Photo by Brittany Hosea-Small)
On the night of Feb. 23, 2022, Anastassia Fedyk was at home, playing with her young son and prepping to teach the next morning, while her husband made homemade pasta for dinner.
“My grandmother was visiting us from Ukraine, and she started getting text messages from my sister in London, saying, ‘Have you seen what’s happening? This is unbelievable,’” she recalls.
What was happening was the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the country where Fedyk, an assistant professor of finance at Berkeley Haas, was born. Russia had made a move on the capital Kyiv and was shelling the city.
It wasn’t totally unexpected—like her entire family, Fedyk had been watching the troop buildup on the Russian border. But the severity of the attack on Kyiv took everyone by surprise. In the days that followed, Fedyk began to think what she could do to help.
Getting to work
Her first answer was to start writing. That was the impetus behind Economists for Ukraine, a group that she co-founded with Yuriy Gorodnichenko, a UC Berkeley professor of economics, along with colleagues from Columbia, University of Illinois and elsewhere. As economists, they hoped they could use their expertise to guide policy and public opinion in support of Ukraine.
“The more we wrote, the more it was seen, and the more there was demand for our writing,” she says. “We didn’t have newspapers knocking on our doors asking for op-eds early on, but we just keep writing, and soon we established an important voice.”
Their work paid off; Fedyk and the group’s writings on Ukraine have been featured in The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and Project Syndicate. Fedyk has also been in-demand internationally for media interviews on the war’s economic impacts, making multiple appearances on CNN, the U.K.’s BBC, Germany’s Deutsche Welle, and more. By banding together with other economists, Fedyk and her colleagues have been able to guide policy as part of the influential Yermak-McFaul International Working Group on Russian Sanctions, and to offer thought leadership on the eventual reconstruction of Ukraine.
A screenshot from Germany’s Deutsche Welle News showing a recent interview with Anastassia Fedyk.
Human and AI-powered aid
Fedyk didn’t stop there. She teamed up with her husband, James Hodson, to launch LifeForce, a platform that takes an economics-based approach to humanitarian aid. Rather than just deliver goods that might not even be needed, LifeForce relies on staff on the ground to continuously check on inventories of important goods, with real-time updates.
“You can basically say, ‘I need insulin,’ and it will tell you which pharmacy near you has insulin and where you can go where you’re not going to be shelled while you’re walking there,” explains Hodson, the CEO of the AI for Good Foundation, which serves as the parent organization for LifeForce. “We’re not going to send you to a pharmacy that’s closed and we’re not going to send you to a pharmacy that doesn’t have the medicine that you need.”
It’s a way of matching needs to resources, Fedyk says. “It’s a very classical economics idea,” she says.
During the winter, Lifeforce also set up warming centers with electricity.
“When the infrastructure damage started in the fall, we set up shelters with internet and heating so that at least people could stay warm and connected during extended outages,” Fedyk says. “Otherwise, when there’s no electricity, there’s no Wi-Fi.”
Witnesses to war
Another initiative Fedyk and Hodson launched is Svidok, a site that acts as a living memorial and a repository for testimony of the lived experience of the war. An anonymous platform, it allows Ukrainians to tell their stories as well as document war crimes and atrocities.
“You need to be able to make a place where people can record their experience,” Fedyk says. “Not just the hard facts for the prosecution, but the lived experiences.”
So far, more than 3,000 Ukrainians—many of them teenagers and young adults—have added journal entries to the site, which has become the largest repository of written testimonies of the war. The posts describe harrowing experiences like hiding in basements and bathrooms during missile attacks, stories by girls and women who say they were raped by Russian soldiers, accounts from survivors of Russian prisons set up on occupied Ukrainian territory, and also descriptions of the tedium of living through endless winter blackouts. Svidok has partnered with the Ministry of Culture and every regional government in Ukraine, and content from the platform has been displayed in exhibits in the U.S. Congress and Poland’s Consulate General.
Teaching and research
At the same time, Fedyk has remained an engaged teacher, leading Haas core finance classes in the evening and executive MBA programs and helping launch the new Flex-MBA program. In June, she was named to Poets&Quants’ 2023 Best 40-Under-40 MBA Professors list.
