Chicago Booth in the News, Winter 2013, Vol. 4

Section 1: News coverage of Chicago Booth.

• THE ECONOMIST. “Even for a school with such an illustrious past,  Booth’s stock has rarely been higher,” a March 4 feature about the school said.    Booth’s full-time MBA is ranked the world’s best by The Economist; it also tops Bloomberg Businessweek’s ranking of U.S. programs, the article noted.  “By all objective measures – whether job placements or student quality – the program is doing better than ever,” Dean Kumar said.   He was interviewed during a recent trip to London.Read article »

• THE NEW YORK TIMES.Booth’s economic experts panel made news March 4 in an article headlined “What Economists Think About Raising the Minimum Wage.”  When asked about the prudence of raising the minimum wage, the 38 economists surveyed by Booth’s Initiative on Global Markets had mixed responses, particularly on the effect on low-skilled job seekers, the March 4 article said.   The Washington Post wrote about the findings February 27.
  Read article »
  Read Washington Post article »
  
  
• CNN.COM.  Booth’s annual U.S. Monetary Policy Forum in New York City made news February 22.  After years of record profits, the Federal Reserve is likely to be saddled with losses starting in 2017 or 2018, according to a report released at the forum and reported by CNN.   Coverage also appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and elsewhere.  Twenty reporters attended the event, presented by Booth’s Initiative on Global Markets.
  Read CNN.com story »
  Read Wall Street Journal story »
  Read New York Times story »
  
  
• DELTA SKY MAGAZINE. Booth was featured in a special section titled “Rethinking Business Education: How the nation’s top business schools are making executive MBA programs relevant again,” in the March issue.  “The Booth School literally invented the executive MBA, creating the first such degree in 1943,” the article said. Clinical Professor Michael Gibbs, faculty director of the EMBA program, “brings real-world research he has conducted in corporations around the world to his classes on workplace management,” the article said.Read article »
  
  
• CHICAGO TRIBUNE. Booth was featured in an article that appeared in a special advertising section about executive education. The staff in Booth’s executive education office has interviewed more than 260 chief learning officers at corporations worldwide, to determine which issues their employees need help with, said Steve Lacivita, associate dean.  “We also talk to participants in our programs to find out what they need, and that’s more than 2,000 people a year,” he said. The article was published March 4. Read article »
  
  
• SUDDEUTCHE ZEITUNG (Germany). Booth was one of the schools featured in an article about trends in executive education, published February 21. “One of the biggest changes has been the rise in numbers of consultancy firms now working in executive education, competing against business schools,” said Arnold Longboy, managing director of executive education at Booth’s London campus. “This has been driven in part by cost pressures faced by companies.”

Section 2: News coverage of Chicago Booth faculty.

• THE NEW YORK TIMES. Research by Deputy Dean Steven Davis was featured in a Page 1 article headlined “Open Jobs and Good Candidates, but Employers Won’t Commit,” published March 7.  The number of job openings has increased to levels not seen since the height of the financial crisis, but vacancies are staying unfilled much longer than they used to, according to a new measure of Labor Department data by Professor Davis and his co-authors, the newspaper reported.Read article »
  
  
• THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Professor John Cochrane published an op-ed titled “Treasury Needs a Better Long Game,” March 3. “Today’s low interest rates are a rare opportunity to buy time for a fiscal housecleaning,” he wrote. “The obvious answer is to fix the long-run deficit problem, with the reform of runaway spending, entitlement programs and a pro-growth tax policy.  So far that is not happening.”Read article »
  
  
• THE NEW YORK TIMES. Professor Richard Thaler published an op-ed titled “Overcoming Obstacles to Better Health Care,” February 23. “To me, the ideal health care delivery system would include a fee for health rather than fee for service model,” he wrote. “Doctors and hospitals should be paid for keeping their patients well.  Paying them for doing more tests and surgeries creates bad incentives.”Read article »
  
