From the Dean's Desk

Faculty research update

Martijn Cremers

Martijn Cremers

Monday, 28 September 2020
Our faculty continues to publish research in top-tier journals at a robust rate. I am pleased to highlight several faculty members’ recent success:

Peter Kelly
Assistant Professor of Finance
Earnings Announcement Return Extrapolation
Review of Accounting Studies (Forthcoming)
The researchers show that extrapolative beliefs are an important ingredient for explaining return patterns and investor behavior around earnings announcements (EAs). Stocks expected to have high EA returns according to their new extrapolation measure experience predictable increases in prices before EAs and predictable decreases afterward (consistent with over-extrapolation). Additionally, the research offers evidence that individual and institutional investors hold extrapolative beliefs before earnings announcements based on past earnings announcement returns.
Katie Wowak
Assistant Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations
"Hiding in the Herd: The Product Recall Clustering Phenomenon"
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management (Forthcoming)
The research finds that product recalls in the automobile industry occur in clusters, which are a collection of recalls within close temporal proximity in which a leading recall (the first recall in a cluster) by one firm excites following recalls (subsequent recalls in a cluster) by competitor firms. Over a 48-year period (1966-2013), 73% of recalls announced during that time occurred in recall clusters. Additionally, leading recalls are associated with as high as a 67% larger stock market penalty than following recalls.
Ahmed Abbasi
Joe and Jane Giovanini Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations
"TheoryOn: A Design Framework and System for Unlocking Behavioral Knowledge Through Ontology Learning"
MIS Quarterly
Analysts and researchers are increasingly dealing with a data deluge that impacts coverage and precision while retrieving information. When manually processing large volumes of scientific research and/or technical documents, these knowledge inaccessibility and inaccuracy issues are especially pronounced. Building on recent advances in text analytics, the researchers designed and developed a machine learning framework to aid analysts and researchers in their information seeking process. Through a series of experiments, they show that the proposed framework can significantly improve the quality, completeness and speed of information retrieved by expert users. This work is part of a research stream on human-centered text analytics that recently won the INFORMS Design Science Award.
Mike Mannor
John F. O'Shaughnessy Associate Professor of Family Enterprise
Management & Organization
"Keep Your Eye on the Ball or the Field? Exploring the Performance Implications of Executive Strategic Attention"
Academy of Management Journal (August 2020)
For CEOs managing complex organizations in a rapidly changing world, it can be hard to decide how to focus their strategic attention. This research, a collaboration between Mike Mannor and a former Notre Dame MBA student, finds that performance is strongest when CEOs adapt the breadth of their attention to align with the quantity and quality of opportunities in the current market, and their organization’s recently demonstrated ability to convert opportunities into results.
Yixing Chen
Assistant Professor of Marketing
"Improving Cancer Outreach Effectiveness Through Targeting and Economic Assessments"
Journal of Marketing (May 2020)
What should health care institutions do to boost cancer screening rates while saving more money for the health care system? Combining machine learning and a large-scale field experiment, this NIH-sponsored study recently published in the Journal of Marketing develops a personalized outreach program that can simultaneously improve liver cancer screening rates by up to 24 percentage points and return on outreach program by up to 96%.
Please join me in congratulating these colleagues contributing new knowledge to their fields and advancing the reputation of Mendoza through their research.
In Notre Dame,
Martijn 