Fedyk in her garden (Photo by Brittany Hosea-Small)
She’s also a passionate researcher: Her most recent work looks at what happens when firms invest in AI. Surprisingly, employment doesn’t drop, she found. “Firms that invest in AI are producing more, they’re scaling up their operations, but they’re also hiring more employees, especially people like product managers to help manage that expanded product variety,” she explained.
From Ukraine to Berkeley
Fedyk moved to the U.S. when she was ten, when her parents were pursing higher degrees in finance and accounting. She went to high school in the Bay Area while her mother earned her PhD at Berkeley Haas.
“We lived in the university housing for students who have families—a very academic life,” she says. “Even as a kid here in Berkeley, I used to come to some of the seminars and classes with my mom. I guess I was always on the path of becoming an academic economist.”
After an undergraduate degree at Princeton, where she met her future husband on the very first day, followed by a stint at Goldman Sachs and a PhD at Harvard, she was able to come back to Berkeley, this time as a professor—her “dream job.”
“Moving back was like coming home,” she says.
Anastassia Fedyk and James Hodson with their son in their garden. (Photo by Brittany Hosea-Small)
Long road ahead
But her connection to Ukraine—her first home—runs deep. Some of her happiest memories are the summers she and her sister spent there after they moved to the U.S., at her grandma’s apartment in Chernivtsi.
She feels fortunate that her grandmother was visiting when the war broke out, and that she’s been able to make her home in Fedyk’s house for the past year and a half. Fedyk happy that her beloved grandmother is safe, but she longs to return to those old family reunions in a peaceful, prospering Ukraine.
There’s a long road ahead that will require a military victory for Ukraine, supporting humanitarian and economic needs in the war’s aftermath, and eventually rebuilding. But the lesson that Fedyk says she has taken away from her work supporting Ukraine is how much of a difference she could make through civic engagement.
“Ukrainians impressed the world with their bravery, but behind that bravery is a decentralized, collective effort,” she says. “Ideas can grow into initiatives that touch thousands of lives, if only we are willing to invest the time and effort.”
Dr. queen jaks listens during a consultation with a faculty member. (Photo: Brittany Hosea-Small)
When Dr. queen jaks walks into a Berkeley Haas classroom and sits in the back scribbling notes, students wonder what’s going on.
“They think the professor is in trouble and I’m there to get the dirt,” says queen, who writes her name with lowercase letters.
But as the school’s first diversity instructional support consultant, queen is not an enforcer. She’s there as an invited guest of faculty members who want help in making their teaching more inclusive.
“It’s so important to make it clear that I’m not there to tell people they’re doing something wrong. I’m not there to hear both sides,” she says. “I’m there because the instructor wants support.”
Unique role
Over the past year, queen has been helping Haas faculty navigate the minefield of changing mores and heightened awareness around a range of topics often referred to as diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and belonging (DEIJB). Her role is unique: Rather being called in to mediate when things heat up, she coaches instructors individually—by observing classes, offering suggestions on course content, or consulting on issues that come up in class. She also teaches best practices through brief workshops and exercises.
Holding both an MBA and a PhD in organizational behavior, queen is fluent in the language of academia, while also drawing on her own experiences of feeling like an outsider who broke into that world as a first-generation student from an impoverished community. She grew up in San Diego and earned a BS in business administration from UC Riverside, going on for her MBA from the University of Redlands and her doctorate from Case Western Reserve University.
She approaches the job with empathy, curiosity, and a natural sense of humor.
“We’re all learning, we’re all going to make mistakes, and that’s okay,” says queen, whose own research focuses on the contributions of marginalized communities. “Society is evolving, and people want change really badly, so everything that comes out of your mouth in the classroom is going to be scrutinized. I’m here to say ‘I feel you. Now let’s turn it around and see how that might be perceived.’”
DEI Instructional support consultant queen chats with Professor Steve Tadelis in his office. (Photo: Brittany Hosea-Small)
Haas Chief DEI Officer Élida Bautista dreamed up the new role in response to growing demand from students for more diversity in course content and on the faculty. In addition to the work Haas is doing to hire more diverse faculty members and an effort led by the Center for Equity, Gender and Leadership to compile a library of business cases featuring diverse protagonists, Bautista wanted to find a way to directly support current faculty. Dean Ann Harrison greenlighted the pilot position.
