From the Dean's Desk

Guest column: Peter Easton and Lorie Marsh

Peter Easton and Lorie Marsh

Peter Easton and Lorie Marsh

Monday, 14 March 2022
For more than a decade the University has championed sustainability and ethical, responsible investing. The principles of sustainability are deeply embedded within the Catholic tradition and woven into the fabric of our Catholic mission; from the physical works on campus and in the community to the co-sponsored Vatican series of energy transition conversations hosted by Father Jenkins and the focus on a just transition to a sustainable future during the 2021 Notre Dame Forum events. Increasingly, however, it is evident that more must be done, and we must act quickly.
The Center for Accounting Research and Education (CARE) was founded in 2004 to support faculty in the creation and dissemination of accounting knowledge, strengthening the bridges between research, education and practice. As we pivoted to a virtual conference platform in 2021, we spent the summer speaking with experts around the globe, from climate scientists to fund managers, researchers and regulators, to activists and global heads of large accounting and investment firms.
A sea-change occurred during those discussions as we listened to the message, repeated over and over again, that business schools must do more to not only educate the leaders of tomorrow, but to address the climate crisis. The message was clear: universities, particularly US institutions, are late in acknowledging and responding to the climate and sustainability issue. We are not adequately educating our students for the professions they are entering.
In response to this message, I announced last September that CARE will shift our focus to sustainability and responsible investing with the creation of three initiatives:
  • A cross-listed hybrid undergraduate/masters level course entitled Accountability in a Sustainable World, offered beginning Fall, 2022
  • A journal entitled Accountability in a Sustainable World Quarterly, that will address the research gap between practice and education 
  • A shift in focus of the annual CARE Conference to matters of sustainability and responsible investing.
The course, currently cross listed as Sustainability Studies Minor course SUS 40160, ACCT40160, MSA70173, and MBA70173, will also be cross listed with Finance. It is designed to develop future sustainability leaders by active engagement with key participants, critical synthesis of research on measurement of climate change effects and movement toward quantifiable achievable goals. The course is open to juniors, seniors and graduate students from all disciplines across the university.
Students will meet exemplary professionals that have one thing in common—they are working to transform our current climate change and environmental crises into societal opportunity. Highly motivated students who have a strong interest in climate change, sustainability, and ways that they would like to become influencers and responsible guardians of the future of our planet are encouraged to enroll. The full syllabus can be viewed here.
The founding editors of Accountability in a Sustainable World Quarterly recognize the immediate need for dialogue among academics and practitioners about sustainability, accountability, data and measurement, related assurance, high quality information to inform (responsible) investment decisions and accountability in setting of personal, corporate and public sector goals. The aim of the journal is to meet this need. It will be cross-disciplinary, with a focus on measurement, assurance of the measurements and use of the measures in the broadest sense. The short articles, authored by academics and practitioners, have an intended readership comprising both groups. More on the journal can be found here.
The 2021 CARE Accounting for Sustainability and Responsible Investing Conference was held in cooperation with Sustainable Investment Forum North America 2021, in partnership with the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative, hosting 2,035 delegates worldwide. The Forum’s mission is to mobilize sustainable investment towards a 1.5°C world, by convening a global audience representing asset owners and investment managers, institutional investors, pension funds, banks, development banks, policymakers, think tanks and NGOs to continue to build the momentum for sustainable finance and responsible investment.
The 2022 CARE Conference will be held at the United Nations COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, in November. Keep an eye on the CARE website for further details. If you would like to be added to the invitation list, please email Lorie Marsh at lmarsh1@nd.edu.
Sincerely,
Peter Easton, Academic Director, CARE; Editor in Chief, Accountability in a Sustainable World Quarterly; and Notre Dame Alumni Professor of Accountancy
Lorie Marsh, Program Manager, CARE; Editorial Manager, Accountability in a Sustainable World Quarterly

