Since our charter class graduated more than 25 years ago, alumni
from the UC Davis Graduate School of Management have been making
their presence known around the world.
Our graduates are CEOs, vice presidents, chief financial
officers, chief operating officers and entrepreneurs. Around the
globe, they have taken prominent roles as international business
leaders in a wide range of industries and organizations.
Graduate School of Management alumni are actively involved in
their communities, and they make time for mentoring, advising and
assisting current students and networking with fellow graduates.
Corporate Frugality Isn’t Just about Cost-cutting
Media coverage of the frugality of companies like Southwest Airlines, Wal-Mart, Amazon.com and Ikea abound. But do they capture something enduring about how these companies really do business?
Empowering Agricultural Aid in Afghanistan
Agricultural aid workers in Afghanistan’s most rural areas have a new tool to help them help others, thanks to Wil Agatstein, visiting lecturer and executive director of the Child Family Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and Mark Bell, director of the International Learning Center at the UC Davis College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences.
Agatstein and Bell received a $2.2 million, three-year grant from the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service to create a web portal that provides development organizations with information on Afghanistan’s most pressing agricultural issues and opportunities.
Optimizing Ad Spend to Maximize Profits
Journal of Marketing Research, 2012
What is the optimal advertising budget and allocation that maximizes profits across multiple regions and over time? The chief marketing officer of a Fortune 500 company raised the question after she noticed that increasing her company’s advertising expenditures enhanced sales as expected, while profits diminished.
Stock values rise when companies disclose “green” information, UC Davis study finds
(Davis, CA) — A UC Davis study finds that it pays to be green, as companies that are open about their greenhouse gas emissions and carbon reduction strategies see stock values rise.
Graduate School of Management Professor Paul Griffin and his co-author, Yuan Sun of UC Berkeley, tracked stock prices of firms around the time these companies voluntarily issued press releases disclosing carbon emission information. In the days after the press releases were issued, the companies saw their stock prices increase significantly, Griffin and Sun found.
Google’s China Challenge
Google’s confrontation with the Chinese government over search engine results and user data won the web giant public relations points—and ultimately allowed it to remain active in China. Until Google’s stand, Western Internet firms acquiesced to the Chinese government’s censorship demands.
“These laws ostensibly cover things such as vulgar content, but in practice involve suppression of ‘subversive’ content (typically, content of political nature),” Professor Hemant Bhargava said in a commentary in the March issue of Chartered Financial Analyst, a leading business magazine in India.
Why Aren’t More Commercial Buildings Going Green?
Professor Nicole Biggart presented her research on the topic in her talk “Where Are the Green Buildings?” at a seminar for engineering, sociology and transportation scholars hosted by the UC Davis Energy Efficiency Center in February.
California’s Smart Energy Investment
Professor Andrew Hargadon served as moderator for “California’s Smart Energy Investments: Enabling the Next Generation of Energy Efficiency,” the last in a series of forums exploring The Roots of Energy Efficiency presented by the UC Davis Energy Efficiency Center in June. Hargadon, who holds the Soderquist Chair in Entrepreneurship, was the founding director of the EEC, and the series premiered under his direction.
Financial Crisis Fueled by Liquidity-driven Sales of Corporate Bonds
Assistant Professor Ayako Yasuda, in collaboration with Professor Alberto Marconi of INSEAD and Professor Massimo Massa of Tilburg University, the Netherlands, has researched the behavior of investors who were significantly exposed to toxic assets during the 2007–2008 financial crisis.
The Synergy of On-and-Offline Marketing
Journal of Interactive Marketing, 2009
Professor Prasad Naik and Professor Kay Peters from the Center for Interactive Marketing and Media Management at the University of Münster, Germany, have won the 2010 Journal of Interactive Marketing Best Paper Award for their article, “A Hierarchical Marketing Communications Model of Online and Offline Media Synergies.”
Who Benefits from Stock Buybacks?
In 2007 U.S. companies spent $1 trillion on stock buybacks that exceeded dividends paid and accounted for two-thirds of net income. Since 2000 those same companies distributed $3 trillion to shareholders through buybacks.
Public Trust: Easily Lost, Hard to Regain
Not surprisingly, trust in private business deteriorated during the Great Recession. “The financial meltdown caused public distrust toward the private sector and increased trust in nonprofits, academic institutions and government,” Professor Kim Elsbach told an audience during a panel discussion in Sacramento in March to frame the release of the “2010 Edelman Golden State Trust Barometer.” The event was hosted by the global public relations firm Edelman, whose annual surveys provide a snapshot of public sentiment.
Monitoring the Monitor: Evaluating CalPERS’ Shareholder Activism
For almost two decades, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS), the nation’s largest public pension fund with more than $207 billion in assets, has been active in pursuing corporate reforms. CalPERS is generally credited as a founder of shareholder activism stemming from its heightened proxy voting activity at companies in the mid-1980s.
In 1992, CalPERS began publicly announcing annual Focus List of poor financial and corporate governance performers in an effort to apply public pressure to the targeted companies.