“When I looked around for consultants and talked to my counterparts at other business schools and universities, no one was doing this—so we didn’t really have a model,” Bautista says. As a clinical psychologist, she designed the role so that all services would be confidential and voluntary.
“Anytime you force people to do something, there’s an inherent resistance and that decreases the efficacy,” she said. “Some people think that when you make something voluntary, you end up preaching to the choir. But even the choir needs tuning: People who are bought into these ideas still need skills to carry them out, and they’ll end up bringing others along.”
Sensitive content
That’s what has happened. Associate Professor Juliana Schroeder—who championed the new role along with associate deans Jennifer Chatman and Don Moore and served on the hiring committee—offered to be a guinea pig for queen to observe her leadership class.
Schroeder is a social psychologist who has thought carefully about diversity and psychological safety in her teaching and materials. Still, on the day of the observation, when she was referencing the 1986 Challenger Space Shuttle explosion to shed light on decision-making pitfalls for a case study about car racing, a student had a “PTSD-like” incident in her classroom.
“He was an Army veteran, and this was directly relevant to his experience,” Schroeder says. “I was so glad queen was there that day, and I was blown away by how great her feedback was. It really illustrated what a benefit it was to have someone well-trained in these topics right there in my classroom.”
After the session, queen gave Schroeder a detailed report with suggestions on adjusting her script and offering both a written and verbal alert for sensitive topics. It also included a list of things she was doing well, and some practices to add—such as repeating back answers that were lower in volume, acknowledging students who were waiting to speak, and using contrasting colors on slides—as well as including photos in her slides that would show diversity beyond race and gender.
Word of mouth
Schroeder thought it was so helpful she asked to share it with other faculty members, and soon queen had a full calendar.
“Every single person I’ve worked with has been so receptive,” queen says. “I’ve spent a lot of time at business schools, and it’s been jaw-dropping how much Haas has embraced this.”
Associate Professor Mathijs De Vaan invited her to sit in on a session focused on DEIJB in his MBA course Leading People. De Vaan, who grew up in The Netherlands, is mindful that his class includes international students who may be new to American culture, as well as students with backgrounds that have been marginalized in the U.S.
“It’s a challenge. There’s always a group of students who are very knowledgeable and very vocal, and others who know these are sensitive subjects and are afraid to speak at all,” says De Vaan. “I wanted students to be on the same page in understanding the scope of the problem that racism and discrimination represent in the U.S., so I gave them a number of examples of where companies fell short.”
That’s important, queen told him, but it can also be stressful for some students. “For minority students in the room, it might reinforce the idea that their group is marginalized,” he says. To address this, in the next iteration of the class he focused less on examples of problematic situations, and more on possible solutions to societal challenges.
Phasing out the ‘cold call’
Professor Steve Tadelis chats with queen about summer plans. (Photo: Brittany Hosea-Small)
As an instructor in the Israeli Air Force almost 40 years ago, Professor Steve Tadelis says he learned how to teach through feedback from required classroom observations. But the DEI workshops he had taken hadn’t helped him with the specific challenges he faces as an instructor. “I was very open to this,” he says.
After working with queen, Tadelis stood up at the fall faculty meeting to give her an enthusiastic endorsement and encourage others to seek her out. He says he appreciated that she gave him straightforward ways to improve his teaching, including rethinking how he was calling on students.
“I do relatively little of the classic business school ‘cold calling,’ because of the artificial aspect of it. It’s rare in the workplace that a senior leader would suddenly turn to someone and say, ‘What do you think we should do about this?’ They would want more preparation,” Tadelis says.
But after consulting with queen, he realized he could give people even more choice in how they participate without lowering his requirements. “My goal is to give each student a set of tools that they can use as decisionmaker, but I’m not there to change their personalities,” he says.
Debate and experimentation
Tadelis, an economist, still worries about how to create a safe classroom space without shutting down honest debate, and how to let people have moments of discomfort in a respectful way.
“How do we create language that is precise, knowing that some words are clearly off limits but not everyone is going to love every word?”, he says. “There are so many historical wrongs that need to be acknowledged and addressed. But it would be nice if there was less combativeness and more debate, exploration, and experimentation.”
