Summer 2024|By Mickey Butts| ILLUSTRATION: DAN PAGE/THE ISPOT
Rethinking ESG scores
The ESG investing industry has attracted trillions of dollars in part by telling investors they can “do well by doing good.”
Thousands of funds and other investment products have been created around the idea that identifying companies with rising scores on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) measures can lead to market-beating returns.
Yet a paper co-authored by Professor Panos N. Patatoukas and published in The Accounting Review suggests that outperformance attributed to improving ESG scores—as measured by current standards—may be a mirage.
“Sorting out correlation from causation is critical in the debate over ESG investing, and we found correlation, not causation,” Patatoukas says.
The researchers—who include Byung Hyun Ahn, PhD 21, of Dimensional Fund Advisors and George S. Skiadopoulos of London’s Queen Mary University—found that relatively larger, more stable, more profitable companies are more likely to have their ESG scores upgraded because they have the most resources to fix weaknesses in those scores and promote improvements. Any above-market returns attributed to ESG scores disappeared when Patatoukas controlled for revenue, growth potential, and other fundamental stock-screening factors.
“Trillions of dollars of capital have been allocated according to the idea that you can rely on improving ESG ratings to beat the market,” Patatoukas says. “Our data challenge this idea.”
His research does not suggest that companies should lessen efforts to reduce carbon footprints or relax plans to be better corporate citizens. Instead, those goals must accelerate in the face of the climate crisis, Patatoukas says.
To give investors the transparency to make decisions in line with their values, he believes the ESG measurement system needs a major overhaul to include information beyond what is already in corporate financial statements.
Patatoukas disagrees with the premise that more responsible portfolios need to necessarily outperform the market—the very idea of doing well by doing good. Investment outperformance is not necessarily an indication of environmental or social progress but rather a measure of capital transfer across investors, he says.
Efforts at greater transparency could falter if firms fail to accurately measure and disaggregate indicators that capture each of ESG’s individual performance dimensions, says Patatoukas. Creating a better measurement system will require a collaborative effort across finance, accounting, economics, operations, climate science, and software engineering. Meanwhile, companies will operate with a patchwork of laws and regulations for the near future, with the Securities and Exchange Commission’s long-awaited climate-disclosurerules blocked by litigation.
“The massive opportunity here is to go beyond identifying companies that are good at checking all ESG rating boxes and develop a way to measure those making real strides toward decarbonization,” Patatoukas says. “Better measurement will facilitate more efficient allocation of capital and speed transition to a more sustainable future.”
Viviana Alvarez Sanchez, former head of sustainability for Unilever North America, moderates the opening panel at the CFRM conference.
With the Securities and Exchange Commission’s long-awaited climate-disclosure rules blocked by litigation, public companies will continue to operate with a patchwork of laws and standards on sustainability reporting for the near future.
But the consensus among the investors, corporate sustainability officers, accountants, CFOs, and standard setters who gathered at Haas in March was that markets have already moved, with thousands of companies already disclosing information about their carbon emissions and climate risk exposures. In fact, many public and private companies are subject to new reporting regulations in California and the European Union, and investor pressure for increased transparency on climate risk disclosures and other sustainability issues will only continue.
“We’re in a time of regulatory and macroeconomic uncertainty, but that does not mean corporate sustainability reporting is not marching forward,” said Professor Panos N. Patatoukas in his opening remarks at the CFRM 27th Conference on Financial Reporting. “What we measure is what we treasure. My hope is that improved measurement will lead to more efficient allocation of capital in society, which could, hopefully, accelerate the transition to a more sustainable economy.”
Professor Panos N. Patatoukas, faculty director of the Center of Financial Reporting Management (CFRM) and co-faculty director of the Sustainable and Impact Finance Initiative at Berkeley Haas.
Former Haas dean and Professor Laura Tyson, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers and a senior advisor to SAIF, gave opening remarks that stressed the importance of consistency for both companies and investors.
“This is incredibly important and it’s all happening right now,” Tyson said.
Laura D. Tyson, professor of the graduate school and former Berkeley Haas dean
Tyson noted that in the United States, the discussion tends to be about actions that companies take that may have a financial consequence for investors—known as financial materiality. While materiality is the focus of the SEC’s proposed rules, it’s just one part of the discussion, she noted: The second part is non material items that may be important to society or shareholders.
“We have had for a very long time, organizing our financial markets, a set of acceptable standards for traditional financial measures,” Tyson said. “Every firm has to apply them. Every accounting firm has to make sure firms apply them. We need something like that in the standards for sustainability. I think we’ll get there, but Europe may get there before us.”
The company perspective
The first panel of the day focused on companies’ perspective, featuring Joe Allanson of Salesforce, Claire Boland of Joby Aviation, R. Paul Herman, CEO of impact investing firm HIP Investor, Sydney Lindquest, ESG director for energy services company SLB, and Douglas Sabo, former chief sustainability officer for Visa.
“Concerns by society quickly turn into shareholder concerns,” Allanson, Salesforce’s EVP of Finance ESG, noted.
One effect of the increased focus on sustainability disclosure is that accountants have had to move outside their traditional silos, communicating across companies more widely. He joked that the array of new rules from the SEC, California, and the EU amounts to a “full employment act for accountants.”
Assurance and verification
A panel on assurance included (from left to right) Anita Chan of KPMG, Marie Hache, ESG Partner at PwC, Deloitte Partner Laura McCracken, Mallory Thomas of Baker Tilly, and (not pictured) Trip Borstel of EY. They emphasized the importance of building trust through reporting that is relevant, reliable, and verifiable.
The panelists emphasized the need to restore trust with a global baseline of corporate sustainability reporting that uses standardized measurements and definitions.
“We’ve been on a journey, and the next five-to-eight years are going to be really interesting in terms of what happens with the SEC rules and the legal issues,” McCracken said.
Chan echoed Patatoukas’ remarks: “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.”
The panel discussion also highlighted the need for corporations to develop processes, incentives, and governance mechanisms that integrate traditional financial reporting with sustainability reporting.
Andy Behar, CEO of As You Sow (above left), served as moderator. “Hope is not a strategy. We are starting to get action,” he said.
Setting standards
Berkeley Law Professor Stavros Gadinis moderated a discussion on standard setting that included Verity Chegar of the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), former U.S. Department of Energy advisor Kate Gordon, and Katie Schmitz Eulitt, of the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) Foundation.
Despite the fear that we’ll end up with separate sustainability reporting standards—imposed by the SEC, the EU, and California—the panelists agreed that convergence on reporting standards is in everyone’s interest.
“This is a global issue that doesn’t happen within boundaries,” said Gordon, who served as senior advisor to both U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and California Gov. Gavin Newsom. “There does need to be consistency for companies since they can’t parse the different rules.
Asked why climate risks should be singled out in audit reports above other risks—such as cyber threats or policy changes—Gordon emphasized that “climate risk is different because the risks are known, and they are predictable. They are already in the atmosphere from things we did 50 years ago or more.”
Even the election outcome won’t likely turn back the movement toward more disclosure, Schmitz Eulitt said. “Let’s just inhabit a world where the climate rule gets thrown out. My instinct is that if it’s a material issue, you have to disclose it. Investors are asking for it,” she said.
Gordon (center), with Chegar (left) and Schmitz Eulitt (right)
Investors’ perspective
The last panel of the day focused on the investors’ perspective and included Nuveen Senior Director Anthony Mark Garcia, Jonathan Hudacko, MBA 01, personal investing principal at Vanguard, Jamie Nulph, MSCI’s executive director of climate and sustainability, Anne Simpson, Franklin Templeton’s global head of ESG, and State Street’s Karen Wong, global head of ESG investing. Patatoukas served as moderator.
