The Marketing Department is delighted to announce a new Master of Science in Digital Marketing (MSDM). This one-year residential program will offer a comprehensive, rigorous, graduate-level education to students with both non-business and business backgrounds to enter into the burgeoning field of Digital Marketing. In the coming months, we plan to announce and market this program to ensure a talented and diverse cohort of students joining us in fall 2023.

I want to recognize some of the many people who were instrumental in getting us to this point. Thanks to Dean Martijn Cremers and Ken Kelley for their enthusiastic support and sponsorship of the cutting-edge program proposal we developed. Both Joe Cherian and Kristen Collett-Schmitt helped navigate the proposal through numerous committees. And finally, special thanks to members of the Marketing Department for their valuable advice and helpful input.

The MSDM program will train students to lead in a field of business where the demand for digital marketing professionals is increasing rapidly. More firms now expect employees to be familiar with the extraction, processing, analysis and protection of data from various digital sources to assist them with digital marketing, social media engagement, data privacy and multi-channel resource allocation.

The MSDM is an analytically-oriented graduate program focusing on broader strategic issues of digital transformation as well as digital and social media marketing and strategy, online marketing decision models, digital branding, pricing, distribution, advertising, promotion decisions, customer management, machine learning and artificial intelligence applications in the digital domain. In addition, by addressing issues such as privacy and ethics, mitigating algorithmic biases, and curtailing the spread of misinformation, we will produce graduates whose actions will bear fruit for society’s common good. A vital element in this program will be an experiential learning opportunity through a new course, Applied Digital Marketing, where students will spearhead the design, deployment and optimization phases of live digital marketing campaigns.

The MSDM will also deliver on the college-level Objectives and Key Results for the Academy (OKRA) of engendering a diverse, equitable and inclusive culture. The program will continue the marketing department’s already strong track record of gender diversity, as over 65% of students across all marketing programs are female. In addition, a key priority will be creating cohorts of MSDM students with a rich diversity of backgrounds and perspectives where all students, including marginalized and underrepresented populations, are integral and meaningful members.

In many ways, the new MSDM is a natural extension of the digital marketing offerings the department has introduced in recent years. The department currently offers a Digital Marketing track for the UG Marketing majors, a Digital Marketing minor program for non-Mendoza undergraduates, and a STEM-designated Digital Marketing and Marketing Analytics major within the MBA program.

We are creating a website for this program and look forward to providing details as soon as it is ready.

Shankar Ganesan
John Cardinal O’Hara, C.S.C. Chairperson & Professor
Department of Marketing

The following are highlights of recently published papers:

Sriram Somanchi, Assistant Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations
"To Predict or Not to Predict: The Case of the Emergency Department" (Production and Operations Management)
We develop a novel two-stage prediction framework that improves the efficiency of hospital operations in terms of handoff from an Emergency Department (ED) to an inpatient facility. Working with a healthcare startup, we show that our method identifies subgroups of patients for whom we can send early signals to an inpatient facility about an admitting patient with limited information while still maintaining high accuracy. Our work has significant potential value to healthcare entities and contributes to a growing stream of work on how to best realize the value of healthcare analytics efforts.

John Costello, Assistant Professor of Marketing
“Why Are Donors More Generous with Time than Money? The Role of Perceived Control Over Donations on Charitable Giving“ (Journal of Consumer Research)
Although nonprofits like charities tend to prefer money, experimental and field data demonstrate that donors prefer to donate time, even when doing so does less good for the cause. In this research, we demonstrate that this preference emerges because potential donors feel more personal control over their time (vs. money) donations. We use our conceptual model to design and test several interventions that nonprofits can use to more effectively generate donations of these two resources.

Ben Matthies, Assistant Professor of Finance
“Long-run risk: Is it there?” (Journal of Finance)
This paper documents the existence of a persistent component in consumption growth. We take a novel approach using news coverage to capture investor concern about economic growth prospects. We provide evidence that consumption growth is highly predictable over long horizons – our measure explains between 23% and 38% of cumulative future consumption growth at the five-year horizon and beyond. Furthermore, we show a strong connection between this predictability and asset prices. Innovations to our measure price 51 standard portfolios in the cross-section and our one-factor model outperforms many benchmark macro- and return-based multi-factor models.

Mike Mannor, John F. O'Shaughnessy Associate Professor of Family Enterprise
“Keep Your Eye on the Ball or on the Field? Exploring the Performance Implications of Executive Strategic Attention” (Academy of Management Journal)
Should CEOs focus on a wide set of strategic issues or just a few key issues? In this paper, my co-author and I develop a new textual analysis tool that shows how CEOs improve firm performance in most cases by focusing on a smaller number of strategic issues (ie. focus, focus, focus). However, broader attention is better when firms face weak market opportunities or are very efficient in using their current resources.

Sandra Vera-Muñoz, Associate Professor of Accountancy
“Climate Risk Materiality and Firm Risk” (Review of Accounting Studies)
Using the SASB Materiality Map to proxy for market expectations of climate risk materiality, we test whether the association between disclosing climate risk in 10-Ks and firm risk (proxied by cost of equity) varies with market expectations of climate risk materiality. We find that the market rewards (penalizes) the firms for disclosing (not disclosing) climate risk in their 10-K filings. However, the penalty for nondisclosure is twice as large when the market expects climate risk to be material as compared to when the market does not expect climate risk to be material. Our results indicate that markets use expectations of climate risk materiality to infer the credibility of managers’ climate risk disclosure decisions. 

Congratulations, Sriram, John, Ben, Mike and Sandra on your publication success.

In Notre Dame,

Martijn

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:

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