That’s one of the reasons queen’s approach has been so effective. She believes that instructors need to pay attention to students’ needs as individuals beyond their grades, and that many practices need updating. At the same time, she believes in collaboration—and good intentions.
“How we define and integrate DEI is constantly changing, which means that no one—myself included—has all the answers,” queen says. “We just all have to keep giving each other feedback and grace, looking at what we can do better next time.”
Elena Gomez, BS 91, a finance executive with more than 30 years of experience in leading global organizations, has been named the new chair of the Haas School Board. She is the first woman to serve in the role.
Elena Gomez is new chair of the Haas School Board
Gomez, chief financial officer at restaurant technology firm Toast, succeeds Jack Russi, BS 82, a national managing partner of corporate development at Deloitte. Russi, who recently retired after a 40-year career at Deloitte, served as Haas School Board chair for nine years.
“We are so thankful to Jack for his boundless wisdom and strategic guidance during his tenure,” said Dean Ann Harrison. “We know that Elena will continue Jack’s legacy of leadership excellence and we look forward to working with her to achieve so many of our future goals.”
The Haas School Board, which meets three times a year, advises the dean and supports the school’s strategic direction. Gomez began her three-year term July 1.
“I’m honored to have the opportunity to chair the board, and work alongside Ann and her amazing leadership team to continue to help Haas thrive,” Gomez said.
“I’m honored to have the opportunity to chair the board, and work alongside Ann and her amazing leadership team to continue to help Haas thrive.” – Elena Gomez
At Toast, Gomez directs finance and strategy, corporate development, accounting, treasury, and business operations. Prior to Toast, Gomez served as the chief financial officer at Zendesk, where she helped scale the company to over $1 billion in annual revenue. Gomez arrived at Zendesk after serving for six years as senior vice president of finance and strategy at Salesforce.
A strong advocate for more women and diverse leaders in business, Gomez served on the founding advisory council for the Center for Equity, Gender & Leadership at Haas. As a Haas Board member since 2019, Gomez, a first-generation college student, has worked with Harrison on strategies to promote inclusion and recruit and retain diverse students.
In a recent Haas podcast, Gomez, the daughter of El Salvadoran immigrants, discussed the importance of being a role model throughout her career. She said she wanted others to see that “not only am I Latina and female, but I want to excel in my role, to show the next generation what is possible.
Gomez is a member of the board of directors at Smartsheet and PagerDuty, and is on the board of The Boys and Girls Clubs of San Francisco. She was also named to the San Francisco Business Times’ 2017 list of “Most Influential Women in Business.”
A new study is the first to document how removing commission fees on trading platforms improves returns for the average trader.
Photo: iStock
The advent of no-fee trading on platforms such as Robinhood has helped fuel an explosion in retail investing—and raised concerns that novices would be tempted to trade too often and would lose more money.
New research co-authored by Berkeley Haas assistant professor Omri Even-Tov shows this fear may be exaggerated: While average investors trade more when fees are removed, they also earn more.
“There is a lot of debate about whether more activity among retail traders will harm their performance, and we show that portfolios don’t underperform just because of greater activity,” Even-Tov says. “In fact, net performance improves by about 11% annually, and this improvement is driven by savings from the removal of fees rather than changes in the returns of trades.”
In a new working paper, co-authored by Berkeley Haas doctoral student Kimberlyn George and professors Shimon Kogan from the University of Pennsylvania and Eric So from MIT, the researchers took advantage of a natural experiment by international trading platform eToro, which dropped fees on certain trades in different countries at different times over the past several years. The research also concluded that individuals craft more diverse portfolios when trading is free.
Boom in retail trading
The popularity of retail investor trading has skyrocketed in recent years. In 2020, more than 10 million Americans opened a new brokerage account. In the month of January 2021, six million more downloaded a financial trading app. There is, according to Deloitte, “an emerging class of individual retail investors” that now accounts for approximately 20% of all trading volume in U.S. stock and options.
A confluence of factors is behind these numbers, from accessibility through smartphones to stay-at-home orders during the pandemic. But central to this growth is the introduction of zero-commission trades, in which startups like Robinhood have done away with the longstanding convention of charging a fee for each trade.
