The University has implemented a new contract management tool called ContractsND that is now available and will become mandatory as of July 1. The system is a component of buyND, but it has been configured in partnership with Notre Dame General Counsel (NDGC) to be the default pathway for contracts to be executed for the University.

The aim is to ensure compliance with Notre Dame policy and contractual terms, to provide greater visibility of the contract process and store copies in a reliable and accessible repository, and to make contract management more efficient.

I’ve outlined below the process for managing contracts appropriately, but I want to clarify two points:

First, for our purposes, a contract is any agreement that includes terms and conditions, and requires a signature. An example might be signing an agreement for a block of hotel rooms or arranging for new software. Contracts cover a lot of areas, so if you’re unsure, please contact me or to finance team member Emilia Taylor. We will be happy to review your document and advise.

Second, the authority to sign a contract on the University’s behalf is restricted to only designated individuals as determined by the Operational Delegation of Authority. For Mendoza, the University has designated sole authority to Dean Martijn Cremers to sign contracts up to a value of $250,000. He has sub-delegated this responsibility to me for operations-related contracts and to Ken Kelley for research/data related contracts.

This is an important point: No one else at Mendoza is authorized to approve or sign contracts. Further, contracts with a value above $250,000 require the signature of the University provost or the president.

If you are considering a contractual agreement on behalf of the University, here are the next steps:

1. You should submit the contract to Emilia along with the following background information:

2. Emilia will submit the contract and background information for a legal review to the Notre Dame General Counsel’s Office via ContractsND.

3. Once General Council approves the contract, they will route it back to Mendoza for review and signature (Martijn or myself). If the contract involves research, data or software, David Yeh and Brandon Greenawalt may review it and advise as well.

4. When the contract has been executed, copies will be stored in the University Contract Repository.

One more thing to note: In the past, you may have contacted Beth Smith for help in getting contracts signed. With the implementation of ContractsND, Emilia is now taking over this responsibility. Many thanks to Beth for her help managing the College contracts over the past nine years!

I expect that as the ContractsND tool is brought fully online, there will be some additional information and training opportunities. It's important that we understand how contracts should be handled so that we act as good stewards of the resources and responsibilities entrusted to us and to avoid potential misunderstandings down the line. If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

In Notre Dame,

Doug

Doug Franson
Director of Finance & Facilities

I’m glad to share with you a sample of recently published research by our faculty, highlighting one paper in each of our academic departments:

Jessica Watkins
Assistant Professor (Accountancy Department)
“Usefulness of Interest Income Sensitivity Disclosures” (The Accounting Review)
The study examines multiple dimensions of usefulness of banks’ interest income sensitivity disclosures. We find these disclosures are predictive of future realized changes in net interest income and appear to be used by a number of market participants, including financial analysts and equity investors. These results suggest that interest income sensitivity disclosures are informative measures of interest rate risk and contradict assertions that these disclosures are useless due to lack of relevance of income sensitivity, poor modeling techniques, and/or redundancy relative to regulatory data.

Johnathan Loudis
Assistant Professor (Finance Department)
"The Conditional Expected Market Return" (Journal of Financial Economics)
Understanding the behavior of expected stock market returns is important for both practitioners and academics alike. In this paper, we develop a new method for estimating upper and lower bounds on the conditional expected market return at any date. Our theoretical and empirical results offer new insights into the origins and behavior of the expected market return. For instance, according to our measures the average expected market return is about 5.2% per year, but it is highly volatile and reaches levels as high as 64% during the 2007-2008 financial crisis.

Xuying Zhao
Associate Professor (IT, Analytics, and Operations Department)
“Preorder Price Guarantee in E-commerce” (Manufacturing & Service Operations Management)
With the development of the internet and e-commerce, retailers often offer preorders for new, to-be-released products. To encourage preorders, retailers such as Amazon offer preorder price guarantee (PG). This research finds that PG enables a firm to profit from preorder demand uncertainty. If preorder demand uncertainty is high, a firm should adopt PG in advance selling. If preorder demand uncertainty is low, then a firm should adopt PG if and only if the percentage of high-valuation consumers is high. 

Ann E. Tenbrunsel
David E. Gallo Professor of Business Ethics (M&O Department)
“It’s Just Business”: Understanding How Business Frames Differ from Ethical Frames and the Effect on Unethical Behavior” (Journal of Business Ethics)
The perspective, or "frame," by which a decision maker examines a decision has a significant impact on their unethical behavior. More specifically, we find that viewing a decision through a business frame leads to more unethical behavior than viewing the exact same decision through an ethical frame. We further find that the decision processes are different between a business and an ethical frame, and that we can change the behavior associated with a frame by explicitly changing the decision processes.

James Otteson
John T. Ryan Jr. Professor of Business Ethics (Marketing Department)
"Democracy and 'People Over Profit’" (Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy)
One central argument supporting democratic political institutions is a principle of equal moral agency, which holds that all people, as free and responsible persons of dignity, are entitled to liberty, rights, privileges and obligations equally, which in turn entitles them to an equal say, or vote, in their government. This paper argues that honorable business in a properly functioning market economy is also based on a principle of equal moral agency, which similarly grants consumers a say, or "vote," in business activity. Thus, some versions of the "people over profits" objection raised to business activity miss the mark: Profit-seeking firms, when operating honorably, do not privilege people over profits; instead, they use democratic profit signals to guide production of benefit to all their stakeholders.

My thanks to these Mendoza faculty members and the many others whose research supports and informs our mission to enlighten and educate.

I also encourage you to attend the Notre Dame Ethics Week events this week via Zoom (see schedule below). The series features a number of our faculty members and students presenting different perspectives of the theme of “Beginning with Empathy: Listening and Learning from Others.” Thank you to Chris Adkins, Jessica McManus Warnell, Viva Bartkus, Joe Sweeney, Kelly Rubey, Ken Milani and Brian Levey for serving as speakers and moderators.

In Notre Dame,

Martijn