Tag: Faculty

Olin kudos to WashU Olin professors Stephen Ryan and Michael Wall, named recently to the Poets & Quants 2022 list of favorite MBA instructors—featuring words from their nominators such as “boldness,” “purpose-driven” and “effective.”

The feature, published in late September, gave the floor to a host of MBA students from around the country who shared their experiences with favorite professors as they were embarking on and continuing through their two-year programs.

Austin René Moulder, MBA 2022, sang praises for Wall (top right), professor of practice in marketing and entrepreneurship and codirector for the Center for Analytics and Business Insights. “He never strayed away from difficult conversations around ethics, purpose and inclusion in marketing. Despite me entering the program with a disdain for the marketing space, his transparency and boldness around leveraging marketing for social good transformed my interest to the point where I am now officially platforming in product management marketing. His keen sense of purpose-driven professorship should serve as a lesson to us all about how to positively influence others through strong values and determination.”

Riley Hawkins, MBA 2022, also had kind words for Ryan, interim director of Doctoral programs and Myron Northrop Professor of Economics. She cited her favorite class, Competitive Industry Analysis, which Ryan taught. “Before Professor Ryan’s class, economic theory was just diagonal lines on graphs. Thankfully, Professor Ryan ties all economic theory and concepts he teaches in class to tangible, real-life scenarios and cases that tremendously helped my understanding of the material.

“I deeply appreciate the extra care to ensure students commit what he teaches to memory. Finally, Professor Ryan is unapologetically himself, making him exceedingly likable. He comes to class every day ready to crack jokes, cold call by pointing directly at students, proceed to gently poke fun at anyone who isn’t prepared and start discussions that often lead to even more interesting, in-depth tangents.”

Philip H. Dybvig, a banking and finance expert at Washington University in St. Louis, is one of three economists to share the 2022 Nobel Prize in economic sciences, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Monday, Oct. 10.

Dybvig and University of Chicago Professor Douglas Diamond were selected for their seminal 1983 paper, “Bank Runs, Deposit Insurance, and Liquidity,” which introduced an economic model that explained why banks are subject to runs.

“Philip Dybvig is a brilliant economist whose work has been transformative in his field and has had an indelible impact on our nation’s financial markets and the health of our economy,” Chancellor Andrew D. Martin said. “By helping us to understand the role of banks in the economy, his research has been instrumental in how we respond to financial crises, and attempt to head them off in the first place.

“This is also a momentous day for Washington University. The Nobel Prize is a tremendous honor — first and foremost for the individual recipients, but also for the institutions where they complete their research. We’re extraordinarily proud to have a WashU faculty member recognized in this manner and we’re delighted to celebrate this moment with him.”

Sharing the award with Dybvig and Diamond is Ben S. Bernanke, the former Federal Reserve chair. Bernake also published a paper in 1983 that explained how bank failures can propagate a financial crisis rather than simply being a result of the crisis.

Model stands test of time

The “Diamond-Dybvig model” became synonymous with the study of banking, financial crises, liquidity and bank runs. The paper demonstrated that all bank runs share the same DNA, despite different circumstances and triggers for panics. It has been cited more than 11,000 times since its publication in 1983.

“Our model showed how to view bank runs as rational behavior. If you think everyone else is going to take out their money, you’re going to take out your money, and that’s rational behavior,” said Dybvig, the Boatmen’s Bancshares Professor of Banking and Finance at WashU’s Olin Business School.

“The model shows that the liquidity provision for banks that makes them fragile is also what adds value to the economy. We worked really hard to make the model itself simple and it has become a workhorse model in banking, so it’s not the most difficult thing to do. It’s a model you can extend and still solve things.”

When Dybvig and Diamond created their model in 1983, there hadn’t been a bank run in the United States since the Great Depression, some 50 years or so earlier. When he and Diamond first presented the paper at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, they received pushback from audience members who believed bank runs were a thing of the past, Dybvig said.