“They’ve found other ways to support their operations, and now regulators are looking at whether or not these new methods need to be reined in,” says Berkeley Haas assistant professor Omri Even-Tov. “But what happens if we reintroduce commission fees? Nobody has an answer to that question.”
No fees means more trading and better performance
The trading platform eToro’s staggered removal of trading fees in different countries allowed the researchers to compare investors’ behavior before and after fees were gone. Even-Tov and his co-authors looked at these patterns for over 40,000 investors between October 2018 and November 2019.
The research design proved particularly powerful as it cut across three different dimensions of trading behavior. First, the researchers could look at how individuals changed their own behavior (if at all) when trading fees were removed. Second, they could compare trading behavior between individuals in countries with and without fees. And third, they could compare how individuals traded stocks that had no commission (non-leveraged trades) as opposed to those that continued to have a commission (leveraged and short sale trades).
Even-Tov and his colleagues found, first and most intuitively, that the removal of fees increased trading frequency by an average of about 30%. Having no fees also drew more people to the eToro platform: New users grew by 172% in countries without fees and only 18% in countries where fees remained in place. Interestingly, the removal of fees also led people to hold significantly more diverse portfolios. Most important, taking away fees improved net performance among traders.
The regulatory question
These results come at time when the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is considering whether to regulate one of the main ways that retail brokerage firms make revenue outside of commission, a process called payment for order flow. Though the new study looked at markets outside the U.S., Even-Tov and his colleagues ran an analysis to demonstrate that the kind of retail trading conducted by the subjects of their research maps neatly onto the kind of trading taking place on American platforms.
As a result, one of the implications from this work is that while stricter scrutiny of payment for order flow may be important for several reasons, regulatory bodies should be wary of pushing online trading platforms back toward a commission model when putting new policies in place.
“There is a common belief in this idea that if people trade more they will lose more, and that getting rid of fees encourages all kinds of irresponsible trading behavior,” Even-Tov says. “In fact, we found that a reduction in fees resulted in net savings, among other positive outcomes. So the SEC should tread carefully when it looks to monitor how retail trading platforms charge their users.”
The inaugural class of 69 Flex students in the evening & weekend MBA program. Photo: Jim Block
Thomas Seidl, a data science manager for Red Bull Soccer in Munich, set a goal to get an MBA from a top American university to future-proof his career in sports analytics. Trouble was, he wanted to stay in Germany with his wife and two young children.
“I wanted to see whether there was an option to do an MBA in the United States at a world class university from home basically,” said Seidl, who holds a PhD in computer science in sports. “I was curious about whether I could get into a top-ranked program. I just wanted to give it my best shot.”
Thomas Seidl, EWMBA 25, with family, attends Flex classes from his home in Munich.
Seidl didn’t have any luck finding an online program in the U.S. that met his requirements. But then, while researching the Berkeley Haas Evening & Weekend Program, he discovered the new Flex MBA option, which lets students take courses remotely with the option to come to campus for electives. It sounded perfect, so Seidl applied and was accepted, joining 68 other students last year in the inaugural Flex cohort, who hail from the U.S., Canada, Egypt, Japan, the Netherlands, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates.
The Flex cohort, launched last year, does things a bit differently. While the evening and weekend MBA cohorts meet in person during scheduled blocks of time throughout their programs—on either evenings or weekends—Flex students take their core courses remotely, with an option to come to campus for electives. For parents, caregivers, and professionals who move or travel often for their careers or for fun, Flex provides what they say they need most: schedule flexibility.
“The Flex program allowed me to stay in Los Angeles and stay very close to my family while also getting an MBA,” said Kevin Haroldo Ramirez, who was a philosophy and legal studies major as a UC Berkeley undergraduate. As a senior consultant at Edgility Consulting, Ramirez said he wanted an MBA to sharpen his business skills as his career progresses in the nonprofit sector.
“It worked out perfectly”
Like Ramirez, about 74% of the Flex class is from outside of the Bay Area, joining from nine California counties and 17 U.S. states. Seven students are living abroad, and many have relocated during the program, says Leah Rozeboom, director of Flex Experience.
Some students living in different time zones, like Seidl, log on in the middle of the night twice a week to take classes. “When class is over at 3 a.m., you start to think about the content and you try to get back to sleep,” he said. “But then your brain just starts to get into all of these ideas about ‘how can I apply this stuff in sports?’ Sometimes it’s difficult, but I think that’s a good sign that I am engaged.”