  
• THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Professor Luigi Zingales published an op-ed titled “Don’t Rule Out Another Berlusconi Comeback,” February 18. “Like Italian goods markets, Italian democracy suffers from a lack of competition,” he wrote. “That makes voters inclined to pick the devil they know.”Read article »
  
  
• THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Research by Professor Luigi Zingales and Associate Professor Adair Morse was featured in the Heard on the Street column February 28.  The research suggests that for every U.S. company that was accused of fraud between 1996 and 2004, three more companies go undetected, the article said. Read article »
  
  
• THE ECONOMIST. Research by Associate Professor Amit Seru was featured in a column titled “Bubbles and fraud; A Smoking gun?” published February 19.   A new paper by Professor Seru for two co-authors “convincingly argues that banks deliberately misrepresented the characteristics of mortgages in securities they pitched to investors and bond insurers,” the article said.  “The misrepresented loans defaulted at much higher rates than ones that were not – a result that would not be produced by random errors.”Read article »
  
  The Wall Street Journal also reported on Professor Seru’s research.Read article »

• THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.  Professor Anil Kashyap was quoted in an article headlined “Japan Picks BOJ Critic to Be Its Next Chief,” published February 25.  “Most of what ails Japan cannot be fixed by monetary policy,” Professor Kashyap said.  “Ending deflation will be a good thing, but a whole host of other reforms are needed to get Japan moving.”Read article »

• THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Professor Anil Kashyap was quoted in an article about Japan headlined “A New Guest Arrives at the Easy-Money Party,” published February 24.  The Bank of Japan has been pushed by Japan’s political establishment into a new period of monetary activism, the article said.  “Who else has missed its own inflation objective for 15 years?” Professor Kashyap asked.  “It’s not an accident that they’re losing their independence.”Read article »

• C-SPAN. Professor Austan Goolsbee testified before the Congressional Joint Economic Committee on the state of the U.S. economy February 28. Watch video »
  
  The Financial Times cited Professor Goolsbee’s testimony in a story published February 28.  “I fear that the impact of the sequester would cut a half to 1 per cent off the growth rate and would put us back in the circumstance where growth is not fast enough to shrink the unemployment rate,” he said.Read Financial Times article »

• FOX NEWS CHANNEL. Professor Austan Goolsbee discussed the budget stalemate in Washington during an appearance on Hannity, March 1.  The segment was titled “Is Obama addicted to raising your taxes?”Watch video »

  Professor Goolsbee also appeared on Hannity February 19 in a segment titled “Obama warns of doom and gloom as spending cuts near.”Watch video »

• THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Research by Professor Lubos Pastor was featured in an article headlined “Stocks for Thick and Thin,” published March 1.  Professor Pastor “who co-wrote one of the first academic studies of stocks’ sensitivity to liquidity crunches, says companies in the financial sector are especially vulnerable during such periods,” the article said.  “This is important to note, he adds, since the sector otherwise dominates the large-cap value category.”Read article »

• SCIENCE MAGAZINE. Professor Richard Thaler published an article titled “Behavioral Economics and the Retirement Savings Crisis,” March 8.  “Behavioral economics can be scaled up to have a major, positive impact on certain behaviors, such as retirement savings,” he wrote with co-author Shlomo Benartzi of UCLA’s Anderson School of Management.  “There are four essential ingredients to any comprehensive plan to facilitate adequate saving for retirement: availability, automatic enrollment, automatic investment, and automatic escalation.”Read article »

• NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO. Professor Randall Kroszner was featured on All Things Considered in a story titled “Time For the Fed To Take Away The Punch Bowl?” broadcast March 6.   As the economy heels, the debate over Federal Reserve policy is healthy, he said.  “The fundamentals are starting to come back, and I think there’s a legitimate debate on whether more needs to be done.”Listen to broadcast »

