The course explores diverse topics in behaviorial finance. The only one relating to social or environmental concerns is a discussion of why socially destructive financial bubbles form.
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UC Berkeley (Haas)
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UC Berkeley (Haas)
S545 Student Services Bldg. #1900
Berkeley, CA, 94720-1900
United States
Berkeley, CA, 94720-1900
United States
Demographic Information
Number of full-time MBA students (2011):
240
Number of part-time MBA students (2011):
275
Total duration of full-time MBA program:
21 months
MBA faculty (Fall 2010):
209
Females as percent of student body:
28%
Private Sector (95%)
Non-profit (5%)
Government (0%)
Description of MBA Program:
Redefining the Business Graduate
In 2010, UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business renewed its long-standing commitment to prepare responsible leaders as part of its new strategic plan. This strategy is centered around developing leaders who redefine how we do business and enforcing a strong culture that captures the essence of Haas and promotes behaviors that lead to better outcomes for our graduates and for society. Haas culture is expressed in four defining principles:
- Question the Status Quo
- Confidence without Attitude
- Beyond Yourself
- Students always
These principles are built into the business practices of the school, from MBA admissions to performance incentives. They reinforce the school’s efforts in responsible business, which began with its founding in 1898 with a course on the Impact of Commerce on Society. Since then this mindset has developed into a rich tapestry of social thought leadership and continues to challenge students to think beyond traditional paradigms of business, society, and the environment.
This mindset also empowers faculty and students to seek creative approaches to the world's enduring problems. Books by David Vogel and Kellie McElhaney have sparked nationwide discussions on CSR. Opeds by Dwight Jaffee and Hayne Leland seek more responsible financial regulation. The Financial Times consistently recognizes Haas as the #1 or #2 global MBA program in corporate responsibility.
The school’s Center for Responsible Business is a hub of activity in teaching, research, and events centered around responsible business leadership. It pioneered the "Strategic CSR & Projects" course connecting students to executives at Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Levi Strauss, eBay, etc. to develop strategies that create competitive advantage through positive social impact. Its long-standing speaker series, such as this spring’s series on consuming sustainably, advance the Haas community’s insights into a variety of social and environmental topics.
The multidisciplinary Dow Sustainable Products and Solutions Program, housed in the Center for Responsible Business, not only offers a course on that topic, but funds student research projects around the world that promise to make a tangible difference.
The center also houses the Haas Socially Responsible Investment Fund, the first SRI fund at a leading business school, and the Moskowitz Prize for Socially Responsible Investing, the first and only global award recognizing outstanding quantitative work on socially responsible investing.
In fact, the center launched a new program in Sustainable Finance last year with a speaker and discussion series on the financial crisis and future sustainability of the financial sector featuring for example, Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short; documentary director Charles Ferguson; a screening of Inside Job; and an industry panel “teach in”.
Through in-depth quantitative and qualitative research engaging bank executives, employees, stakeholders, and society at large, the Future of Finance research program seeks to shape the dialogue around what a thriving and sustainable financial sector should look like. The center also hosts a three-day workshop focused on sustainable finance.
The Haas School’s top-ranked Center for Nonprofit & Public Leadership prepares students to lead nonprofit and public organizations and to be productive board members and volunteers throughout their business careers. Its "Social Sectors Solutions" consulting course provides students with first-hand experience while nonprofits benefit from their skills in marketing, finance, strategy, and policy analysis. The course connects MBA students with a consultant from McKinsey & Co. to develop business plans for nonprofit clients looking for enterprising ways to shore up their financial sustainability long-term.
Students themselves are a powerful force for sustainable business at Berkeley-Haas. In 1998, five MBA students launched what remains the largest social venture competition at any business school. The Global Social Venture Competition has grown into a partnership with Columbia Business School, London Business School in the UK, Indian School of Business, Thammasat Business School in Thailand, Essec Business School in France, and several outreach partners in the US, Italy, and China. Every year budding social ventures receive feedback from VC judges and fellow social entrepreneurs in the effort to strengthen their chance at success and to build a growing network of new businesses with a triple bottomline.