One of the four Berkeley Haas-based virtual classrooms used for live teaching during Flex.
Kinshuk Verma, a product manager for Electric Hydrogen, who lives in San Jose, Ca., applied to Flex because of her heavy travel schedule. “At my previous job, I was traveling more than 50% of the time, and I knew that the weekend or weekday schedule was not going to work for me,” she said “Once I got into the Flex program, I had a baby, and it worked out perfectly.”
With an equally hectic life, Molly (Hill) Bjorkman, a mom of two who juggles work as a manager for an arts nonprofit and helps run Napa-based GRO wines with her husband, Lars Bjorkman, said she never considered commuting to do an MBA.
Molly Bjorkman, EWMBA 25, helps run GRO, which makes small lot, single-vineyard wines sourced from Napa Valley, with her husband, Lars.
For Bjorkman, easing back into school during the first semester was difficult but fulfilling. “The core classes are challenging,” she said. “I am an all As” type so I have to be a little forgiving of myself and the first semester was, ‘how do I do school again? There’s so much that was new and there is still not enough time.” Last semester, Bjorkman, mom to an 11-year-old and 13-year-old, rose at 5 a.m. at her Calistoga, Ca., home to do an hour of asynchronous course work before heading to her local office. On Tuesdays and Thursdays from 4-6 p.m. she joined live classes.
Bjorkman said she was impressed by the camaraderie among the many mothers in Flex. Her study group includes moms Erin Mitsuyoshi, who lives in Hawaii, and Sophie Christian, who lives in Portland, Oregon.
Christian, a college piano professor, said the group’s connection on Slack and at in-person weekend have helped make bonds stronger.
Christian said the pandemic and its many restrictions led her to pursue a new career path for herself that she believes will lead to a bigger impact. “I wanted something more flexible in business so I’m exploring,” she said. “I still run my teaching business but I am letting go of that part of my life. I jumped at the chance when Berkeley offered this program.”
Coming together
Last April, the Flex cohort convened in Berkeley for an in-person weekend. Students participated in Leadership Communications course sessions on compelling storytelling and finding your authentic leadership style, completed one-on-one coaching sessions, and enjoyed small group dinners with Haas faculty and coffee with students in the evening MBA cohort.
Maria Carkovic, (middle) who taught the popular Macroeconomics course to the Lux cohort, surprised the students by showing up in-person while they were on campus in April. Photo: Jim Block
Maria Carkovic, who taught their Macroeconomics class, surprised the cohort in person during lunch at Chou Hall, where they met her for the first time. “It was a wonderful surprise,” said Carkovic, who was chosen by the evening MBA class for the 2023 Cheit Award for teaching excellence. “I think that they were very aware that it was special to be together, so they were interacting to the max and connections were being formed. Life gets very complicated at the age that they go to grad school in business and the Flex program works to their advantage.”
Strong bonds have formed within the group, encouraged in part by cohort representative Lisa Dalgliesh, who is described by many classmates as a connector.
During Flex orientation kickoff, she said she was pleased to meet three other students from Texas sitting at her table. The group now meets for occasional dinners in Texas. Last August, while traveling for work to Washington, D.C., she had dinner and drinks with four classmates, and she hosted classmates when they traveled to Austin for work.
(Left to right) Lokesh Kesavan, Mackenzie O’Holleran, Daniel Mitchell, Rahul Sharan, Lisa Dalgliesh, all EWMBA 25. Photo: Jim Block
Dalgliesh, who lives in Austin and works as a people strategy and integration leader for Deloitte, said she chose Flex, in part, to stay put in her native Texas and not uproot her life. “I thought there would be a social trade off when you go to a program like this, but that’s not been the case,” she said.“Quite the opposite..It’s fun to visit people in their hubs.”
Flex is “the future of academia,” she added. “This is an equitable approach to ensuring that people from all walks of life and at all different stages of life have an opportunity to tap into an education from a top tier institution from anywhere.” she said.
“This is an equitable approach to ensuring that people from all walks of life and at all different stages of life have an opportunity to tap into an education from a top-tier institution from anywhere.” – Lisa Dalgliesh, EWMBA 25
Class from anywhere
The pandemic, though isolating for many students, proved that both remote work and remote teaching are possible, even preferable for some, which is one reason why Flex applications are rising.