Guest column: Chris Fruehwirth

Martijn Cremers

Martijn Cremers

Monday, 21 September 2020
Image
The changing IT world
This past year has been a blessing and maybe a curse for IT. The blessing is that the technologies we provide have been more utilized than ever before (which is exciting for us). The curse is that demand for our services is at an all-time high.
The pandemic has caused our College and the world to rapidly adapt to a pace of constant change and embrace technology. For many of us, this started with the March transition to online teaching and resumed in August, where we were utilizing the dual delivery technology in the classrooms. Mendoza IT and I have learned that Mendoza College and the Notre Dame community have many very resilient faculty, staff and students in these turbulent times. My team has witnessed this resiliency in many situations since the start of this online journey. We know that technology plays a vital role in navigating these challenging times, but none of us forgets that people matter the most.
When looking back at this past year, there are a few IT items to highlight. In March, moving online involved Mendoza IT ensuring technology readiness of faculty, staff and students. The move was composed of technology training sessions around Zoom and Panopto presented by Nick Page, an individual technology equipment readiness review and the creation of support documentation on the Mendoza Exchange website. Some of our front line IT support staff who answered numerous calls and emails and who provided consultations for our faculty, staff and students included Ryan Krasyk, Ryan Hudson, Hank Gettinger, Jerry Kickul, David Hardman and David Yeh.
Moving into preparation for the fall academic year, Mendoza IT (and our colleagues at OIT) had numerous classroom preparations to accomplish in a reasonably short amount of time. Delays in the IT supply chains for critical AV equipment such as microphones and cameras almost hindered classrooms from being ready. The Mendoza IT members of Jim Spencer, Jeremy May, Frank Mark, Nick Page and our new part-time hire Kyle Way spent long hours making sure that our classrooms provided the optimal dual delivery experience for our faculty and students. Shortly before the classrooms were released back into our faculty’s hands, M&O chair Craig Crossland facilitated and led a very informative dual delivery classroom demo for all of the College, which contributed to our faculty readiness for the upcoming academic year.
All the while, another essential effort for the College was going on, which was the construction of the B003 classroom in Stayer. This classroom was completed in a tight timeframe to ensure that the residential MSBA program had highly functional classroom space for its new students. This project wouldn’t have been possible without our faculty partnerships, including Scott Nestler, Fred Nwanganga, Sharif Nijim and Rob Easley. Our two project managers, Zara Osterman and Diego Wang, were another vital component for this IT project. These two made sure the vendor kept to the tight timeline and delivered a fully ready classroom for the first day of class.
Finally, there are two last efforts I would like to mention. First, Mendoza IT recently accomplished launching the Virtual Municipal Finance Workshop 2020, working with our very own Professor Paul Gao. From Mendoza IT, both Minhee Myung and David Yeh were critical in getting the technology components of this effort off the ground. Tami Springer from Faculty Support also stepped out of her typical role and spent time working with Mendoza IT cleaning up our customer relationship management system (Salesforce) that supports a variety of MCOB business processes.
In closing, I would like to thank all the faculty and staff for their patience, support and understanding during these last few months. As I have highlighted many different people throughout this column, I will leave you with the following quote:
“It's not a faith in technology. It's faith in people."
Steve Jobs, Co-founder of Apple.
With gratitude,
Chris Fruehwirth
Director of Mendoza IT

The next level

Martijn Cremers

Martijn Cremers

Monday, 14 September 2020
Image
I recently participated in a livestream interview with Lou Nanni, vice president for University Relations. During the interview, Lou asked me about my strategic vision for the College; specifically, he asked, what are my plans to take the College to “the next level”?
It’s an important question, which I interpret as asking where the College could be in five to 10 years. It’s also a challenging question, as we necessarily need to be very focused on managing the current changes and disruptions due to the pandemic, which makes it harder to continue to “elevate, cooperate and integrate”; i.e., to also work on our strategic vision.
I will mention a few of our strategic initiatives to advance our mission through initiatives centered on the imperative to Grow the Good in Business — to contribute, cooperate and compete with a view that centers on serving others, especially those who have the greatest needs:
Undergraduate Scholars and Honors Program: The aim is to elevate our undergraduate program by further challenging our most academically gifted and academically ambitious students in the Scholars Program by offering honors sections of existing courses as well as (mostly new) honors courses, where both honors sections and new honors courses offer accelerated and advanced content. The Honors Program would further allow students to write a thesis supervised by a faculty member. Associate Dean Jim Leady is taking the lead on working toward developing plans for both programs. We hope to launch the Scholars Program in the 2021-2022 academic year.
Business Analytics: We will continue to integrate analytics throughout our curricula. For undergraduates, the ITAO team of Sriram Somanchi, Fred Nwanganga and Xiaojing Duan with assistance from Rob Easley and Bob Lewandowski has been working hard to create a new course required for all business majors, Fundamentals of Coding. The course will give students a basic level of understanding that in turn allows us to integrate analytics and coding in all of their subsequent courses. Although I didn’t talk about this specifically in the interview, we have the same goal to integrate analytics throughout our graduate programs curricula. For example, we added a new data analytics concentration as well as a host of new accounting-focused data analytics courses to our MSA program.
Frontlines: As you know, we recently received a significant gift from Ken and Susan Meyer that will allow us to expand the Meyer Business on the Frontlines Program. The gift allows us to offer the Frontlines experience to all Notre Dame MBA students, as well as to pilot a domestic version this year, Frontlines in America. The team of Viva Bartkus, Joe Sweeney and Kelly Rubey also are creating a shorter term Frontlines Engagements course.
COVID-19 has been a challenge. At the same time, these past months have helped us recognize that we're here for a purpose, to work together, to help each other and to teach and serve our students. You have brought your “A” game! We’ve learned a lot, and because you have been willing to really step up and work together, we've been very resilient. It's times like this that show that we are very much a strong community, and I actually think that through the great adversity and the mistakes and the pivots and the changes and asking more and more of you, of all of our faculty, staff and students, we've become an even stronger community.
Lou also asked me what my first year serving as dean has been like and whether there have been any surprises. To the last question, I can answer, YES. A minor surprise is that I get way more emails than I could have imagined. More importantly, I have been surprised with how patient, gracious and generous you all have been with me as I started and continue in this new role, even as I’m making mistakes and learning, and I'm so grateful for all the help that I continue to receive.
In Notre Dame,
Martijn