Patatoukas emphasized that “climate risk, which includes both physical risks from environmental changes and transition risks related to moving towards a lower-carbon economy, is increasingly acknowledged as a significant investment risk.”
Wong said reporting standards are critical as more investors ask to incorporate sustainability metrics explicitly into their portfolios. “We have some investors who really care about climate change risk,” she said. “I think it’s important to provide a choice for investors. It’s their money, not ours.”
Asked about the strategy of divestment versus engagement, Simpson, who also teaches MBA, MFE and undergraduate classes at Haas, encouraged students who want change to embrace the complexity of the moment. “If you want to feel pure, roll up your sleeves and walk away,” she said. “If you want real change, you have to roll your sleeves up and get involved.”
Meredith Albion, FTMBA24 (right), worked for a credit ratings firm before attending Haas. She has focused much of her time at Haas on sustainable investing. She is currently a student principal of the Haas Sustainable Investment Fund and is a member of the SAIF Student Advisory Board.
The FTMBA program moved up four slots to tie for #7 with the Yale School of Management and NYU’s Stern School of Business. Except for 2021 and 2023, the FTMBA has ranked #7 since 2019.
Meanwhile, the Evening & Weekend Berkeley MBA Program ranked #2 this year among part-time MBA programs. The Berkeley Haas MBA for Executives Program placed #7 among EMBA programs and is now the top executive MBA program at a public university in the nation. This ranking is based solely on ratings by business school deans and directors.
The 2024 FTMBA ranking, released today, reflects positive changes that U.S. News made to its rankings methodology, said Haas Dean Ann Harrison.
The ranking reflects all of the work Haas is doing to strengthen its programs and reputation, she said. “There are many different ways of evaluating a school, and rankings go up and down for all of us,” she said. “The change in the U.S. News methodology, with less emphasis on starting salary upon graduation, is a positive step.”
A few details on the rankings methodology used this year:
Employment rates at graduation – 7% weighted (previously 10%)
Employment rates three months after graduation – 13% (previously 20%)
Mean starting salary and bonus – 20%
Ranking salaries by profession – 10%
Peer assessment score – 12.5%
Haas ranked #5 in salaries, which were ranked this year by profession (tied with Chicago Booth). Harrison noted that alumni accept jobs in a variety of industries, which logically means a variety of pay scales.
“This is true for Haas, as well, where graduates prioritize where they can make the biggest impact, whether that is in consulting, product management, fintech, or by founding a new company,” she said. “I applaud U.S. News for taking into account the reality of the wealth of opportunities for a b-school graduate and comparing apples to apples across all the schools it surveys.”
Assessment by the school’s FTMBA peers was strong this year, at #7 (tied with Columbia) and the school ranked #9 for its recruiter assessment. Haas also had the highest GMAT score, tied at #1 with Stanford, Harvard, Wharton, Kellogg, and Columbia.
In specialty rankings, based solely on peer assessments, U.S. News ranked the full-time MBA program:
The ESG investing industry has attracted trillions of dollars, in part through marketing that tells investors they can “do well by doing good.”
Thousands of funds and other investment products have been created around the idea that identifying companies with rising scores on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) measures can lead to market-beating returns.
Yet a new paper co-authored by Berkeley Haas accounting professor Panos N. Patatoukas, forthcoming in The Accounting Review, suggests that outperformance attributed to improving ESG scores—as measured by current standards—may be a mirage.
“Sorting out correlation from causation is critical in the debate over ESG investing, and we found correlation, not causation,” Patatoukas says. “Our research finds there’s no hidden information in proprietary ESG scores beyond what is already contained in easily accessible financial reports.”
The researchers—who include Byung Hyun Ahn, PhD 21, of Dimensional Fund Advisors, and George S. Skiadopoulos of Queen Mary University of London—found that larger, more stable, and more profitable companies are the ones more likely to have their ESG scores upgraded. These are the companies with the most resources to devote to fixing any weaknesses in their ESG scores and promoting their improvements.
But any above-market returns attributed to ESG scores disappeared when the researchers controlled for revenue, growth potential, and other factors used in traditionally used to screen stocks.
“Trillions of dollars of value have been allocated according to the idea that you can do the right thing and beat the market,” Patatoukas says. “Our data challenge this idea.”
“Trillions of dollars of value have been allocated according to the idea that you can do the right thing and beat the market. Our data challenge this idea.” —Professor Panos Patatoukas
The research does not imply that companies should turn away from efforts to reduce their carbon footprints, become more socially responsible, and be better corporate citizens—rather, those efforts must accelerate in the face of the climate crisis, Patatoukas says. He argues it’s the ESG measurement system that needs a major overhaul to incorporate information that goes beyond what is already reflected in corporate financial statements in order to give investors the transparency to make decisions in line with their values.
Questioning ESG frameworks
As of late 2023, $2.74 trillion was invested globally in funds that track companies with better sustainability scores, according to Morningstar. Last August, Bloomberg counted 14,500 funds with ESG called out in their prospectuses, holding $7 trillion in assets. And despite a recent political backlash and some $13 billion in outflows last year, trillions remain invested in ESG funds globally.
The question of whether ESG issues have a material impact on stock prices is critical to the industry. The search for an answer has spawned an ecosystem of standard-setting organizations, rating agencies, and index providers. At the foundation of this ecosystem is a materiality framework with industry-specific disclosure standards developed by the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB).
Prior academic research, as well as researchers at McKinsey, Charles Schwab, Morgan Stanley, and others, have found that companies with higher ESG scores can match or exceed benchmark-adjusted returns, often due to factors like lower costs, less regulatory pressure, and higher productivity. Such outperformance, known as “alpha,” is the holy grail of the investing industry.
“Index fund managers and index providers often cite evidence of ESG alpha as evidence of the value of the SASB materiality framework,” Patatoukas says, adding that some financial leaders might even cherry-pick benchmarks to show above-market returns.
Yet Patatoukas and his co-authors showed ESG alpha to be elusive. Through an analysis of the MSCI/KLD indicators of ESG strengths and weaknesses for U.S. public firms, they concluded that financially established companies—characterized by larger size, lower growth, and higher profitability relative to their sector—are associated with higher ESG scores because they are more likely to resolve material weaknesses and create strengths in their ESG scoring. But there’s no new information embedded in a rising ESG score that hasn’t already been priced into a stock’s price, he says.
“Our evidence shows that a simple benchmark portfolio based on established firms is indistinguishable—both in terms of performance and overall ESG score—from a portfolio based on firms with rising ESG scores,” he says. “Investors could target an overall ESG score by selecting portfolio stocks on fundamental firm characteristics, which is simpler and cheaper.”
“Investors could target an overall ESG score by selecting portfolio stocks on fundamental firm characteristics, which is simpler and cheaper.”
As an external validity test, the researchers also analyzed the performance of the Bloomberg/SASB index family powered by State Street’s “Responsibility Factor” (R-Factor), which is aligned with the SASB materiality framework and draws from several alternative ESG data sources. They found that, compared with matched benchmark indices that do not incorporate ESG considerations, the Bloomberg/SASB indices do not generate additional returns.
Troubling lack of transparency
Patatoukas finds the current system troubling for a few reasons. First off, socially and environmentally responsible small and mid-sized companies may be penalized because they have fewer resources to devote to the logistics of ESG reporting. Second, the current frameworks might allow a company to get upgraded even if it becomes less environmentally efficient, and might penalize a company for being more transparent than its competitors.
For example, a company might opt to be fully transparent and include data on all of its contractors—including carbon emissions from their activities, and even injury rates experienced by contract workers. Another company might only include its direct employees and receive higher ESG scores.
The research also takes issue with the premise that more environmentally and socially responsible portfolios need to outperform the market—the very idea of “doing well by doing good.” Though this may be possible, investment outperformance is not an indication of environmental or social progress, but rather a measure of capital transfer across investors who are buying and selling, he says.