Maeve Peterson, EWMBA 25, during an April storytelling session, part of the Leadership Communications course, taught by Jennifer Caleshu, MBA 12, and a continuing lecturer.
“We don’t take a one-size-fits all approach to our part-time programs for working professionals,” said Jamie Breen, assistant dean of Berkeley Haas MBA programs. “Flex is an inclusive, future-forward program that works for an increasing number of students who want to earn a world-class degree that fits with their schedules and lives.”
Cairo serves as a perfect base for Scott Diddams to travel all over Europe. “I’ve attended (Haas) MBA lectures from Paris, Athens, London, and Cairo,” said Diddams, a product manager at Microsoft, who logs into class from different time zones. “I feel like I’ve been able to keep up and perform just as well as if I were in person. If anything, as an introvert, it makes it even easier for me to pay attention when I’m in my own space and not worrying about the classroom.”
“I’ve attended (Haas) MBA lectures from Paris, Athens, London, and Cairo,” – Scott Diddams, a product manager at Microsoft.
After coming to campus in April, Diddams, a former paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division of the U.S. Army, stopped in Seattle to work at Microsoft headquarters before flying home. In a meeting with a senior engineer, Diddams said he tested some concepts he’d learned in his marketing class.
Scott Diddams with classmate Mei Kaslik, who visited him in Egypt while she and her husband were on vacation.
The manager gave him excellent feedback, he said. “Having that impact at work is something that I don’t think I would’ve been able to do a year ago before taking these courses,” he said. “I certainly felt much more confident.”
Macroeconomics was a favorite course, he said. “Attending that class from Egypt, which is undergoing a kind of financial inflation crisis, and being able to see that while learning about it,” he said, “that’s the perfect way to learn something.”
Like Diddams, Dalgliesh, who holds an undergraduate degree in psychology and a master’s degree in human dimensions of organizations from the University of Texas, Austin, said she believes her MBA will take her to the next step professionally.
“It was important for me to learn more about the business world so I can have a seat at the table,” she said.
Berkeley, Calif. – The Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, today announced the launch of the Berkeley Haas Sustainable Business Research Prize. The prize encourages serious research with timely, real-world business-practice applications among business school faculty around the world related to responsible business, sustainability, and ESG (environmental, social, and governance) issues.
This new prize seeks to recognize the most significant research papers that hold the greatest potential to catalyze immediate change in business management practices in the face of urgent global environmental crises. Additionally, the prize will motivate thought leadership globally and add to the body of knowledge and intellectual capital in the role of business in society.
Recognizing that the global market is not acting fast enough to address the climate change crisis, the 2023 prize will seek papers that explore economic levers that motivate individuals, corporations, and markets to act with urgency on climate and resource-saving initiatives.
This Haas Sustainable Business Research Prize is supported by Allan Spivack, MBA 79 and former President & CEO of RGI Home. Spivack has long been at the vanguard of sustainable business and serves on the Senior Advisory Board of the Berkeley Haas Center for Responsible Business.
“The University of California, Berkeley has a tradition of cutting-edge innovation across many academic and research disciplines,” Spivack said. “My intention in creating the Sustainable Business Research Prize is to provide a platform in which the urgent conversations around climate change and industry can meet the moment.”
A committee of well-regarded sustainability researchers and practitioners at the Haas School of Business will choose one academic study to win the $20,000 prize. The committee will be chaired by Berkeley Haas Dean Ann E. Harrison and made up of faculty members Reed Walker, Transamerica Chair in Business Strategy; Assistant Professor Sytske Wijnsma; Assistant Professor Jonathan Weigel; and Associate Professor Panos Patatoukas, the L.H. Penney Chair in Accounting and Distinguished Teaching Fellow.
The prize is part of Dean Harrison’s three strategic priorities for the Haas School: sustainability, entrepreneurship, and diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and belonging (DEIJB). As the top public business school, Berkeley Haas is committed to addressing sustainability challenges by preparing our students to lead the transition to a sustainable and inclusive economy through designing and implementing new business models, policies, and solutions.