Full-time MBA students also created a new campus-wide group for students and researchers titled the Berkeley Energy Resources Collaborative (BERC), which hosts an annual green energy symposium. And an executive MBA student launched the annual Berkeley-Stanford Green Energy Symposium.
In 2007 the Haas School launched the Center for Energy and Environmental Innovation, which in itself has become a vibrant hub of events, course offerings, and research in this field, and which is led by the Haas School’s leading energy experts Severin Borenstein and Catherine Wolfram. The Cleantech to Market (C2M) started as a not-for credit program that connects graduate students to researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to help them bring their clean energy solutions to market faster. It since then has grown into an interdisciplinary course offering MBA students the chance to work with graduate students across campus to explore cleantech issues first-hand. Led by an impressive staff of cleantech experts, C2M’s co-director Cyrus Wadia is currently on leave in Washington DC to advise the US Department of Energy’s Office of Science and Technology Policy on renewable energy.
The C2M course satisfies the school’s new experiential learning requirement, as do courses in the Nonprofit Program’s Social Sector Solutions and the Center for Responsible Business’s Strategic CSR & Projects.
As a result of these robust efforts across Berkeley-Haas, the school has become the top destination for thought leaders in social and environmental engagement and sustainable business.
How does the MBA program 'walk the talk' of social and environmental impact?:
From Dean Rich Lyons
The face of business schools is changing. Ask people on the street whether they think business schools have been breeding grounds for overconfidence and self-focus; many would answer with a resounding, “Yes.” This may be more perception than reality, but we must view this issue as worthy of our attention.
The future is demanding different business leadership because management challenges of the 21st century will be different from those of the 20th century – and they are marked by “unsustainabilities”. I These are commercial paths we are on where a straight-line continuation will not work—where a straight line will hit a wall certainly in our children’s lifetimes, if not our own.
Examples include healthcare expenditure, energy use, public education, the economics of aging, carbon, global access to safe water, and so on. These linear paths and others need bending and the real bending will be the work of business. We need more people who can bend it, not just CEOs, but people working at every level in all kinds of organizations. In essence, we need path-bending leaders; we need innovative leaders.
Berkeley-Haas adopted major curricular revisions in the full-time, evening, and weekend MBA programs in 2010. These revisions can be described in three fundamental shifts that we hope will produce the kinds of innovative leaders who will be prominent among the path-benders of the future.
I. From Implicit to Explicit
In the first change, we shifted from an approach of implicit culture to one emphasizing explicit culture. By culture, I am referring to the norms and values that guide our admissions decisions, define behaviors within our schools, and affect behaviors long after students have left the transformative experience that is business school. A unique aspect of the Berkeley-Haas approach is the conscious use of the school’s culture to shape its MBA students as they learn how to be responsible innovative leaders.
That move reflects a growing trend in business, where firms with strong cultures encourage their employees to act in ways that create recognizable brands. They manage their cultures profoundly and deliberately, starting at the beginning with the many dimensions of employee selection, such as interviews, applications, and references. They continue with the many dimensions of employees’ “onboarding,” in terms of how they integrate their employees into their organizational cultures during their first hours, days, weeks, and years of employment. And they continue for as long as employees are at the company, through their training, peer-to-peer enforcement, and the “tone from the top.”
At Haas, we took steps to formalize our culture into a explicit code for all of our students, faculty, staff, and alumni (see above). With that code in place, we can better encourage our students to adopt the attitudes and behaviors of innovative leaders.
II. Experiential Learning: From Independent to Integrated
The second shift at Haas is from independent experiential learning courses to a new, integrated experiential learning curriculum.
We initiated this change to capture a particular opportunity we saw in business—to educate and graduate better problem finders and problem framers. Much of the debate within management education has been about whether to focus on systems thinking or integrative thinking or critical thinking or design thinking. But all four approaches give us different ways to frame. Each approach opens our eyes to new and different solutions. This ability to frame—and, more crucially, to reframe—problems allows us to move from one solution to another in a disciplined way.
