Thank you to those who attended the inaugural University Chair Public Lecture Series on Tuesday featuring Mike Crant, the Notre Dame Professor of Management & Organization and the newest University Endowed chair at Mendoza. The event had a terrific turnout; it was great to see so many of you.

Mike delivered an enlightening — and entertaining — retrospective of his personal and professional life, presenting personal milestones as well as his research accomplishments including his seminal work in the area of the proactive personality, which has been cited more than 23,000 times. This makes Mike one of the best-cited scholars in the College as well as at the University. In addition, during his 33-year tenure at Notre Dame, Mike has taught over 6,800 students and 139 sections. 

I also thank M&O Department Chair Ann Tenbrunsel, who helped introduce Mike. Ann recalled, “Those of you who have been in administrative roles — and especially those of you who have been department chairs — know what it means to have a few givers in your department. Since I have been chair for two-and-a-half years, Mike has never turned down an assignment. That includes some pretty onerous ones. Yet every time, he doesn't just do it, he doesn't just show up. His committee reports, his review of his colleagues' research, teaching and service, and I know this talk today, are always reflective of a tremendous amount of preparation and effort.”

Tom Bateman, the Bank of America Eminent Scholar of Commerce Emeritus from the University of Virginia and who supervised Mike’s dissertation, was also on hand to recall Mike’s early career as a research assistant at the University of North Carolina. Tom performed an impromptu and long-overdue hooding ceremony, which he neglected to do as Mike’s dissertation chair (and Mike has never let Tom forget it).

Mike’s talk also was a fun walk down memory lane for the College, including clips shared from this 1991 video about the College called, “Making a Difference.” There are many familiar (and younger!) faces in there!

All in all, it was a special occasion as Mike’s story illustrated the importance of research to his individual career and the College as a whole. Our research presents our distinctive lens on the world as a Catholic university. As a community, we all help to build our research reputation and share in its impact. 

As I’ve presented previously, “Notre Dame 2033: A Strategic Framework” states as its top priority, “Notre Dame must be the leading global Catholic research university, on par with but distinct from the world’s best private universities.” Likewise at Mendoza, our top strategic priority is to elevate the quality and quantity of impactful research with relevance to business and society. A major part of that is to elevate our research culture, which is one of the main responsibilities of Senior Associate Dean Ken Kelley. Under Ken’s leadership, we are working on elevating our research culture on many levels.

Let me mention eight ways in particular where we are working to elevate our research culture:

1. Expanding the number of tenure-track faculty, research faculty, post-docs and visiting scholars, especially once we have more space when the new building, the North Addition, is completed.

2. Starting our first-ever doctoral programs in Analytics and Management. 

3. Launching the new Undergraduate Research Scholars Program led by Hal White, starting in fall 2024.

4. Building our research infrastructure including the data scientist team. 

5. Constructing a new Behavioral Lab in a new physical space in our basement in the calendar year 2024.

6. Supporting research labs around coherent research agendas, such as, for example:

• The Human-Centered Analytics Lab co-directed by Ahmed Abbasi and Ken Kelley. 
• The Gaming Analytics and Business Research Lab directed by Nick Berente. 
• The new Humanitarian Operations Management Lab directed by Alfonso Pedraza-Martinez.

7. Starting a sabbatical policy under which tenured faculty members will take a year-long research leave without teaching obligations, with an expected launch in the academic year 2024-2025 (and which I’ll share more about in the spring semester).

8. And finally, organizing more research conferences and seminars. Among the new research seminars, a key initiative is to provide more opportunities to gather as a College to hear about the research from our colleagues, including faculty from across Mendoza, our staff and our students.

The University Chair Public Lecture Series is part of this last effort to gather as a College across departments, with faculty, staff and students to recognize, celebrate and elevate the great research taking place at Mendoza. We will hold the second lecture during the spring semester. I hope to see you there. 

My thanks again to all who made Tuesday’s event possible – Mike Crant and his family, Ann Tenbrunsel, Tom Bateman, Reilly Fangman, Carol Elliott, Dana Pierce and Chad DeWeese. 

In Notre Dame,

Martijn

Career Development

The time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is one of my favorite times of the year at Mendoza. We look back on the fall activities, look ahead to the next semester, and outline how we will continue to work with graduate students on their career development. This year, I want to provide an overview of Mendoza Graduate Career Development and thoughts on moving forward as One Mendoza. 

What we do:  The Career Development team embraces the College's mission to Grow the Good in Business.  Our role is to empower students in their career journeys.  Our vision is to create leaders who are lifelong stewards of their careers.  We pursue this vision by valuing inclusion, servant leadership, and relationships.  Our strategy is built on four pillars, illustrated by the graphic below.  The top two pillars symbolize how we work closely with key partners including alumni, employers, and internal stakeholders at the University.  The bottom two pillars symbolize the core competencies of our team, focusing on career coaching and career curriculum.