Guest column: Mike Mannor

Martijn Cremers

Martijn Cremers

Monday, 7 September 2020
Image
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
2020 has been tough on everyone. Through our struggles as a society to grapple with a global pandemic, tribalism, systemic racism, police violence and shortcomings in diversity, equity and inclusiveness, we also have a moment to reflect on how our institutions serve our society in support of our collective values.
Tragically, recent news brought more reports of suffering in the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. This tragedy, together with the heartbreaking stories of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and so many more — going back to Emmett Till and the untold numbers of victims  before and since — bring the sobering realities of inequality and discrimination into clearer focus.
At Notre Dame, our values as a Catholic institution guide us forward. In addition to recognizing the gravity of the moment, we are committed to taking substantive steps to improve the diversity of our community and to foster inclusive excellence throughout our College. We must grapple with our legacy and current shortcomings with a spirit of transparency and openness, and, I believe, pursue change as both a moral and professional obligation.
To this end, good steps forward are happening throughout our College. Nearly every week, there are new opportunities for our community to come together and listen to each other and discuss these issues. Some recent examples include the Mendoza sessions organized by Kara Palmer with Eric Love and Pamela Nolan (make sure to mark your calendar for our next meeting at 3 p.m. Sept. 24 with Angela Logan, who will focus the conversation on implicit bias).
There is also the University’s Diversity Practitioners Group and a series of opportunities to build an anti-racist vocabulary. If you have not explored the resources provided in the “Diversity and Inclusion” section of the Mendoza Exchange website, I would encourage you to review the 127 content items currently included on the topics of racism at work, faith, teaching, books, films and more.
Much of the hard work of change requires specific and sustained attention, which is often only possible through concentrated efforts in smaller groups. I was particularly encouraged by the M&O department’s session recently on inclusive excellence with a focus on racial justice and equality, which included a reflection on Dean Marcus Cole’s essay, “I am George Floyd. Except, I can breathe. And I can do something.” This is part of an ongoing series of inclusive excellence workshops that occur multiple times a year with all of the faculty in M&O. I know other departments and administrative groups have conducted or are working on similar initiatives.
Our undergrad students recently worked to build awareness about racial injustice with the Notre Dame Strike for Black Lives virtual demonstration. Students shared a message of solidarity in their Zoom classes and left after one minute, using that time to educate themselves on racial justice issues.
In the MBA program, our students have risen to this challenge. A task force of students, administrators and alumni met throughout the summer to hold listening sessions, reflect on our program’s shortcomings and draft recommendations for moving forward. I am pleased to share the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force recommendations with all of you. In total, the team iterated over many issues, consolidated, negotiated and advanced 44 targeted recommendations across four thematic areas of focus: transparency, investment, mentorship and signaling. Fifteen of these recommendations are highlighted as top priorities and cut across all parts of the MBA program experience. I encourage you to read these recommendations and consider how you might join with me, Martijn, Kelli Kilpatrick and the entire MBA program team to move forward in these important areas.
Like many of you, I come to all of this with a thankful spirit and an open mind. I am thankful for the commitment of our students and alums to dedicate themselves toward progress. I am thankful for the legacy of Father Hesburgh and Notre Dame to take steps forward over the last 50 years. And especially, I am thankful to all of you for your partnership in joining together in this challenging and important work.
#GoIrish!
Mike
Michael J. Mannor, Ph.D.
Associate Dean for the MBA Program
John F. O'Shaughnessy Associate Professor of Family Enterprise

Writing the comeback

Martijn Cremers

Martijn Cremers

Monday, 31 August 2020
Image
On Friday, Father John announced the good news that we will resume in-person teaching in our undergraduate program as of Wednesday (September 2). Following the University’s directions, we will be using a phased approach with some classes starting this week and some the following.
I’m proud of our students and the efforts they’ve made in these past weeks so that we can get back to in-person teaching, as the University also improved its systems and procedures. I ask all of you to do what you can to encourage them to continue to follow the University safety guidelines, especially those of you who have a direct relationship with them. The University sends them regular updates, but I’m sure words of concern and personal interest from the faculty and staff carry a lot of weight.
We remain committed to in-person teaching and doing everything we can to keep each other safe so that we can be here together. At all times, we each must examine how we can do better and work toward doing better for each other, as we continue to hold each other accountable as well.
I think that it is always useful to share these public health protocols – essential to our being able to continue in-person instruction – with our students: Wear a mask, practice social distancing, avoid any social events with more than 10 people, avoid any social events where physical distancing or mask-wearing is not practiced, wash hands regularly, complete the daily health check and show up when selected for surveillance testing.
In addition, this has been a stressful time for many. We should encourage students — as well as all of us — to seek support through University resources and advisors. As you have opportunity, ask students what the on-campus experience has been like for them and for any suggestions they have to improve their learning experience. I, along with the associate deans and academic directors, am always interested in hearing from you and our students.
As Father John said, “Together, we are writing one of the great comebacks in Notre Dame history.” That “comeback” certainly could not happen without the incredible efforts of our faculty and staff, for which I’m most thankful.
In Notre Dame,
Martijn

Latest from the Dean