Guest column: Erin Bellissimo

Erin Bellissimo

Erin Bellissimo

Monday, 7 March 2022
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The Notre Dame Institute for Global Investing seeks to be a preeminent, university-based investment management research and education program worldwide, convening ideas and people around critical industry topics. One of our key priorities is to promote more inclusivity within the investment management industry. NDIGI recognizes that the industry is stronger with diversity of thought leadership and background. Therefore, our research, curriculum and events encourage and promote diversity within the industry, focusing on women, underrepresented minorities and first-generation students.
Women’s History Month is an excellent opportunity to highlight how NDIGI aims to expand the pipeline of women entering financial services, especially asset management. Launched in 2019, the annual Women’s Investing Summit (WIS) is an opportunity for all students at Notre Dame to hear from senior female executives in financial services. Patty Brady of NDIGI took charge of planning WIS ’22 and brought an outstanding group of female role models to campus in February.
In addition, we see an opportunity to help expand the pipeline to Mendoza for women. We are grateful to Mark Dumich, who worked tirelessly to partner with the Admissions office and several finance faculty, to launch a high school pre-college leadership program (The Power of Investing) that targets diversity.  Beyond the classroom, Mark serves as an ambassador to enrolled students to support their questions and application process to Notre Dame. Mark’s personalized attention and support are making a real difference for these high school students in getting to know Notre Dame and Mendoza.
We are also thankful for Professor Carl Ackerman who has partnered with NDIGI on nearly every diversity issue we come up with. From leading Girls Who Invest on campus to now heading our pre-college Power of Investing class this summer, Carl puts in so much time with NDIGI and we appreciate his support for women in finance.
Finally, our partnership with student clubs has been a central part of realizing our mission and priorities at NDIGI. Tess Swain is on the frontlines of supporting our professional clubs, including Smart Women in Securities, which aims to introduce undergraduate women to finance and investing.
The NDIGI team serves as a resource for all students – organizing executive fellows to meet 1:1 with students, offering focused groups of women to have coffee chats with campus visitors and executives, and partnering with Bob Rischard in career services to advise and mentor students on an as needed basis. We help with internships, advice and programming with an intention to continue to change the face of investing. Our hope is that the work of NDIGI and our campus partners will result in increasing the brand of Notre Dame and the Mendoza College of Business within the investment space, allowing us to draw the best students, faculty and investors to Notre Dame.
In Notre Dame,
Erin Bellissimo
Managing Director of the Notre Dame Institute for Global Investing

Guest column: Ryan Retartha

Ryan Retartha

Ryan Retartha

Monday, 28 February 2022
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I’m happy to share a few updates and statistics regarding our Mendoza alumni engagement efforts for this year.
Facts and Figures
While it is always difficult to track all alumni engagement, I’m confident to report that so far this academic year, we have more than 360 individual instances of alumni connecting directly with students across at least 64 different initiatives. These include club interactions, social and networking events, and career support, just to name a few. My endless thanks to my student, faculty and staff partners who constantly innovate new ways for our alumni to elevate the student journey at Mendoza.
Alumni Book Club
In January, we launched the Mendoza Alumni Book Club to wild success. This initiative includes an online portal where users can discuss the book, receive regular email communication with reminders and new discussion topics, and engage in live author chats. As of this week, we have 768 alumni members, 268 discussion posts and almost 16,000 pageviews. As we begin our second book next month, “High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out,” I’m very pleased to invite all Mendoza faculty and staff to join as well. You can sign up to participate at this link. We’ll also be introducing some Notre Dame faculty selections later this year, so keep an eye out for those!
Commencement 2020
The Class of 2020 will finally get an opportunity to celebrate its graduation this coming Memorial Day weekend. The Registrar has assigned each college a time to host their own adjacent celebration to the University commencement on May 29 (Sunday) in the Notre Dame Stadium. Mendoza will be hosting our celebration brunch for all business alumni — undergraduate and graduate — at 10 a.m. on May 28 (Saturday).
We have about 200 alumni who have RSVP’d so far, and University Enterprises and Events will determine a venue after they see our headcount as of April 1. We will also need the usual slate of Faculty Marshals for the Sunday Commencement exercises in Notre Dame Stadium; please let me know if you are interested in serving. To complement the May events, we also look forward to providing a Mendoza Class of 2020 reunion event on the weekend of the Notre Dame versus California football game on September 17. 
Yours in Notre Dame,
Ryan
Ryan Retartha
Director of Mendoza Alumni Relations