Flash forward to the 2008 financial crisis.

Former Olin Dean Mark Taylor talks with Philip Dybvig about his model’s origins.

Proud moment for Olin

“The model helped us to understand what we should be doing in a financial crisis. In the crisis in 2008, a lot of things run on banks — money market funds, the repo market, bank commercial paper. These aspects of the 2008 crisis all look very closely like what we wrote about in our paper. Our model gives policymakers a framework for how to think about what was going on,” Dybvig said.

“Phil Dybvig’s winning the 2022 Nobel prize in economics is a proud moment for Olin and WashU,” said Anjan Thakor, interim dean of Olin Business School and the John E. Simon Profesor of Finance.

“With his co-author, Douglas Diamond, Phil published a seminal paper on bank runs in 1983 that provided a rigorous theoretical model of how even an otherwise healthy bank can collapse due to a run on its deposits caused by a coordination failure among depositors. It provided an economic rationale for federal deposit insurance as a way to eliminate this possibility and became a workhorse model for a vast literature to follow on bank runs, panics and financial crises, thereby reshaping banking research on the issue of financial stability.”

Dybvig joined Olin’s faculty in 1990. He previously taught at Princeton University and was tenured at Yale University. He has published two textbooks and more than 35 articles in leading journals.

Dybvig joins a prestigious list of Nobel laureates affiliated with Washington University, 26 in all, many of whom did a significant portion of their award-winning work here. He is the second WashU person to receive the Nobel in economics.

The economics prize was established by Sweden’s central bank and first awarded in 1969, its formal name being the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. The prize includes a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor (nearly $900,000) and will be handed out Dec. 10.

Of waking up to the news that he was selected as one of this year’s winners, Dybvig said, “I’m really honored to be recognized along with Ben Bernanke and Doug Diamond. I seem to be the last person to know! I have so many messages on my phone.

“I really wish my PhD adviser Steve Ross [who taught at Yale and later at Massachusetts Institute of Technology] could be here to see this. He should have had a Nobel Prize. He would have been happy to see one of his students receive this.”

On September 12, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to launch a National Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Initiative, noting the United States relies too heavily on foreign materials and foreign bioproduction. Off-shoring of critical industries threatens US ability to access materials like important chemicals and active pharmaceutical ingredients.

Consider the prescriptions you or your loved ones need for high blood pressure, infections or other ailments. Chances are, no manufacturing source exists in the United States for critical generic drugs or their active ingredients.

In fact, in 2021 the White House sounded the alarm about vulnerabilities in the pharmaceutical supply chain that has led to shortages of critical medicines the Food and Drug Administration deems “essential.” A White House report proclaimed, “The disappearance of domestic production of essential antibiotics impairs our ability to counter threats ranging from pandemics to bio-terrorism, as emphasized by the FDA’s analysis of supply chains for active pharmaceutical ingredients.”

The problem? It seemed that insufficient US manufacturing capacity due to offshoring was largely to blame. But new research from the Center for Analytics and Business Insights, at Olin Business School at Washington University, finds the US does, indeed, have the capacity to make the nation’s most essential and critical drugs—yet most of the capacity is sitting idle.

Report fills key data gap

The CABI report fills a crucial gap in available industry data: “US Generic Pharmaceutical Manufacturer Available Capacity Research Survey.”

“We addressed of a significant blind spot, which was the understanding of available capacity in the United States to build supply chain resiliency,” said Anthony Sardella, author of the CABI report, senior research advisor for CABI and Olin adjunct lecturer.

“Our results were quite surprising. Fifty percent of available capacity is not utilized,” he said. “The number was stunning.”

On September 14, the Biden administration revealed it will invest more $2 billion into biotech and biomanufacturing efforts, with $1 billion from the Department of Defense for manufacturing infrastructure in the US.