“Social welfare creation involves directing investments toward companies and projects that positively impact society and the environment,” he says. “The time is ripe to evaluate the real effects of corporate sustainability reporting in terms of mobilizing capital to enable the transition to a more sustainable economy.”
New measurement targets
So what should be measured to allow people to make investment choices in line with their values? That question will be a key topic of a conference on March 20 at Berkeley Haas organized by the Center for Financial Reporting and Measurement, titled “Corporate Sustainability Measurement and Reporting: From Whether to How.”
Patatoukas says we’re getting closer to measuring what matters with ESG in terms of a company’s carbon emissions. This metric comes with strong measurement incentives. California is leading the charge with the first-in-the-nation disclosure requirements about carbon emissions. For example, under the Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act coming into force in 2026, California will mandate that both public and private companies with more than $1 billion in revenue disclose details about their carbon emissions.
Efforts at greater transparency could falter if firms don’t accurately measure indicators that meaningfully capture, in granular detail, each of the individual performance factors of ESG, Patatoukas says. This will require the intersection of different disciplines—finance, accounting, economics, operations, climate science, and software engineering.
“The massive opportunity here is measurement—to go beyond measuring the companies that are good at checking all the boxes and develop a way to measure those that make significant strides towards our decarbonization path,” Patatoukas says. “Better measurement will facilitate more efficient allocation of capital and accelerate transition to a more sustainable future.”
Special Purpose Acquisition Companies, known as SPACs, were a hot new investing trend over the past couple of years.
In this short video, accounting professor Omri Even-Tov explains how Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) work, how his concerns that they harming individual investors drove his research, and how that research influenced the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to tighten up rules.
Hi everyone, my name is Omri Even-Tov and I’m an accounting professor at the Haas School of Business. You might have heard about SPACs, which was a pretty hot trend until recently. So my colleagues and I actually wrote a paper about SPACs because we had a feeling that they might harm investors.
But before we begin I want to describe to you a bit what a SPAC is and how it works. Let me go to my slides here for some help.
So SPACs are, first, Special Purpose Acquisition Companies. Those are blank-check companies that raise money via an IPO for the sole purpose of acquiring a private company. This transaction is also known as a de-SPAC. Now those SPACs are usually managed by a sponsor. The sponsor can be a private equity firm, a venture capital firm, a hedge fund, or in some cases it can also be an individual—like in the case of Chamath from Social Capital that you all know from the “All-In” a podcast.
So let’s assume in our case there’s a SPAC and this SPAC is called “Just another SPAC.” So this SPAC goes public via an IPO and they raise money. In our case they raise $500 million. Now the SPAC has between 18 to 24 months to try and identify a suitable target to acquire. So let’s assume that they managed to find this target. This target is called, “Some Private Company.” Now once they found the target, the shareholders of the SPAC need to vote on this transaction. If they vote yes, then we have an acquisition and this process is called a de-SPAC transaction and then good luck to all of us.
In the case that the shareholders vote no, or in the case that the SPAC wasn’t able to identify a suitable target, then there is no transaction and all of the money that was initially raised by the SPAC is returned to investors.
Now why is why are SPACs so interesting? They’re very interesting because in the last few years they actually outpaced the number of traditional IPOs. So if we look at this figure you can see that this line counts the number of SPAC IPOs and this line is actually higher than the line of the traditional IPOs—and not just in terms of numbers but also in terms of volume and proceeds raised using the SPAC process. We can see that those bars that reflect SPAC IPO proceeds are actually higher than those of the traditional IPO proceeds.
So why are SPACs so unique that we decided to explore them and examine what’s happening with them? So a main difference between traditional IPOs and SPACs is that traditional IPOs do not have any protection from liability if they provide future-looking statements. So if they provide projections that are misleading or inaccurate, they’re going to be liable for them. In the case of SPACs, those are basically mergers as you saw in the in the in the slide, so they are entitled to a protection under the Safe Harbor rule that came out in 1995. And because of that many SPAC sponsor thought, ‘we basically have a shield from liability if we provide future projections of the companies.
So in our case, what we felt is that because of this theoretical shield, sponsors are going to take advantage of that and they’re going to issue very optimistic projections in order to entice retail investors and investors in general to invest in those companies. And this is exactly what our research finds. We find that SPAC companies, on average, provide very optimistic projections, and in most cases, they underperform. And unfortunately those projections lead to the attraction of a lot of retail investors—not so much institutional investors that are likely are able to steer away from those very optimistic projections. And because retail investors are attracted to those companies, they invest and in the long term they suffer from under performance. We also find that those companies are actually more likely to be sued in a class action lawsuit because this shield doesn’t shield you from everything. If you provide misleading information that is inaccurate then you’re going to be liable for that.
And so our paper was actually very instrumental in a new rule that the SEC issued just a few days ago about amendments being made to the rule about SPACs. And the SEC sites both a common letter that we wrote and our paper by stating that some of the amendments are directly related to that. The first change is to level the playing field between SPAC IPOs and traditional IPOs, and remove this protection from SPAC IPOs from providing future projections. The second thing is basically adding much more disclosure to the projections. How are they being made, who’s making those assumptions, what assumption are being made.
And this is in the hope of helping investors have better information about the companies they invest in. So hopefully this really helps protect retail investors. We believe it does. Thank you for listening.
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 lose more money.
But new research co-authored by Assistant Professor Omri Even-Tov shows this fear may be exaggerated: While average investors trade more when fees are removed, they also earn more.
“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 doctoral student Kimberlyn Munevar, PhD 24, and professors from the University of Pennsylvania and MIT, the researchers analyzed 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 staggered removal of trading fees 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 2018 and 2019. They found that the removal of fees increased trading frequency by an average of about 30%. Having no fees also drew people to the eToro platform: New users grew by 172% in countries without fees and only 18% in countries where fees remained in place. The removal of fees also led people to hold significantly more diverse portfolios.
Though this study investigated non-U.S. markets, the researchers ran an analysis to demonstrate that the kind of retail trading conducted by their subjects corresponds with trading on American platforms.
These results come at a 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. “Now regulators are looking at whether or not these new methods need to be reined in,” says Even-Tov. But regulatory bodies should be wary of pushing online trading platforms back toward a commission model when putting new policies in place, he says.
Summer 2023|By Amy Marcott| Illustrations by Martin Leon Barreto
Moments showcasing Haas’ pioneering impact on the business world
From its outset, business at Berkeley has proved trailblazing. Launched by a gift from Cora Jane Flood in 1898, Berkeley Haas—previously called the College of Commerce and the School of Business—is the only leading business school founded by a woman, the first founded at a public university, and the second-oldest in the U.S. It was launched, in part, to help California expand economically, with the forward-looking goal of enriching trade and cultural exchange in the Pacific Rim. Throughout the twentieth century, business schools—and Berkeley Haas in particular—took on evermore prominent roles in shaping the world economy and the character of business itself. In this, our 125th year, we celebrate some of Haas’ pivotal moments reimagining business and business education.
Pioneering the study of social impact…
Scene from the 2018 Global Social Venture Competition, which ran for 20 years and distributed more than $1 million in prize money to teams aiming to better the world via viable companies with social impact.
Professor Earl Cheit ushered in the study of corporate social responsibility via his research and teaching starting in the late 1950s. The future dean also organized the first national CSR symposium in 1964. New coursework, with support from Professors Dow Votaw and Edwin Epstein, became the model for leading business schools. Today, Haas prepares students to become ethical, socially focused leaders via myriad courses, experiential learning opportunities, and co-curricular activities.
…helped pandemic-ravaged small businesses.
