We’re excited to let you know about an innovative program at Mendoza — the Silicon Mod-Away program for our MBA students. For the past seven weeks, 14 Notre Dame MBA students have been living and studying in Silicon Valley as part of a pilot program with Notre Dame California.

The Silicon Valley Mod-Away reflects the MBA program’s growing commitment to the technology field and an expansion of our analytics training in the program. Last year, more than one-third of our MBA students took jobs at technology companies, and others chose jobs in technology or data-related roles in other organizations, such as consulting firms.

Courses in the Silicon Valley Mod-Away are focused on product management, technology and innovation. All four classes are being taught or co-taught by tenured Mendoza faculty. Sarv Devaraj, the director of ND California, is teaching a course on Data and Digital Innovation. Xuying Zhao, who also lives in area, is teaching a course on Smart Supply Chain Innovation. Nick Berente and Jan Poczobutt (an ’83 alum and a senior executive at Amazon) are co-teaching two of courses — one on Digital Product Management and one that connects our students with tech companies in Silicon Valley to develop new digital innovations.

Although most Silicon Valley tech firms are still working remotely, limiting onsite visit opportunities, Silicon Valley faculty, as well as Ryan Retartha and John Rooney, stepped up to both bring speakers into the classroom and students out to some firms each week. The students had the opportunity to spend time with leaders from Google, Facebook, Amazon, IDEO, LinkedIn, Adobe, VMware, JD.com and several others. The Mod-Away also offered a range of opportunities to interact with alumni, such as happy hours, tailgating at the ND-Stanford game and visits to alumni-connected organizations. The visits included a trip to a Napa Valley winery (Silver Oak) and a professional soccer organization (San Jose Sharks), among other field trips to California’s abundant tourist destinations.

Beyond organized events, many students individually connected with alumni in the area throughout the term and found those alumni to be quite available for grabbing a cup of coffee and helping with networking. Most students lived in an apartment complex across the street from Stanford University, and took classes in a temporary facility on-site. ND California is working to identify a more long term classroom facility in Palo Alto for next year.

Overall, indications are that this Mod-Away in Silicon Valley was a successful pilot. Over the Stanford-ND weekend, we spent time asking the students for their reflections about their experience so far. They expressed overwhelmingly positive reviews of their experience, noting the lifelong bonds they have formed together, and deep appreciation for the opportunity to learn, network and immerse themselves in the culture of Silicon Valley. They are eager to help recruit first year students to participate in the program next year.

We look forward to building on this success and continuing to both build and strengthen opportunities for Notre Dame MBAs in the Bay Area.

In Notre Dame,

Nick Berente

Viola D. Hank Associate Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations

Mike Mannor
Associate Dean for the MBA Program
John F. O'Shaughnessy Associate Professor of Family Enterprise

I’m pleased to highlight recent faculty research published in top academic journals:

Zhi Da, Howard J. and Geraldine F. Korth Professor of Finance
Short selling efficiency (Journal of Financial Economics)
We propose a new variable called short-selling efficiency (SSE) to measure whether short sellers devote more capital to more overpriced stocks. We show conceptually and empirically that SSE has favorable predictive ability over aggregate short interest, as SSE reduces the effect of noises in short interest and better captures the amount of aggregate short-selling capital devoted to overpricing.

Paul Gao, Professor of Finance
Good for your fiscal health? The effect of the affordable care act on healthcare borrowing costs (Journal of Financial Economics)
Since its passage in 2010, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has grown to provide health coverage to more than 31 million people (including the Medicaid expansion) and survived three challenges before the Supreme Court. We use the health-care municipal bond market to study hospital credit risk around the implementation of the ACA. Health-care providers issued significant municipal health-care bonds — the primary source of financing for nonprofit hospitals, which represent about 70% of all hospitals in the U.S. We show that the ACA significantly reduced hospital credit risk. The immediate yield change represents $360 million in aggregate interest savings on all health-care municipal bonds issued from mid-2012 to 2015.

Hong Guo, Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations
Xuying Zhao, Associate Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations
The Role of Expectation‐Reality Discrepancy in Service Contracts (Production and Operation Management)
Service contracts are common practice in some industries while being eliminated in others. To investigate this phenomenon, we identify expectation–reality discrepancy (ERD) as a key determinant. A provider's ERD is defined as consumers’ ex-ante expected valuation minus their ex-post realized valuation of the provider's service. Our analysis reveals that providers’ contract strategies critically depend on their ERDs rather than the true service valuations. 

Ann Tenbrunsel, David E. Gallo Professor of Business Ethics 
The Opportunities and Challenges of Behavioral Field Research on Misconduct (Organizational Behavior & Human Decision Processes)
Research on behavioral misconduct and ethics across many fields has provided important managerial and policy implications, but has primarily relied on laboratory experiments and survey-based methods to quantify and explain predictors of and mechanisms behind such behavior. This introductory article in a special issue devoted to field studies of unethical behavior goes beyond summarizing the articles by offering a methodological classification of field research on misconduct, discussing the challenges facing behavioral field studies and identifying the tools that might mitigate them. Our goal is to provide a foundation that helps build a cross-disciplinary, integrated view of the field evidence on behavioral misconduct as well as to encourage future work that employs the best empirical practices.

Joonhyuk Yang, Assistant Professor of Marketing
Commercial Success Through Commercials? Advertising and Pay-TV Operators (Journal of Marketing Research)
The study examines the role of advertising in the growth of direct satellite services (such as DirecTV or Dish Network) in the U.S. pay-TV service market that was dominated by cable operators until the 1990s. In particular, the study provides evidence that a form of advertising scale economies was in effect as the unit costs of local advertising tend to be higher than those of national advertising, which likely allowed the satellite operators to better leverage their national presence with (cheaper) national advertising. Overall, this study highlights the interaction between advertising efficiencies and the scale of entry in explaining the competition between market incumbents and entrants.

Thank you, Zhi, Paul, Hong, Xuying, Ann and Joonhyuk, for your efforts to advance your disciplines and our research reputation.

In Notre Dame,

Martijn