30 billion more doses possible

Last year, the generic pharmaceutical industry made headlines when it announced the closure of several U.S. manufacturing plants. Why? In part because of lower offshore operating costs and labor rates, intense pricing pressure and steadily growing dependence on offshore sources for raw materials.

“How do we account for this incongruency?” Sardella asks. He and his team surveyed 37 U.S. generic pharmaceutical manufacturing sites. They found the sites are producing at just half of their production capacity annually, with an aggregate excess capacity of nearly 50%. In fact, only two of the 37 manufacturing sites are producing at full capacity.

If the sites got up and running, nearly 30 billion additional doses of essential and critical medicines could be produced in the US without incurring the expense of building new manufacturing plants and shorten the time to make generic medicines available from domestic sources, according to the report.

In a nutshell, the report recommends the following:

• Repurpose idle sites to enable manufacturing to address shortages, increase supply-chain resiliency and build supplies within 24-36 months.
• Continue current federal funding efforts for advanced manufacturing technologies to reduce production costs, create new workforce opportunities and increase the economic sustainability of US drug manufacturing.

Research aims to foster national policy

Sardella, who focused his research on issues at the intersection of business, government and society, will present the results of the paper on October 4 to the National Press Club in Washington, DC, to provide support for policy considerations and initiatives to strengthen US drug manufacturing sustainability.

The next step for CABI is its new paper, in progress, about how to model funding initiatives that de-risks the adoption of new, advanced manufacturing technologies, such as continuous-flow chemistry, to boost production.

CABI has been researching the drug shortage issue over the past couple of years. Learn more:

Burnout affects more than half the employee population in the United States.

In a recent article in Forbes, Olin’s Peter Boumgarden shared some tips for employers about how to stem the tide of workers who regularly experience intense and unwanted symptoms such as fatigue, reduced productivity and a cynical attitude.

Boumgarden recommends basing your understanding of burnout on a definition from the psychologists Christina Maslach, Wilmar B. Schaufeli and Michael P. Leiter: “a prolonged response to chronic emotional and interpersonal stressors on the job.”

All workforces are unique, so take the time to evaluate what’s burning out people, Boumgarden suggests. Could one of your corporate policies unintentionally be causing a problem that affects performance and morale?

“Let’s say you are an organization that desires greater collaboration,” Boumgarden told Forbes. “You ask for people to come back to the office at a higher rate than your competitors. If the average commute time is an hour each way, what is the impact on work outcomes and burnout of having to find two more hours in the day?”

Every decision will cause ripples. Do they create more issues than a policy solves?

Boumgarden is the Koch Family Professor of Practice in Family Enterprise, director of the Koch Family Center for Family Enterprise, and academic director of the Center for Experiential Learning at Washington University in St. Louis. 

Read more in the article “7 strategies to help your employees avoid serious burnout.”

Lamar Pierce has been appointed editor-in-chief of the prestigious journal Organization Science. His term begins January 1.

“It’s such an honor to be chosen,” Pierce said in an announcement from INFORMS, which publishes Organization Science. “But even more so, it is an opportunity to enable and empower the next generation of great scholars and their research,”

Pierce is professor of organization and strategy and associate dean for executive education and lifelong learning at Olin.

“I am committed to the leadership and content of Organization Science representing the diverse set of scholars, theories, methods, phenomena and geographies that make our field so great, such that everyone studying organizations will look to our journal as an opportunity to publish their best work,” he said.

The journal, in its 33rd year, publishes groundbreaking research about organizations, including their processes, structures, technologies, identities, capabilities, forms and performance. 

Matthew Walls, director of publications for INFORMS, said the search committee was impressed with Pierce’s “vision for increasing the quality, dissemination and impact of this important INFORMS journal.”

“I am looking forward to working with Professor Pierce toward accomplishing these important goals to help Organization Science reach its full potential as the most innovative, rigorous and impactful journal in organizational management.”

Said Pierce, “I hope our collective work as a field will play a central role in solving the grand challenges facing people, organizations and societies today.”