Professors Adair Morse and Laura Tyson worked with the State of California and the nonprofit and banking sectors to create a public-private partnership as a small business loan fund for vulnerable companies. They then launched the California Rebuilding Fund for small businesses in under-resourced communities.
…created a competitive advantage.
The Center for Responsible Business, founded by faculty member Kellie McElhaney in 2002, brought Haas to the forefront of the corporate social responsibility and business sustainability movements. The Wall Street Journal ranked Haas the No. 2 b-school for CSR in 2006 and 2007. The Financial Times rated Haas No. 1 worldwide in 2008.
…launched the first and largest student-led SRI fund.
Debuting in 2008 and featured in the Wall Street Journal, the Socially Responsible Investment Fund (now called the Sustainable Investment Fund) offers MBA students real-world experience in delivering strong financial returns and positive social impact.Student fund managers have grown the $1 million investment to over $4 million.
The Global Social Venture Competition, launched in 1999 by five Haas MBA students, turned the nascent idea of creating viable companies with social impact into a global triumph. In its 20 years of existence, the GSVC distributed more than $1 million in prize money and helped more than 7,000 teams better the world.
Codifying our culture…
Our Defining Leadership Principles Question the Status Quo, Confidence Without Attitude, Students Always, and Beyond Yourself had been latently capturing Haas’ essence for generations. In 2010, spearheaded by then-Dean Rich Lyons, BS 82, and anchored by the organizational culture research of Professor Jennifer Chatman, we took them public.
…distinguishes us from other prestigious business schools.
Our DLPs are a source of competitive advantage as well as pride and engagement. They are also our leadership brand, defining our graduates as Berkeley Leaders who practice responsible business. In 2018, Poets&Quants deemed us “the archetype for a values-driven MBA program.”
…positions Haas as the powerhouse for culture research.
Our new Berkeley Culture Center, founded and led by Professors Chatman, PhD 88, and Sameer Srivastava, helps business leaders create and nurture healthy and effective workplace cultures and is a hub for connections between academic research and corporate best practices. An annual conference convenes leaders from industry and academia to discuss new research and explore how to help organizations function more effectively. Chatman and Srivastava will soon launch the Culture Fix podcast to offer solutions to work dilemmas.
…cultivates community.
Since 1994, the alumni relations program at Haas has flourished in its mission to connect alumni to the school and to one another by adding traditions and signature events, expanding regional chapters and affinity/identity groups, developing career resources, creating a volunteer pipeline, providing mentorship opportunities for students and alumni, and much more.
Catalyzing the study of innovation…
The groundbreaking theories of dynamic capabilities, created by Professor David Teece in 1997, and open innovation, created by Adjunct Professor Henry Chesbrough, PhD 97, in 2003, led Haas to become one of the top business schools for innovation management and strategy.
…changed business education.
Previously, common belief held that established corporate structures were poorly suited for innovation, but Teece’s dynamic capabilities framework explains how large organizations can be entrepreneurial too. He also launched interdisciplinary programs with Berkeley’s engineering and law schools to help infuse innovation deep into research and teaching at Haas and to apply innovation management principlesin private and public settings, including in the management of universities.
…facilitates global companies sharing innovative solutions.
Haas’ Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation helps companies expand markets, manage innovation, and facilitate strategic alliances via the membership-based Berkeley Innovation Forum. The World Open Innovation Conference, founded by Chesbrough and now hosted by a university in the Netherlands, allowed Haas to play a key role in bringing novel ideas to market.
In the Cleantech to Market course, Chris Tan (right), MBA 13, worked with mechanical engineer Lindsay Miller, PhD 12, on a device that harvests energy from machinery vibrations, generating enough electricity to run wireless sensors without ever having to change a battery. Tan helped answer key questions aimed at commercializing the device. Photo: Jim Block
…commercializes cleantech advancements.
The Cleantech to Market accelerator program pairs students with entrepreneurs to help bring promising climate tech innovations to market—more than 120 since its launch 15 years ago.
…helps students make innovation a competitive advantage.
The semester-long Haas@Work course acts as a faculty-run/student-staffed innovation agency—with teams of MBAs using a variety of innovation methodologies to assist corporate partners in developing and testing novel solutions to key challenges.
…inspires changemakers.
The Berkeley Changemaker initiative, established in 2020 and inspired by Lecturer Alex Budak’s Becoming a Changemaker course (later a book), has helped thousands of incoming students identify their passions and use their leadership traits to transform Berkeley and the world. Offered through the College of Letters and Science and Haas, the class is part of the campuswide initiative led by Laura Hassner, EMBA 18, and supported by former Dean Rich Lyons, BS 82, Berkeley’s chief innovation and entrepreneurship officer.
Early teaching of entrepreneurship…
Paul Simpson, EMBA 14, at Airbnb headquarters during Silicon Valley Immersion Week in 2013.
Begun in 1970 (six years before Apple Computer was founded), Dean Richard Holton initiated one of the nation’s first courses in entrepreneurship, which he team-taught with Leo Helzel, MBA 68, for many years. It was likely the only such class that provided students direct contact with entrepreneurs. When the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation opened in 1991, Executive Director Jerome Engel continued building Haas’ renowned entrepreneurship curriculum by partnering with the venture capital community, creating career opportunities for students, and training faculty worldwide.
…allowed Haas to pioneer the Lean LaunchPad method.
Created in 2011 by Lecturer Steve Blank and now taught worldwide, Lean LaunchPad was an entirely new way to teach entrepreneurship. Inspired by a Haas MBA course, it challenges students to develop business models rather than business plans and to iterate their models frequently based on customer feedback.
…inspires unlikely entrepreneurs.
Professor Toby Stuart changed entrepreneurship teaching at Haas by restructuring the full-time MBA entrepreneurship course, gearing it not only to students with startup ideas but to students investigating entrepreneurship as a career as well. He also created a star-studded, career-changing Silicon Valley Immersion Week for the Berkeley MBA for Executives Program.
…positions Haas as the campus entrepreneurship hub.
A new entrepreneurship and innovation initiative, spearheaded by Dean Ann Harrison, is enhancing Haas’ efforts on three fronts: endowing thought leadership through faculty chairs, expanding programming, and creating a three-floor Entrepreneurship Hub for all of campus. Renovation has begun on the Hub, which is adjacent to Haas and features spaces for students to gather and work.
Dominating in finance…
In the late 1960s, when students were requesting courses providing creative approaches to financial markets and investment theory (thanks to new technologies), Berkeley embraced an innovative and highly quantitative approach to finance, becoming a national leader with its analytical quantitative curriculum.
…prompted insights into financial markets.
In the 1970s, Professor Emeritus Mark Garman pioneered early stock exchange simulations and studied market microstructures, minute trading activity in asset markets that today play a role in algorithmic and electronic trading.
…changed how financial assets are created and priced.
In 1979, the late Professor Emeritus Mark Rubinstein developed the binomial options pricing model (aka the Cox-Ross-Rubinstein model), which can be used to price a range of complex options. It remains one of Wall Street’s most important valuation tools and no doubt contributed to the subsequent growth of derivatives. In the early 1990s, Rubinstein, Professor Hayne Leland, and Adjunct Professor John O’Brien launched the SuperTrust, an S&P 500-based fund that traded as a single security, essentially the first exchange-traded fund.
…allowed us to take the lead in the crowdfunding revolution.
In 2008, Danae Ringelmann and Eric Schell, both MBA 08, co-founded Indiegogo, one of the world’s first crowdfunding sites, democratizing access to capital and entrepreneurship while navigating unchartered regulatory waters. In 2015, Haas, the Fung Institute for Engineering Leadership, and the Kauffman Foundation partnered to establish CrowdBerkeley, a premier hub of education and research on crowdfunding.