At Haas, we help our MBAs hone their problem-framing skills through an integrated experiential learning process. They begin with a new required class, “Problem Finding, Problem Solving,” which provides the critical backbone content for experiential learning embedded in other courses.
Armed with these tools, our students all participate in at least one of eight experiential learning options that expose them to real-world business challenges. Crucially, all are designed to emphasize experience in the upstream activities of problem finding and framing, such as:
- Haas@Work: an applied innovation course in which teams of 40 MBA students address a strategic opportunity at a client company. The client-executives deliberate on the proposed solutions in front of the students before a core team of students works with the company to implement the chosen solutions within 100 days.
- Cleantech to Market teams Haas students with graduate students in engineering, law, and other fields to work on projects for the nearby Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The students evaluate the commercial potential of the lab researchers’ cleantech innovations or develop strategies to bring them to market faster.
- Social Sector Solutions connects MBA students with a consultant from McKinsey & Co. to develop business plans for nonprofit clients looking for enterprising ways to shore up their financial sustainability long-term.
- Corporate Social Responsibility in which students engage with companies such as Walmart to develop socially responsible business strategies that are aligned with business objectives and core competencies.
- International Business Development in which students work in small teams with a variety of clients throughout the spring semester and then travel to their clients’ international locations for three weeks each summer.
While engaged in their experiential course, students also must participate in our new team performance module where they receive more advanced tools and coaching for becoming strong team leaders and skilled members of high performance teams.
II. Curriculum: From Coordinated to Connected
Our third shift was from coordinating courses across the MBA core curriculum to connecting capabilities across the whole of our curriculum. We have identified a set of ten measurable capabilities, all rooted in the social sciences and highly valued in the marketplace, that back our approach to innovative leadership with a competency model. The ten capabilities are divided into three primary categories:
Defining opportunities – We have identified the top three skills as problem framing, opportunity recognition, and experimentation, some of which we have described at length above.
Making choices – Skills in this category include revenue model innovation, valuation of ideas, and risk selection. Innovation isn’t just about experimentation or idea generation. It’s also about choosing which innovations show the most promise and knowing how and when to act on them. Revenue models – new ways of getting paid for what you do – are evolving rapidly in industry after industry, often in qualitative ways. A deep knowledge of the reasons can trigger a future path-bending opportunity where it might not otherwise occur.
Building organizational capacity – These include the abilities to influence without authority, manage ambiguity and conflict, foster team creativity, and employ adaptive governance. They reflect the trend toward flatter organizations with more distributed authority. Our students will need to influence without needing to rely on authority, which includes knowing how to coach and give feedback effectively, show how people’s efforts matter to the organization, and lead organizational change.
The boundaries within organizations are becoming increasingly fluid—and stakeholders more often have conflicting interests. To become effective leaders, students must understand different perspectives and recognize the implicit assumptions underlying those perspectives. They must know how to foster creativity among team members and react to, adapt to, and rectify problems as they arise.
With these changes, we can produce graduates who are capable of path-bending feats of leadership.
Course Name: Brand Management and Strategy
Instructor: Upshaw
There has never been a more exciting time to be managing brands or working with those who do. At its core, this course will continue to be a hands-on, practical exploration of product, service, and enterprise-wide brand building and management. However, in response to the changing needs of contemporary brand marketing and based on suggestions from previous students, the course recently has been enhanced and restaged. The class now provides more opportunity for students to do hands-on work and actively engage with brands. Students will also get to enact scenarios where brand managers have to deal with social/stakeholder issues like product failures or recalls.
Course Name: Business and Public Policy
Instructor: Aggarwal
How should one formulate and integrate market and nonmarket strategies in a complex global economy? Most business strategy courses focus on the organization of the firm and analysis of the market environment within which companies operate. Yet an important element in pursuing competitive advantage is the ability of a firm to mold or influence the nonmarket business environment—the rules, regulations, domestic institutions, and international regimes that define the context of the market in which they operate. Many actors influence the nonmarket environment including governments, international organizations, the media, non-governmental organizations, and a host of activist groups. This nonmarket environment often determines the profit and loss opportunities and perils for firms in many industries including biotechnology, telecommunications, the automobile industry, and consumer electronics, to name only a few. Firms that take the nonmarket environment as given often fall behind their competitors despite havig developed strategies for the market in which they operate.This class focuses eclusively on non-market (social) players/stakeholder groups.