Our success is measured by career outcomes, course instructor feedback (CIFs), and student and stakeholder feedback. We work with all of the Mendoza graduate programs. The 2023 MBA Employment Report documents our most recent MBA outcomes.

Current Focus and One Mendoza: As the Career Development team moves forward, we will continue to define our role in executing the College’s Strategic Framework. We approach our work inspired by the concept of One Mendoza, which reflects our goal to have our departments operate with a unified purpose, aligned objectives, and a common culture. This is important for Career Development because our students’ career success depends on their successfully working with, and integrating knowledge from, separate but related groups: admissions, student services, faculty, staff, and alumni. We look forward to increased success from our students as we all work together to support them.

The fundamental belief that every human being is naturally creative, resourceful, and whole informs our career coaching, and this belief helps transform us all into our best and most authentic selves. With the spirit of this belief, I encourage all of you to enjoy this special time of year at Mendoza.

Best Regards,

John Rooney
Senior Director
Graduate Business Career Development and Alumni Relations

As a reminder, please join us for the inaugural University Chair Public Lecture Series talk featuring Mike Crant, Notre Dame Professor of Management & Organization, at 3 p.m. on November 28 in the Jordan Auditorium, with the reception following at 4 p.m. in the atrium. All are welcome!

Congratulations to the following faculty on their research success:

Jeffrey Bergstrand, Professor of Finance
(Note: The paper is co-authored by then-senior undergraduate student Stephen Cray (BBA ’16) along with then-Notre Dame Assistant Professor Antoine Gervais, now an associate professor of economics at the University of Sherbrooke in Canada.)
"Increasing Marginal Costs, Firm Heterogeneity, and the Gains from “Deep” International Trade Agreements" (Journal of International Economics)
Evidence to date suggests that it would take a 57% reduction in “fixed” trade labor costs (say, reducing “red tape”) for the United States to achieve the same gain in economic welfare (or per capita income) as a 3% further cut in tariff rates. So why did the United States aggressively pursue over the past 30 years “deep” trade agreements that reduced such fixed costs? This research establishes that by recognizing empirically supported positively sloped bilateral export supply curves – in contrast to the typically assumed but empirically rejected flat export supply curves – it takes only a 14% reduction in fixed trade costs to achieve the same U.S. economic welfare gains as a 3% cut in tariff rates.

Andrew Imdieke, Assistant Professor of Accountancy
“Reliance on External Assurance in Regulatory Monitoring” (The Accounting Review)
The researchers exploit a regulatory change to examine whether bank regulator strictness is affected when regulators can no longer rely on external assurance. Absent external assurance, the study finds evidence consistent with increased regulator strictness in the reporting of problem assets, particularly during targeted examinations. Thus, the results indicate that regulators become stricter when they can no longer rely on the work of external auditors and that third-party assurance is an imperfect substitute for direct regulatory monitoring.

Shijie Lu, Howard J. and Geraldine F. Korth Associate Professor of Marketing
“Crowding-Out in Content Monetization Under Pay What You Want: Evidence From Live Streaming” (Production and Operations Management)
This study investigates the impact of viewer tipping in live streaming on broadcasters and peer engagement. Results from a field experiment reveal that while broadcasters react positively to more tips, viewers tend to tip less, chat less and leave streams sooner when they see peers tipping.  This effect is more pronounced in heavy tippers, potentially due to their focus on the pursuit of social status.  The research underscores social status as a driver of these crowding-out effects in live streaming, offering insights for platform design. (See related ND News story.)

Drew Marcantonio, Assistant Teaching Professor of Management & Organization
Environmental Violence: A Tool for Planetary Health (Lancet Planetary Health)
Human-produced environmental risks to health and well-being are high and contribute to patterns of global morbidity, mortality, economic inequality, displacement and insecurity. The implications of human-produced environmental harms to global health are complex just as are their causes. This paper presents the concept of environmental violence and offers a potentially robust frame for engaging this issue. Environmental violence is excess human-produced pollution that degrades human health – it is the single largest source of human mortality today resulting in at least 9 million deaths annually. The framework can be applied to map and measure causes and consequences of environmental violence and to help build just solutions that promote integral human ecology and flourishing.

Yoonseock Son, Assistant Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations
Corey M. Angst, Jack and Joan McGraw Family Collegiate Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations
“Value of IT in Building Resilience During Crises: Evidence from U.S. Higher Education's Transition to Online During the COVID-19 Pandemic” (MIS Quarterly)
This study examines digital resilience in higher education institutions by assessing the role played by the centralized governance of information technology (IT) investments. The researchers find that centralized IT investments geared toward facilitating organizational coordination and providing instructional and technical support played a pivotal role in enabling emergency remote teaching and improving student ratings during the crisis. These results are corroborated by interviews with CIOs of U.S. higher education institutions. Additional analyses also suggest that the effectiveness of centralized IT governance is contingent upon organizational size, dissimilarity of local units and the strategic role of the CIO. 

Thank you to Jeff, Andy, Shijie, Drew, Yoonseock and Corey for your contributions.

In Notre Dame,

Martijn