Championing new teaching modalities…
As business evolved, Haas adapted its teaching to respond to challenges and opportunities taking shape worldwide, often blazing new academic trails. In 1959, when the famous Ford Foundation and Carnegie Corporation reports criticized most of American business education for its overall low standards and overly strong vocational bent, both cited Berkeley’s program, which was broader and more rigorous, as an excellent model.
…led to the first MFE Program at a business school.
The Master of Financial Engineering Program was launched in 2001 to prepare students to use skills in math, theoretical finance, and computer programming to make technically complex financial decisions. Today, it consistently ranks first among programs nationwide. The program recently added a data science curriculum that’s supported by a high-tech lab offering students and faculty access to real-time financial data and leading analytical software.
…created one of the few international management consulting programs.
Our International Business Development course debuted in 1992, assigning teams of MBA students to real-world consulting projects that include several weeks overseas, mostly in developing economies. IBD has since dispatched more than 1,800 students to work in 89 countries, helping organizations worldwide redefine how they do business.
Sameera Chilakapati (right), MBA/MPH 12, and Lily Chou, BS 04, MBA 12, speak with locals in the Jafrabad Kurai village near Bijnor in Uttar Pradesh, India, during a 2011 International Business Development trip.
…made Haas the first Top 10 b-school to offer a remote MBA.
In 2021, Haas announced its Flex cohort for the evening & weekend program. Students take live, virtual core courses from Haas professors teaching in new state-of-the-art video classrooms and can choose to take their electives virtually or on campus. (See sidebar, Linking Up.)
…offers unprecedented education of cross-sector leaders.
The Center for Social Sector Leadership, founded by Nora Silver, who serves as faculty director, pioneered three unique experiential b-school programs to prepare students for the nonprofit and public sectors. Social Sector Solutions, a professional management consulting partnership between Haas and McKinsey, launched in 2006 and has involved over 900 students who have served 170 nonprofits and public/social enterprises. Philanthropy Fellows, begun in 2008, is a partnership with the David and Lucile Packard Foundation that places recent MBAs with program officers at the foundation for two years—allowing new grads to enter a foundation at a professional (rather than administrative) level. Impact CFO, created with Assistant Professor Omri Even-Tov, will launch this fall with 15–20 alumni to help meet the market demand for chief financial officers in social impact organizations.
…integrated problem framing and solving approaches into a business curriculum.
Teaching Professor Sara Beckman developed three pioneering b-school courses: Managing the New Product Development Process and Design as a Strategic Business Issue (both in 1993), and Problem Finding, Problem Solving, which was part of the MBA core starting in 2012. PFPS, which included everything from systems thinking to human-centered design approaches, taught students how to think about complex business problems. Since 2017, undergrads can pursue the Berkeley Certificate in Design Innovation, a first-ever collaboration among Haas, the College of Engineering, the College of Environmental Design, and the College of Letters and Science’s Arts & Humanities Division.
Berkeley Haas courtyard showcasing one of the four Defining Leadership Principles etched into the pavement. Photo: Jim Block
Embracing behavioral economics…
Behavioral economics was born at UC Berkeley in 1987 with an interdisciplinary PhD course taught by two future Nobelists: economist George Akerlof and psychologist Daniel Kahneman. Professor Terrance Odean, MS 92, PhD 97, was encouraged by Kahneman to be the first at Haas to research behavioral finance, an area that was fertile ground for psychological analysis in an era of asset bubbles and market crises.
…established the vanguard of a new generation of behavioral economics researchers.
Haas faculty have since propelled the discipline into the mainstream while taking it into the future. Associate Professor David Sraer has investigated investor behavior and speculative bubbles. The late Professor John Morgan, who founded Haas’ Experimental Social Science Laboratory (XLab) for conducting experiment-based research, focused some of his work on inattention to shipping costs in eBay auctions and on behavioral biases in voting. Professor Ulrike Malmendier, the only woman ever to have won the prestigious Fischer Black Prize, has researched how individual biases affect corporate decisions, stock prices, and markets in general. She and Professor Stefano DellaVigna will lead the new O’Donnell Center for Behavioral Economics, which launches this fall, and will continue to make Berkeley the epicenter of behavioral economics research and a beacon for the brightest intellectual talent in the field.
Committing to diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and belonging…
Socioeconomic mobility is core to both the UC Berkeley and Haas missions. The 2018 DEI strategic plan—the first such action plan at a major business school—translated aspirations for inclusion into intentional and comprehensive action at all levels of Haas. As a result, Haas has made substantive changes over the past six years to increase diversity and representation, engender lifelong learning around equity and inclusion, and cultivate belonging. Haas was also the first leading b-school to publicly share its DEI demographic data.
…created a unique and robust DEIJB team.
Dean Ann Harrison quickly made DEIJB a priority when she began her tenure in 2019. She met with student leaders; significantly increased scholarship funding for the incoming class; diversified the demographics of the Haas School Board, faculty, and senior leadership teams; modified the core MBA curriculum to require a course on leadership communications in diverse work environments; and appointed one of the first chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officers at a leading business school. Today, CDEIO Élida Bautista oversees a team of four focusing on admissions, student experience, staff community and capacity-building, and, uniquely, faculty support (see sidebar, Teaching Aid).
…advances gender and diversity in policy and business.
Research by Professor Laura Kray, a leading expert on the social-psychological barriers influencing women’s career attainment, has debunked popular gender stereotypes. Kray’s work has shown that the popular perception that men outperfom women as negotiators is false and hurts pay equity efforts. The Center for Equity, Gender & Leadership, founded in 2017 by faculty member Kellie McElhaney, develops “equity fluent” leaders to drive positive change and build an inclusive and equitable world. EGAL does this via hands-on education and learning opportunities, resources (like playbooks), and support for academic research. Kray is EGAL’s faculty director.
…improves access to Haas.
During the pandemic, Haas launched two programs to expand, diversify, and strengthen access to the school. Accelerated Access allows students who wish to pre-commit to business school while acquiring important work experience to apply to Haas in their senior year of college and gain conditional acceptance. Cal Advantage offers talented University of California undergraduates a streamlined application process.
…enriches the diversity of the venture community.
The Black Venture Institute, created by Berkeley Executive Education in collaboration with BLCK VC and Salesforce Ventures, teaches Black executives the foundational elements to become angel, scout, and venture investors.
Boost@BerkeleyHaas grad Jayiontae Williams, second from left, takes time out for a family photo at the Boost commencement.
…provides social mobility opportunities for local youths.
In 1989, Dean Raymond Miles started the Boost@BerkeleyHaas program—formerly known as the East Bay Outreach Program then Young Entrepreneurs at Haas (YEAH)—to teach business and academic skills to under-resourced high school students. It is one of the only university-based youth entrepreneur programs to support teens from disadvantaged communities throughout their entire high school career. Since its founding, the program has helped more than 1,200 students (many first-generation) go to college.
…supports alumni professional development.
Alumni may enroll in a three-part, self-paced online DEI workshop featuring CDEIO Bautista that focuses on best practices for creating and promoting a diverse and inclusive workplace culture. Since 2021, alumni committed to DEIJB have gleaned insights from top industry leaders at the annual virtual Alumni Diversity Symposium.
…expands partnerships with HBCUs.
Haas recently launched 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.
MBA students glean real-life experience via the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics. In 2013, for example, Louis Li, Sarah Walker, and Dimitar Goulev, all MBA 14, tackled a Telegraph Avenue challenge focused on rejuvenating a Berkeley site surrounded by a vermin-infested lot, an abandoned storefront, and People’s Park. Their plan included preserving a historic mural as well as creating affordable housing and a small grocery store.