Course Name: Business Model Innovation
Instructor: Charron
The class focuses on business model innovation and includes examples from the nonprofit sector, pharma for neglected tropical diseases, and biofuels.
Course Name: Business Strategies for Emerging Markets
Instructor: Feferman
This course is tailored to students pursuing an international career in economic development,international business, or entrepreneurship in developing regions, including social ventures. The course draws on economic development theory, business cases, and project evaluation techniques (market analysis, finance) to provide a holistic view of the role of business and technology in sustainable economic development. Students will learn and apply conceptual frameworks and practical tools that will help them in their international careers. We will discuss pertinent business cases from developing countries (in Latin America, Africa, and Asia) to illustrate key concepts, utilizing examples from diverse economic sectors such as telecommunications, renewable energy, information technology, and agriculture. The course will review the role of technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship in promoting economic development. We will discuss business models employed by companies and social ventures in developing countries. The course is structured to evolve from a “macro” view of economic development (countries and regions) to a “micro” or business-level view (companies, markets, and projects). The macro analysis provides a contextual background for the subsequent discussions on the evaluation of business opportunities. We will also discuss special topics such as microfinance, clean energy, ICT for development, public-private partnerships, and globalization. The course will include guest lectures by economic development practitioners and entrepreneurs. More than 75% of class sessions are dedicated to social and environmental topics and these same topics are woven into the remaining class sections.
Course Name: Cleantech to Market
Instructor: Alexander
This course deals entirely with getting environmental technologies to market: Cleantech to Market is a project class in which graduate students apply their business, engineering, scientific, and legal knowledge to help translate cleantech research into market opportunities. Students perform a 15-week market assessment of inventions from nationally acclaimed labs such as the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Joint BioEnergy Institute, the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, and the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society. Students work in four-person teams, and meet energy professionals from across the industry. They prepare market reports and public presentations for each invention, and collaborate as a class to support each other’s work.
Course Name: Corporate Finance
Instructor: La Blanc, Rau
This course is a continuation of EWMBA 203. It covers techniques for valuing projects and corporation, methods of financing projects and corporations, financial management, capital structure, risk management, corporate governance, corporate restructuring, and compensation. The course is meant to provide a good understanding of the ways in which financing methods and techniques can affect firm value. The theme of corporate governance is woven throughout the course, but accounts for less than 25% of course material.
Course Name: Corporate Financial Reporting
Instructor: Rasmussen, Zhou
We will use the examples from the text and the real world to develop an understanding of how and why financial reporting choices are made by preparers and how the data are used for decision making by the various users of financial statements – lenders, equity analysts, investment bankers, boards of directors, and others who monitor corporate performance and the behavior of management. This courses is for anyone who will be looking at the big picture of companies’ performance (finance), running their own, or part of a larger, business (entrepreneurs and management) or those preparing financial information (accountants). Discussion in class will be welcome so that the subject can come to life for the students. As in 2006, the final class section focuses on Sarbanes-Oxley and human capital.
Course Name: Data and Decisions
Instructor: Gertler, P, Davis, L, La Blanc, G
The objective of this core course is to make students critical consumers of statistical analysis using available software packages. Key concepts include interpretation of regression analysis, model formation and testing, and diagnostic checking as it may relate to areas such as health care and ethical issues.
Course Name: Design and Systems Thinking for MBAs
Instructor: Beckman
This is a new course that is intended to expose you to fundamental thinking skills – from the fields of critical thinking, design thinking and systems thinking. The course is structured to be highly exploratory and very hands-on. You will have many opportunities to teach and learn from your fellow students as well as in-class opportunities to try a variety of thinking exercises and skills. Collectively, the class will create a blog to discuss the reading materials and what you are taking away from them. We’ll also create a wiki-based collection of tools that you can take away from the class and use in the future. The blog and wiki will also form a forum for conversation about these topics more widely across Haas and to some extent with communities outside Haas. This year, the course will support work being done at Haas to develop the “Berkeley Difference” – a set of learning experiences that future Haas students will have that will distinguish the types of leaders that Haas generates. This is a one-time opportunity to be a part of a larger effort to shape the school’s future direction. The class kicks off with a session focused on design and systems thinking applied to education.