February Research Roundup

Martijn Cremers

Martijn Cremers

Monday, 21 February 2022
Following are highlights of recently published papers:
Ahmed Abbasi, Joe and Jane Giovanini Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations
David Dobolyi, Assistant Research Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations
"The Phishing Funnel Model: A Design Artifact to Predict User Susceptibility to Phishing Websites" (Information Systems Research)
Phishing is a security risk that affects both individuals and organizations alike. To better protect against it, we (along with our co-authors) developed a model that is better able to predict user susceptibility to phishing in real-time by evaluating the entire phishing process holistically.
John R. Busenbark, Assistant Professor of Management & Organization
"Corporate-level influences on internal capital allocation: The role of financial analyst performance projections" (Strategic Management Journal)
Research on internal capital allocation — the practice by which corporate managers of multidivisional firms distribute financial resources to the business units — offers perplexingly mixed insight as to whether managers benefit from helping financially stimulate underperforming divisions or rewarding the top performing segments. In our research, we theorize and find that firms performing well below or above expectations are incentivized to engage in the former, whereas firms performing consistent with expectations allocate capital consistent with the latter.
Zhi Da, Howard J. and Geraldine F. Korth Professor of Finance
"Extrapolative Beliefs in the Cross-section: What Can We Learn from the Crowds?" (Journal of Financial Economics)
Using novel data from a crowdsourcing platform for ranking stocks, we investigate how investors form expectations about stock returns. We find that investors extrapolate from stocks’ recent past returns, with more weight on more recent returns, especially when recent returns are negative, salient, or from a dispersed cross-section.
Dean Shepherd, Ray and Milann Siegfried Professor of Entrepreneurship“Grounding Business Models: Cognition, Boundary Objects, and Business-model Change” (The Academy of Management Review)
This study builds on grounded-cognition theories and the notion of boundary objects to offer a grounded-cognition framework of business-model change. By developing this framework, we advance understanding of the micro-foundations of strategy; offer a new pathway by which stakeholders inform value creation and value capture; and explain nuances in the relationship between boundary objects, business-model coherence and the decision to change a business model, and illustrate how the mechanisms that help create a viable new business model can also help overcome an actor’s psychological obstruction to making a pivot.
Joonhyuk Yang, Assistant Professor of Marketing
"High-energy Ad Content: A Large-scale Investigation of TV Commercials" (Journal of Marketing Research)
A trend reported by both academics and practitioners is that advertising on TV has become increasingly energetic. Using a data set of over 27,000 TV commercials delivered to U.S. homes during the period between 2015 and 2018, this study investigates the association between the energy level in ad content and consumers’ tendency of ad-tuning. The authors find that more energetic commercials are likely to be tuned in more or avoided less by viewers, while the association varies across product categories and program genres. The main implication of this study is that advertisers should pay attention to components of ad content other than loudness, which has been regulated by law.
Congratulations, Ahmed, David, John, Zhi, Dean and Joonhyuk on your publication success.
In Notre Dame,
Martijn

Guest column: Rob Easley

Rob Easley

Rob Easley

Monday, 14 February 2022
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The ITAO Department is pleased to announce a new Master of Science in Business Analytics focused on Sports Analytics. This is a natural fit for the University of Notre Dame with its deep connection to collegiate athletics, and also for the Mendoza College of Business with the GAMA Lab (Gaming Analytics & Business Research Lab) and new Ph.D. offerings in Analytics and Management.
There is no better time for us to embark on this journey — the stars are aligned with both ITAO’s analytical strength and Notre Dame’s athletic excellence.
The MSBA in Sports Analytics offers the same baseline instruction in business analytics as the standard MSBA while using required courses in sports and human performance analytics in place of electives. Other coursework will emphasize either front-office (e.g., ticketing, pricing, fan experience, etc.) or athletic performance analytics problems where such examples are applicable. Many aspects of this program align with our imperative to Grow the Good in Business, such as using analytics in human performance to predict and prevent injury or to maximize wellness.
This program requires the same rigor and provides the same degree that is currently offered through our MSBA-Chicago and MSBA residential programs. With its focus on sports analytics, we anticipate attracting a number of post-graduate and graduate-transfer student athletes. Therefore, we developed the program to be delivered across a full year that starts in the summer session. We also arranged classes to avoid early mornings and later afternoons to minimize scheduling conflicts for student athletes. We anticipate launching the program this summer (2022) if we have sufficient student enrollment.
Assistant Teaching Professor Brandon Erlacher will serve as the Academic Director of MSBA-Sports Analytics. In addition to teaching, Brandon has experience helping brands find and communicate insights, optimize customer journeys, design digital products and personalize customer experiences to drive engagement and conversions. He is a Double-Domer with both an EMBA and an MSBA earned as part of the first MS in Business Analytics cohort in Chicago.
In this program, Assistant Teaching Professor Martin Barron will provide courses on Machine Learning, Sports Analytics and Human Performance Analytics. Martin earned both his M.S. and Ph.D. in Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics (ACMS) at Notre Dame, working with statistical machine learning techniques. A native of Dublin, Ireland, Martin worked as a data scientist for Kitman Labs, a human performance optimization firm, prior to joining the ITAO department. While at Kitman Labs, he developed machine learning pipelines and collaborated with elite sports teams on projects in the areas of injury prevention, performance maximization, player growth and maturation, and strategy analysis. He is also the faculty advisor to Notre Dame’s Sports Analytics Club, which provides analytics services to many ND athletic teams.
More information is available on the website, which we will continue to modify and build out over time.
Special thanks to Corey Angst, Kristen Collett-Schmitt, María Stutsman y Márquez, Brian Connelly and the Mendoza Graduate Business administration for collaboratively working to get this going in such a short time frame.
Rob Easley
John W. Berry Sr. Department Chair
IT, Analytics, & Operations

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