Pioneering the study of urban economics…
The Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics was founded in 1950, one of the first such university centers nationwide. It allowed Professors Sherman Maisel and Albert Schaaf to author the first major study of the structure of the California real estate industry, looking at the role of race and gender and finding a rising trend of women employed in the field. Later, Maisel would help create the current national U.S. mortgage market that relies on bond financing rather than on the strength and liquidity of local banks.
…advanced an unprecedented analysis of real estate markets and risk management.
Professor Nancy Wallace and researchers at the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics mapped the massive mortgage market and built groundbreakingly accurate housing price indices that monitor the characteristic dynamics of the housing stock. Wallace and Professor Richard Stanton, along with Paulo Issler, MBA 98, PhD 13, and Carles Vergara-Alert, MFE 04, PhD 08, recently combined these comprehensive databases with wildfire prediction models to estimate residential real estate value-at-risk in California.
…led to a renowned gathering of experts and a legendary forecast.
The Fisher Center hosts an annual Real Estate and Economics Symposium, a high-powered event known for the reputation of the speakers—and for Professor Emeritus Ken Rosen’s revered economic and real estate forecasts for California.
Our commitment to sustainability…
No other business school matches the breadth of Haas’ work in sustainability. The new Office of Sustainability and Climate Change, led by climate finance expert Michele de Nevers, coordinates curriculum and activities in five key areas: energy, food and agriculture, the built environment, sustainable and impact finance, and corporate responsibility.
…launched the preeminent university research center on energy economics.
Ever since Professor Severin Borenstein began leading the Energy Institute at Haas in 1994, it has been a place where serious academic researchers influence public policy at the state and federal levels, where the curriculum in energy and cleantech evolves to meet student and marketplace needs, and where collaboration flourishes. No other business school has as much depth, breadth, or influence in the energy field as Haas. Borenstein also co-developed the unique—and indispensable—Energy and Environmental Markets course and the energy market simulations used in the class. The course was the first of its kind at a top b-school and has been emulated at many peer institutions.
…allows Haas to pioneer green architecture and operations.
Chou Hall, which opened in 2017, is the nation’s greenest academic building, having earned LEED Platinum certification for its energy efficient design and operation, TRUE Zero Waste certification at the highest level after more than a year of efforts to divert over 90% of landfill waste, and WELL Gold, which is given to buildings that promote user health and well-being. Haas recently appointed its first full-time director of campus sustainability to oversee numerous initiatives—such as the campus renewable energy transition and elimination of single use plastic—to move Haas to carbon neutrality by 2025.
…inspired an unrivaled array of sustainability courses.
In 2021, Professor Nancy Wallace shifted the focus of the real estate program to consider high-efficiency, mixed-use development and financing strategies to fund real estate sustainability. Haas faculty members are now retooling all core MBA courses to address climate change and other sustainability challenges in various business disciplines. The revamped Sustainable and Impact Finance program keeps pace with rapid changes in climate finance and impact investing to best prepare students for careers. One focus for the Center for Responsible Business is reimagining capitalism and Executive Director Robert Strand, who teaches a course called Sustainable Capitalism in the Nordics?, is now the executive director of the new UC Berkeley Nordic Center.
…led to new degrees and certificates.
With Berkeley’s Rausser College of Natural Resources, Haas offers an undergraduate minor in sustainability and is developing a dual MBA/master’s in climate solutions. Haas also offers the Michaels Graduate Certificate in Sustainable Business.
Our faculty’s public service work…
Since its earliest days, Haas faculty have applied their insights to issues advancing the public good. Our first dean, Carl Copping Plehn, is credited as one of the fathers of the California tax system. Professor Lincoln Hutchinson, an expert in South America and Russia, left Berkeley in 1922 to become one of the State Department’s earliest commercial attachés. In the 1930s, Dean E.T. Grether lent his expertise of markets and pricing structures to the Great Depression’s wave of business regulations—among many others.
…guides national economic policy in groundbreaking ways.
Professor Emeritus Janet Yellen is the first person to have served in the nation’s three top economic roles: treasury secretary, head of the Federal Reserve, and chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers (during the Clinton administration). Her four years as Fed chair were considered near perfect, marked by job and wage growth amid low interest rates. Former dean Laura Tyson was the first woman to chair the Council of Economic Advisers (1993–95) and to direct the National Economic Council (1995–96), among other roles.
…helped navigate e-commerce, communications, and horizontal mergers.
As the chief economist for the Federal Communications Commission in the mid-1990’s, Professor Emeritus Michael Katz informed an important revision of cable television price regulations. He later addressed Congress about how to allow consumers to safely make payments via phones. Professor Emeritus Carl Shapiro played a central role in the first big update in almost 20 years of the guidelines on horizontal mergers as the chief economist in the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice (2009–11). Both men continue to serve as expert witnesses in the country’s most high-profile antitrust cases.
…advances global gender parity.
As a longtime co-author of the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report, Tyson helped quantify the magnitude of gender-based disparities and develop initiatives for change. She also served as lead author in 2016 for two reports for the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Women’s Economic Empowerment that included action-oriented recommendations to hasten improved economic outcomes for women.
…gives voice to the voiceless.
A former World Bank director, Dean Ann Harrison has earned international acclaim for her research on foreign direct investment and multinational firms. In proving that job losses in U.S. manufacturing are driven primarily by labor-saving technology such as investments by U.S. multinationals in automation, she has shown that free-trade economists miscalculated the costs of globalization and failed to ensure that policies were in place to compensate the losers, including many workers in rural communities.
Summer 2023|By Amy Marcott & Laura counts| Illustrations: Martin Leon Barreto
Revolutionary findings by Haas faculty that have advanced business
All established wisdom had to start somewhere, often in the form of fresh insights that went on to become common knowledge. Here are some of those big ideas that started at Haas and became deeply embedded in business thinking.
Social Responsibility
Business firms and their leaders should govern with accountability and be socially responsible in their relationships with diverse sectors of society affected by their operations. Leaders failing to do so may eventually lose their leadership roles and see their own organizations collapse.
The late Professor Emeritus Dow Votaw was a pioneer in the field of corporate social responsibility and looked at how corporations evolved amid a society growing increasingly complex.
Wages
Paying workers more than the market wage boosts productivity and morale and reduces turnover.
Professor Emeritus Janet Yellen’s scholarship has focused on a range of issues related to wages, unemployment, and economic cycles. Her most-cited work on “efficiency wages,” written with her husband, George Akerlof, found that businesses offering better pay and better working conditions are often making a wise decision and are rewarded with more productive workers.
Employees
Human assets are as important as the financial and physical assets of a company and need to be managed in a strategic way.
As a scholar, the late Professor Emeritus and former Dean Raymond Miles positioned human resources as a strategic function, defining HR management styles commonly taught today.
NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS
Even in games where players don’t know what their opponents know or what the parameters are, it’s still possible to develop a framework to analyze strategic decision-making.
In 1994, the late Professor John Harsanyi (along with John Nash from Princeton University and Reinhard Selten from Bonn, Germany) won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work in game theory that used probabilities to model how rational people will interact strategically when they have imperfect information. The spark for Harsanyi’s research came from his inability to advise the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in 1964 on negotiations with the Soviet Union, because neither side knew much about the other; it was a game of incomplete information. Game theory is now a significant tool for analyzing myriad conflicts, including global political clashes, labor negotiations, and price wars.
Analyzing the boundaries between firms and the markets they operate in is critical to understanding how to best design productive activities.
In 2009, the late Professor Oliver Williamson won a Nobel (along with Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University) for his insights into what’s known as the “make or buy” decision, a way of analyzing whether an organization should contract out for parts or make them in-house. Williamson brought together multiple disciplines to invent the field of transaction cost economics, which sheds light on optimal contracting, the boundaries of the firm, the design of bureaucracies, and more. His work was path-breaking because economic research at the time was focused on market transactions and not what happened inside organizations. Williamson’s insights have influenced everything from electricity deregulation in California to human resource management in the technology industry.