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The Berkeley MBA Asia Business Conference is an annual, one-day event hosted by the Asia Business Conference Club in collaboration with the Has School's Management of Technology Program (MOT), Clausen Center for International Business & Policy, Lester Center for Entrepreneurship, and the UC Berkeley Center for Research on Chinese and American Strategic Cooperation (CRC). The conference is a 100% student-organized event that provides a collaborative venue for students, professionals, business leaders, academics and international thought-leaders to meet and exchange ideas on current topics & opportunities in Asian business. Asia is the rising star of the world economy in the 21st century. For decades the two economic giants - China and India - have led the pack to outpace growth of developed economies. However, with the deepening of U.S. financial turmoil, it is clear that Asia cannot be decoupled from the U.S. economy. Two urgent questions in the minds of those in Asia are: externally, how to achieve independence and internally how to upgrade their industrial sectors away from labor-intensive and environmentally damaging business models.
Each spring, the Haas School’s Women in Leadership student club hosts the annual Women in Leadership Conference, the longest running student-organized summit at Haas. This event attracts more than 400 female business leaders, MBA students, and participants from the Bay Area. The conference includes keynote speakers, panels, workshops, a networking luncheon, and a wine reception. From panel discussions focusing on industry-specific issues to interactive workshops, participants are inspired and challenged to find their perfect balance. Through networking opportunities and professional development workshops, the event promotes the wide variety of career options, professional networks and lifestyle choices available to women today.
Date: February, 2011
Business leaders need sophisticated tools for decision-making that account for complexity and uncertainty in an increasingly volatile and interconnected world. Whether thinking strategically in highly regulated sectors like energy or planning for the long-term in resource-reliant sectors like consumer products, the concept of "sustainability" has provided a lens to deal with the strategic, marketing, and policy aspects of sustainable business.
This workshop will go a step further and explore the financial aspects unique to sustainability issues confronted by businesses.
Workshop description
This workshop is based on the assumption that the frameworks provided by economics and finance can, with appropriate modifications, help us understand and deal with the unique issues faced by a sustainable business.
The workshop will
- Focus primarily on environmental issues as they relate to financial decision-making
- Modify existing economic and financial frameworks in an attempt to evaluate the effects of new and emerging regulatory and strategic environmental issues on the value of projects and firms
- Evaluate not only the private benefit, but also the social value, created or destroyed by a project and therefore the firm
Started by a Berkeley Executive MBA student, this event has grown into an annual don't miss learning and networking event that brings together the best minds in cleantech topics from UC Berkeley and Stanford University.
Type: Fund Management
Launched in Fall 2007, the Haas Socially Responsible Investment (HSRIF or the Fund) is the first-ever student-managed investment fund within a business school that uses corporate responsibility (CSR) criteria as a screen for the fund's portfolio. HSRIF investment decisions are made by Haas MBA and Master's in Financial Engineering (MFE) students with the advice of an Investment Advisory Committee. HSRIF has been formed to provide MBA and MFE students with a keen interest in CSR and finance with unique exposure to the complexities, challenges, and rewards - both financially and socially - of the investing world. Students participating in management of HSRIF will have a unique opportunity, in a real-world setting, to test the investment and CSR principles they have learned in the classroom. The investment philosophy guiding the Fund will be to achieve a balance between financial performance and social/environmental performance. As such, investment decisions will be made based on both traditional financial and business evaluation criteria (e.g. valuation metrics, firm size and growth, size of market, competitive position, strength of management, recent performance) as well as detailed socially responsible investment criteria (e.g. customer benefits from using the product/service, sustainability principles, supply chain practices, employee treatment).