“At the Haas School of Business, we believe that the transition to a sustainable world is being led by business. It is business that is mobilizing the vast amount of capital and innovation needed to create successful environmental solutions at scale,” Harrison said. “The Haas Sustainable Business Research Prize seeks to address this challenge in translating cutting-edge academic research into action in the face of the climate crisis.”
The prize is administered by the Berkeley Haas Center for Responsible Business (CRB). The CRB connects students, businesses, and faculty to mobilize the positive potential of business to create a more responsible, resilient, and sustainable society. Building on more than two decades of research, teaching, and engaging with business, the center encourages sustainability-minded research and its application in the marketplace of commerce and ideas.
In getting a good deal on a loan, numbers matter: Lenders look at companies’ financial statements and payback on past loans. Strong financial statements could mean a lower interest rate or better terms for the borrower.
But in the competitive landscape of loan acquisition, it’s not just about crunching numbers. Loan officers and borrowing managers are people, after all, and those who do repeat business build relationships and trust over time. The soft information accumulated in these relationships can reduce the costs of screening and monitoring, and thus reduce the cost of debt, according to new Berkeley Haas research.
“While two companies with the same credit score may appear similar on paper, our research shows that individual lending relationships can reveal important differences between them,” said Omri Even-Tov, assistant professor of accounting at the Haas School of Business. “These relationships foster trust and reduce information gaps, allowing lenders to gain valuable soft information about a borrower’s sense of responsibility and overall creditworthiness.”
Even-Tov’s forthcoming paper in the Review of Accounting Studies—coauthored by Xinlei Li of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hui Wang of the Renmin University of China, and Christopher Williams of the University of Michigan—shows that established relationships between a loan officer and a borrowing manager not only increase the likelihood of a loan, but tend to make the conditions of that loan better for the borrower without increasing risk for the lender.
These results, the researchers suggest, are increasingly important as technological innovation means fewer personal relationships in banking—and beyond.
Unique dataset
Even-Tov and his colleagues examined a sample of loans from between 1996 and 2016. They manually collected the signatures on these loans to determine the names of two key actors who are typically engaged in contracting negotiations and interact extensively. This laborious process allowed them to create a dataset comprising nearly 4,000 loans with 2,800 unique borrowing managers and 2,100 unique loan offices. The vast majority of these loans were one-off interactions, but some of them were conducted by the same loan officer and borrowing manager two or more times.
Comparing these groups, the researchers found that established relationships between lenders and borrowers proved favorable for both parties. For the borrowers, they led to better interest rates. For the lenders, they allowed for better screening and monitoring as evidenced by fewer rating downgrades.
The cost of turnover
They also found that when a borrowing manager and loan officer left their jobs, the two firms were roughly 70% less likely to engage in business together. These results were especially pronounced among smaller institutions, and with loan officers who manage fewer transactions, as these two groups rely more heavily on soft information accumulated in their relationships.
“This really quantifies a lot of anecdotal evidence about the importance of relationships, and it also sheds light on an underappreciated cost of turnover,” Even-Tov said. When an employee leaves a company, it’s a loss not only of their knowledge and skills, but their relationships, too. If a company loses its CFO, it has not only lost that distinct set of talents, but possibly the chance of getter better deals on loans. “Companies need to factor in these less-tangible assets of their employees.”
Decline in professional relationships
Even-Tov highlighted two related implications raised by this paper: New technological tools are driving a decline in professional relationships, and this is happening in industries beyond banking. He gave the auditing industry as an example. Auditors in previous years would be embedded in clients’ offices. They got to know the companies they were auditing, and the people who worked there. Today, a great deal of auditing is done remotely, or even automatically. The same is true for consulting, real estate, venture capital, and private equity.
“We need to think about what we lose when technologies allow us to bypass the need for interaction between individuals,” Even-Tov said. “There are advantages to doing this work more quickly or from a distance, of course. But these changes also introduce costs, and this work makes some of those costs clear.”
Berkeley Haas welcomed an accomplished group of nearly 700 new full-time 
Berkeley Haas this month is kicking off its anniversary celebration of 125 years of reimagining business. The festivities commemorate a significant milestone in the 
“As an American, it’s a great honor to have my work on regulation, much of which has focused on Europe, be recognized by an association of European scholars,” said Vogel.