ORGANIZATIONS & INNOVATION
Natural selection processes akin to those in bioecology drive the emergence, growth, evolution, and decline in groups of related organizations.
This vibrant field of research, called organizational ecology, was co-developed by the late Professor John Freeman and former Professor Glenn Carroll.
Reliable performance by an organization may require a well-developed collective mind in the form of a complex, attentive system tied together by trust.
Professor Emeritus Karlene Roberts pioneered a new way to understand human-made disasters, looking beyond human error and technical glitches to the organizational causes of catastrophes in industries requiring nearly error-free operations, like commercial aviation and nuclear power plants. The quality of interactions among team members, she found, was a critical part of highly reliable organizations.
Knowledge gives companies competitive advantage and is contained within a company’s people.
Ikujiro Nonaka, MBA 68, PhD 72, pioneered theories about knowledge management and transformed how people drive innovation together. Along with Hirotaka Takeuchi, MBA 71, PhD 77, Nonaka co-authored the business best-seller The Knowledge-Creating Company. In 1997, Nonaka became the Haas School’s Xerox Distinguished Professor in Knowledge, the first professorship in the world dedicated to the study of knowledge management.
It isn’t enough for companies to innovate—they also must be able to profit from those ideas. This requires good strategic management and access to manufacturing, marketing, distribution, and other complementary assets and technologies on favorable terms—which is just as important to financial success as great R&D.
Professor David Teece is known for this theory of dynamic capabilities, which puts the management team front and center in the innovation process. Gary Pisano, PhD 88, co-authored the first article on the topic, in 1997.
Companies used to rely on their internal labs for their innovations, but they can retain their competitive edge by partnering with other companies—even competitors—to create useful and lucrative products and services.
This concept, known as open innovation, was created by longtime Adjunct Professor Henry Chesbrough, PhD 97.
Branding
A brand is an asset involving relevance and image (functional and emotional) and having a loyal customer core. The implication is that a brand is the responsibility of the whole organization including the executive suite.
Professor Emeritus David Aaker is widely considered the father of modern branding. His pioneering work defined brand equity and detailed ways to build and manage brands and portfolios that are used by organizations worldwide.
Open Science
Widely accepted research practices in the social sciences leave too much room for bias and manipulation and need to be reformed.
Professor Leif Nelson’s 2011 paper, “False Positive Psychology” (co-authored with Joseph Simmons and Uri Simonsohn), helped launch the open science movement, which has upended the field of psychology, toppled famous studies, and sent waves throughout the social sciences. Open science focuses on rooting out biases, replicating important studies, and—on rare occasions—exposing fraud. Many researchers have since adopted more rigorous practices, and reforms are ongoing.
Culture
Person-culture fit is a useful predictor of organizational commitment and extra-role behavior, which in turn affect firm performance.
Professor Jennifer Chatman, PhD 88, co-created the Organizational Culture Profile in the early 1990s with Charles O’Reilly, MBA 71, PhD 75, and Dave Caldwell. It illustrates 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.
Finance
The balance sheet approach should be used to analyze accounting issues as opposed to the income statement approach.
Articles by the late Professor Maurice Moonitz, BS 33, MS 36, PhD 41, played an important role in the gradual switch to the balance sheet approach by the bodies that establish the generally accepted accounting principles followed by publicly held American corporations. He also influenced the conceptual frameworks eventually adapted by accounting standard setters both in America and abroad.
Securities with various risks and returns can be combined into a mutual fund that mimics the S&P 500.
The concept of a “SuperFund” index, a radical innovation in security markets that paved the way for exchange-traded funds, was developed by Professor Emeritus Nils Hakansson in 1976.
Prior to the Global Financial Crisis that started in 2007, banks were selecting the riskiest pools of home mortgages—the lemons that were more likely to contain mortgages in which borrowers prepaid or defaulted on their loans—to sell into the securitized bond market.
The late Professor Dwight Jaffee, along with Professor Nancy Wallace and Christopher Downing, were the first to document loan cherry-picking by banks and Freddie Mac. Their research drew intense scrutiny from Freddie Mac and helped to pressure the quasi-governmental entity into disclosing more information about underlying mortgages. Jaffee made seminal contributions aimed at influencing the public policy debate on questions related to the causes of the Global Financial Crisis, which he anticipated years before its onset.
Behavioral Economics
Humans tend to remain committed to a losing course of action (think bad investments or relationships) rather than pull the plug and try something different.
Professor Emeritus Barry Staw coined this phenomenon “escalation of commitment,” a discovery that is one of the most highly cited in organizational behavior. He helped pioneer the field of behavioral decision theory, a sub-area of behavioral economics.
Individual experiences of macroeconomic shocks affect financial risk-taking, as often suggested for the generation that experienced the Great Depression.
Professor Ulrike Malmendier proved econometrically what had been observed only anecdotally and has continued her groundbreaking research into how the economic conditions that prevail during a person’s life so far strongly influence their views on money for years and decades to come.
Homeownership
Lending discrimination has not disappeared with the shift online, since algorithms incorporate human biases.
Professors Adair Morse, Richard Stanton, and Nancy Wallace were the first to merge large datasets with details on interest rates, loan terms and performance, property location, and borrower’s credit with race and ethnicity. Their 2021 research found that both online and face-to-face lenders charge higher interest rates to African American and Latino borrowers, and these differentials lead to over $450 million in extra interest payments per year.
Energy
Californians have been paying a “mystery gasoline surcharge”—which has ranged from 28 to 65 cents a gallon in any given year—since 2015.
Professor Severin Borenstein discovered this surcharge, finding that between 2015 and 2022, it cost Californians $48 billion—over $4,000 for a family of four. He’s been fighting to get government officials to understand it ever since. Earlier this year, the state legislature and governor passed a bill that will establish a special state office to investigate the cause of the surcharge and possible remedies.
TECHNOLOGY & ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Lack of total transparency limits the liquidity that firm owners can obtain through an IPO.
Professors Emeriti Hayne Leland and David Pyle’s 1976 paper was a seminal contribution in the field of corporate finance, investigating what happens when entrepreneurs cannot be expected to be entirely straightforward about their projects to lenders, since there may be substantial rewards for exaggerating positive qualities.
“Smart markets,” defined as a turbulent, information-intensive environment with constantly changing products, consumers, and competitors, will require a shift in performance goals from profitability per product to profitability per customer.
Professor Rashi Glazer’s trailblazing theory about smart markets—which he first introduced in 1991, years before the Internet boom—positioned Haas as a thought leader in the data-driven marketing movement.
Durable economic principles can guide you in understanding today’s frenetic business environment in information-based products and the technology sector.
Haas Professors Emeriti Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian co-authored Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy (1999), a widely acclaimed book that deconstructs the economic factors affecting information technology markets. Though the book pre-dated Facebook, the iPad, and big data, it continues to guide leaders through the information age.
Perception is reality in entrepreneurship.
Professor Toby Stuart has investigated the nuances of how startups build momentum by establishing the right set of affiliations. In building a company, entrepreneurs proactively architect exchange relationships that enhance the legitimacy of their endeavors. His work finds that the more uncertain the prospects of a new venture, the more essential it is to enlist the support of those already held in high esteem in the space.
Despite it seeming easy to shop around online, information gatekeepers design markets so that prices vary widely and are hard to compare.
The late Professor John Morgan was a prolific researcher, with notable contributions to the area of pricing and competition in online markets. His most-cited work sheds light on the reasons that prices can vary so widely on the internet when it’s easy to shop around: So-called “information gatekeepers” have an incentive to design markets in ways that prices across sellers vary.
Numbers are important when it comes to loans. Lenders look at companies’ financial statements and loan history when determining interest rates or loan terms.