Pierce will succeed Gautam Ahuja, Eleanora and George Landew Professor of Management in the SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell University, whose final term as editor-in-chief of Organization Science ends December 31.

Fourteen new instructors and researchers—including three postdocs—have joined WashU Olin in economics, finance, marketing and organizational behavior.

TENURED/TENURE-TRACK FACULTY

Giselle Antoine, assistant professor of organizational behavior PhD: management and organization, University of Washington, 2022 Research interests: culture, moral emotions, deviance

Hannah Birnbaum, assistant professor of organizational behavior PhD: management and organization, Northwestern University, 2022 Prior to Olin: teaching assistant, Northwestern Research interests: factors that undermine the success of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in organizations

Jon Bogard, assistant professor of organizational behavior PhD: behavioral decision-making, UCLA, 2022 Prior to Olin: teaching assistant, UCLA Research interests: how beliefs about others and about what is right shape judgments, attitudes and decisions

Cecilia Diaz Campo, assistant professor of economics PhD: economics, University of Western Ontario, 2022 Prior to Olin: teaching and research assistant, University of Western Ontario Research interests: empirical industrial organization, health economics, applied econometrics, applied microeconomics

Brad Larsen, associate professor of economics PhD: economics, MIT, 2013 Prior to Olin: assistant professor of economics, Stanford University Research interests: industrial organization, bargaining/negotiation, occupational licensing, online markets, auction, applied econometrics

Brittany Lewis, assistant professor of finance PhD: finance, Northwestern University, 2020 Prior to Olin: assistant professor of finance, Indiana University at Bloomington/visiting scholar, Northwestern University Research interests: the intersection of financial intermediation and household finance

Margarita Tsoutsoura, associate professor in finance PhD: finance and economics, Columbia University, 2010 Prior to Olin: John and Dyan Smith Professor of Management and Family Business, Cornell University Research interests: corporate finance, family business, entrepreneurship and innovation

PROFESSOR OF PRACTICE

Kabir Dutta, professor of practice in finance PhD: philosophy in financial engineering, University of Pennsylvania, 2002 Prior to Olin: assistant professor of finance, John Hopkins University Research Interests: financial engineering, operational risk, credit risk, stochastic modeling, enterprise risk management, information economics

LECTURERS

Koray Sayili, senior lecturer in finance PhD: business economics, Queen’s University, 2014 Prior to Olin: assistant professor of finance, University of Indiana at Bloomington

Research interests: entrepreneurship, innovation, human capital, managerial compensation, portfolio hedging

Chris Mondy, lecturer in marketing PhD: logistics, materials and supply chain management, University of Missouri–St. Louis, 2021 Prior to Olin: visiting assistant professor, University of Central Oklahoma

VISITING FACULTY

Michaela Pagel, visiting associate professor of finance PhD: economics, University of California, Berkeley, 2014 Prior to Olin: Roderick H. Cushman Associate Professor of Business, Columbia Business School Research interests: behavioral economics, household finance, macroeconomics

POSTDOCS

Martin Luccioni, postdoc in economics PhD: economics, University of Western Ontario, 2022 Prior to Olin: research assistant, University of Western Ontario Research interests: economics of education, labor economics, empirical microeconomics, personnel economics

My Tra Nguyen, postdoc in finance PhD: finance and econometrics, Warwick Business School, 2022 Prior to Olin: research fellow, Gillmore Research Center for Financial Technology (U.K.) Research interests: applications of textual analysis to empirical asset pricing, financial technology

Zhaoque (Chosen) Zhou, postdoc in finance PhD: finance, Syracuse University, 2021 Research interests: algorithm trading, high-frequency trading

Pictured at top: Top row, left to right, Antoine, Birnbaum, Bogard, Dias Campo, Dutta; second row, Larsen, Lewis, Luccioni, Mondy, Nguyen; bottom row, Pagel, Sayili, Tsoutsoura, Zhou.