• MARKETPLACE RADIO. Research by Professor Ayelet Fishbach on feedback was featured in a story broadcast March 6.    Her research found that many people want to hear about what they’re doing wrong.  “The more a person is committed to a goal, and by that I mean the more someone thinks that they absolutely have to do it, they like doing it, it’s important for them to do it, the more negative compared with positive feedback will be efficient,” Professor Fishbach said.   Her co-author on the research was Stacey Finkelstein, Ph.D.’11.Listen to broadcast »

• ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER (California). Professor Luigi Zingales published an op-ed titled “Preview of coming attractions,” March 4.  “The current generation has to start repaying the debt past ones dumped on them,” he wrote.  “This is where Greece, Portugal and Italy are now, and this is where most Western democracies will be pretty soon,” he wrote.Read article »

• MARKETPLACE RADIO. Professor Jean-Pierre Dube was featured on this nationally-broadcast radio program in a story about poor results by J.C. Penney, February 28.Listen to broadcast »

• MARKETPLACE RADIO. Professor Steven Kaplan was featured in a story titled “The wealthy may pay more taxes now – but their wealth goes further, too,” broadcast March 8.Listen to broadcast »

• CRAIN’S CHICAGO BUSINESS. Clinical Professor Joseph Pagliari published an outlook for the Chicago housing market, titled “No quick fix in sight,” February 19.  “Chicago’s net home appreciation rate is among the lowest of the 20 metro areas surveyed by Case-Schiller,” he wrote.  “In this context, the recent laggardly performance of the Chicago metro area is more consistent with Chicago’s meager growth in home values over the last dozen-plus years.”Read article »

• CRAIN’S CHICAGO BUSINESS. Clinical Professor James Schrager was quoted in an article about the appointment of Troy Clarke as CEO of Navistar, seven months after Lewis Campbell was named interim CEO.   Campbell also resigned from Navistar’s board of directors.   Whether Clarke continues Campbell’s direction or takes his own tack will be the test, Professor Schrager said.  “That will really tell the tale if the board was happy with the direction they were going.”Read article »

Section 3: Chicago Booth students and alumni in the news.

• BARRON’S. Howard Marks, MBA’69, was profiled in the cover story titled “Guru to the Stars,” March 9. “Howard Marks has made a killing on distressed debt,” the article said. “So what does he think of the bond bubble? It’s in only the ‘fifth inning.’” Marks is co-founder and chairman of Oaktree Capital Management, which manages $77 billion in investments.Read article »

• FINANCIAL TIMES. Andrea Sreshta, MBA’13, was featured in an article about LuminAID, a company she co-founded. LuminAID won Booth’s Social New Venture Challenge last year and “we’ve moved past the business plan competition phase,” Sreshta said. The company makes solar-powered lanterns.Read article »

• BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK.  Neal Nisargand, MBA’14, published his latest MBA Journal entry March 11. “My first quarter experience culminated with Bank Week, where aspiring bankers at Booth traveled to New York City to visit the Wall Street firms,” he wrote.Read article »

• INSTITUTIONAL INVESTOR. Mark Hoplamazian, MBA’89, was profiled in the March 8 edition of this magazine. He is CEO of Global Hyatt. “As head of the smallest of the big hotel chains, Mark Hoplamazian is taking Hyatt’s well-known brand to emerging markets’ growing middle class and newly wealthy,” the article said.Read article »

• EL PAIS (Spain). Alejandro Banegas, MBA’10, was quoted in an article about the value of an MBA degree.  “An MBA is key when you meet a crossroad in your career, and America is the best option” of where to study for it, he said in the article published March 3.

• FINANCIAL TIMES. Emmanuel “Manny” Roman, MBA’87, was featured in an article headlined “Expectations high as Roman takes reins.” He recently took over the top spot at Man Group, one of the oldest trading houses in London. “City wags have a new name for the world’s second-largest hedge fund: the Manny Group,” the February 27 article said.Read article »