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. New research co-authored by Asst. Prof. Omri Even-Tov shows that the soft information accumulated in these relationships can reduce the costs of screening and monitoring and thus reduce the cost of debt.
“These relationships foster trust and reduce information gaps, allowing lenders to gain valuable information about a borrower’s sense of responsibility and overall creditworthiness,” says Even-Tov.
In fact, established relationships between loan officers and borrowing managers not only increase the likelihood of a loan but tend to improve loan conditions for the borrower without increasing risk for the lender.
Using a sample of loans from 1996 to 2016, Even-Tov and his colleagues compared one-off interactions with loans conducted by the same parties. In established relationships, the borrowers saw better interest rates and the lenders got better screening and monitoring as evidenced by fewer rating downgrades.
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.
In this live interview on Wharton Business Daily, Associate Professor Yaniv Konchitchki discusses whether a soft landing is still possible and provides insights about the current state of the capital markets and the macroeconomy. Konchitchki argues, based on his research, that the Federal Reserve has made systematic and predictable errors, waiting too long to raise interest rates and letting inflation get out of control. He comments on whether further interest rates hikes are necessary, whether the Fed’s 2% inflation target is the right one, and discusses whether inflation can get under control without further hurting consumers, businesses, households, and the economy.
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.”
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.”
New research published in the Journal of Monetary Economics
BERKELEY, Calif.—Inflation is back with a vengeance. Prices of goods and services have risen at rates not seen since the 1980s, slamming households, small businesses, corporations, and governments at all levels.
But new research by Berkeley Haas Associate Professor Yaniv Konchitchki finds that most corporations that face significant risk from inflation have failed to disclose it. Inflation has caused trillions of dollars in shareholder stock price loss damages thus far and is threatening major additional losses for shareholders.
In a paper published in the Journal of Monetary Economics and coauthored with Jin Xie of Peking University’s HSBC Business School, the authors show that when it comes to inflation, companies widely ignore U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) legal rules requiring them to disclose important risks to their business. The authors developed a novel approach to extracting the attitudes and beliefs of corporate managers toward inflation risk from SEC reports, by examining over 65,000 10-K annual reports filed by major corporations with the SEC from January 2005 to April 2021. They discovered that, despite SEC legal requirements to disclose risk factors, more than 61% of the companies at high risk when prices rise never mentioned inflation or used inflation-related words in the risk disclosure section of those reports.
The failure of exposed companies to disclose inflation risk is not a trivial matter. Securities laws require public companies to disclose risks to their business in order to protect investors. “Corporate executives do not follow the legal requirement to warn shareholders about inflation risk,” said Konchitchki, an expert on the interface between capital markets, corporate financial reporting, and macroeconomics. “Several trillions of dollars in shareholders’ wealth have been damaged, and more are at stake.”
Consider the losses on stocks over the past one-to-two years of rising inflation. Any individual or institutional investor who holds shares in companies, directly or indirectly—such as through retirement accounts—has suffered losses, Konchitchki said.
“Our textual analysis of corporate reports filed with the SEC reveal that executives in many of these companies never mentioned—even once over the past several years of our sample period—the word inflation, inflation-related phrases, or that the companies are highly exposed to inflation risk,” he added. “Diligent investors, plaintiff attorneys, and regulators should ask, and will probably be asking, ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’”
The paper’s findings and framework enable the identification and evaluation of shareholder damages—especially for firms with inadequate risk disclosures—and could transform corporate disclosure practices, inflation expectations, and monetary policy, Konchitchki said.
The risks of inflation
Inflation can hurt companies in a variety of ways. For example, companies currently hold in total hundreds of billions of dollars in cash on their balance sheets. “Inflation erodes the purchasing power of these cash amounts, generating massive losses that are not shown in their financial statements because the U.S. financial reporting regime is nominal—i.e., it ignores inflation effects,” Konchitchki said.
Furthermore, the authors show that inflation risk exposure is common across almost all industries. Restaurant chains that can’t raise menu prices as fast as the soaring costs of food see their profit margins squeezed—imagine a burrito and the avocados that go into it. Utility companies that need a regulator’s approval to raise prices when costs rise are also highly exposed to inflation shocks. Silicon Valley Bank collapsed recently because it was holding billions of dollars in long-term government bonds that plunged in value as the Federal Reserve raised interest rates to combat inflation.
Given inflation’s increasing prevalence, there are emerging examples across many industries that Konchitchki said he is monitoring to study the macroeconomic effects of inflation.
Damages to shareholders
Konchitchki and Xie identified companies highly vulnerable to inflation by looking for those that had seen their share prices drop following inflation shocks, that is, when inflation data was released showing prices had risen more than had been forecasted. “We developed a measure to determine the extent to which shareholder value was damaged by unexpected inflation,” Konchitchki explained. The authors found that 14-18% of the companies in their sample, calculated across all industries, are exposed to rising prices.
The failure to be warned about inflation risk could be devastating for shareholders. Konchitchki and Xie created a model to simulate stock price losses if inflation shocks occurred in a 2-6% range over three years. The model projected total shareholder damages of $0.9 trillion to $2.8 trillion for shareholders of inflation-exposed companies.
One thing did seem to change the practices of corporate executives: getting sued. Companies exposed to inflation that had been targets of shareholders’ securities class action lawsuits were more likely to begin disclosing inflation risk, the authors discovered. In contrast, companies that were not exposed to inflation risk did not change their reporting practices following such class action lawsuits.
‘Rational inattention’
Why would companies not discuss inflation dangers in their annual reports? Konchitchki doesn’t believe that executives are trying to pull the wool over investors’ eyes. After all, a failure to provide adequate disclosure puts executives and their companies in jeopardy of legal action and regulatory sanctions.
The most probable explanation, Konchitchki said, is “rational inattention”—the economic theory that decisionmakers can’t process all available information but can rationally choose which pieces of information to pay attention to. The potential damage from rising prices just isn’t on the corporate radar screen—perhaps especially among Gen X and Millennial managers who have never experienced periods of runaway prices. “Because inflation has been relatively low over the past decades and/or identifying the damages from inflation might have been too costly, executives haven’t been attuned to it,” he suggests. He predicts that in coming years executives will be more liable, and thus will pay more attention to inflation if they wish to reduce their legal liability and excel in their jobs.
This lack of attention is also a problem for Federal Reserve policymakers who have been loudly warning about inflation and its risks in a bid to manage expectations of corporations and other players in the economy. Konchitchki’s and Xie’s research shows that many executives aren’t getting the message.
Larger lesson
As a founder of a new research area that he termed macro-accounting, Konchitchki pioneered the examination of linkages between accounting data, capital markets, and the macroeconomy. He believes there’s a larger lesson in the failure to recognize the threat of rising prices in financial reports.
“There is a disconnect between executives and an understanding of the macroeconomy,” he said. “We’ve seen shortcomings in appreciation of how inflation can be disruptive. It’s important that corporate managers become more familiar with macroeconomic and accounting research and take a more holistic approach, considering how economic turbulence will affect the financial performance of their businesses.”
Going forward, given the increase in the level and fluctuations of inflation, the effects analyzed in the paper will be even more critical for executives, shareholders, attorneys, and the macroeconomy, he said. And the methodology developed in the paper can be generalized to other macroeconomic risks. “Executives can improve their companies’ performance and risk management by adopting a macro-accounting, research-based approach, which focuses on assessing the effects of current and forecasted macroeconomic fluctuations—such as inflation, recessions, wars, and other economic uncertainties—on their accounting performance metrics.”
Read the full paper:
Undisclosed Material Inflation Risk
By Yaniv Konchitchki (University of California, Berkeley) and Jin Xie (Peking University) Journal of Monetary Economics, March 2023
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