Annual conference organized by Haas School MBA and undergraduate students that brings industry leaders and business students together to discuss the challenges and successes to building diverse organizations. Panel discussions focus on fostering diversity through recruitment and management of employees as well as through customer service. It draws attendance from our graduate and undergraduate students as well as alumni, prospective students, and the business community. Past speakers have included Ronnie Lott, Founding Partner, HRJ Capital and Harris Barton, Founding Partner, HRJ Capital.
The Best Practices Series brings to UC Berkeley and the Haas School the best practitioners from the Berkeley and Silicon Valley community to speak about the practical aspects of entrepreneurial activity. The series is timed to match the academic year and also the business plan competition season, particularly the Berkeley Business Plan Competition and the Global Social Venture Competition. Entrepreneurs from the Berkeley campus and the community in general are encouraged to come to each of the sessions. Traditionally the session during the first week of December focuses on Social Ventures Financing and Social Impact Assessment (SIA).
Type: discussion
Date: January, 2010
Leaked emails and files from the University of East Anglia (UEA) have raised questions about the integrity of the peer review process for climate change research. The Haas School hosted a panel discussion to explore how the work at UEA fits into the larger body of climate change research and the impact the leaks are having on climate change discussions. The panel also discussed the scientific process and how conflicting findings should be treated in the policy arena.
Type: Competition
The Haas Education Club sponsors an annual Education Leadership Case Competition each February. It was originally launched in 2007. The 2009 competition, the third addition of the event, will feature the DC Public Schools: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Nation’s Capital. The competition is specifically for MBAs and other graduate students from schools across the country. The purpose of the case competition is to bring attention to a critical, real-time issue in education, and to provide an opportunity for talented and dedicated graduate students to create potential solutions for the issue. The 2008 competition featured Rebuilding New Orleans Public Schools.
For more than 15 years, the Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum has provided an intimate and informative setting for students and the public to meet with and hear from seasoned professional entrepreneurs. The series is hosted by the Haas School's Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Each month, a specific topic in entrepreneurship and innovation is presented and discussed by the leading Bay Area professionals in that field. The purpose of the forum is to foster the growth and success of entrepreneurial ventures through the exchange of information and the development of productive relationships among entrepreneurs, MBA students, and those who finance and advise them. It allows professionals to meet each other and to meet the next generation of entrepreneurial leaders.
Organized by the Haas School's MBA student-led Berkeley Energy & Resources Collaborative (BERC), the UC Berkeley Energy Symposium explores the challenges, opportunities, and the role of UC Berkeley in creating a sustainable energy future. The symposium brings together more than 500 leading researchers in energy technology, economics, and policy with the top cleantech investors, industry experts, MBA students, and entrepreneurs. Attendees have the opportunity to participate in a variety of panels, including sessions on energy-efficiency, transportation fuels, solar technologies, carbon regulation and innovation, energy storage, and energy economics.
Type: Competition
Organized by UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, the Global Social Venture Competition (GSVC) is the largest and oldest student-led business plan competition providing mentorship, exposure, and financial awards to emerging social ventures from around the world. The GSVC’s mission is to catalyze the creation of social ventures, educate future leaders, and build awareness around social enterprise. Held each year at Haas in conjunction with a day-long Symposium on Social Entrepreneurship, the competition supports the creation of real businesses that bring about positive social change in a sustainable manner. A partnership with Columbia Business School, London Business School, Indian School of Business, and Thammasat University (Thailand).
Type: Business plan competition
Date: February, 2010
Haas hosts a school-level competition to determine which student business plan team will represent the school at the national Better Living Business Plan Challenge.
http://www.netimpact.org/displaycommon.cfm?an=1&subarticlenbr=2315
The Haas School hosted the inaugural innovation conference organized by the Economist magazine. The kick-off conference in March 2010 addressed innovation at a broader level. The second event to be held at Haas in March 2011 will address disruptive entrepreneurship, addressing how the shift of innovation toward developing economies is forcing companies companies to live in a state of constant disruption. Participants at this event will examine how the very meaning of innovation is changing, and why it matters today more than ever.
Type: Competition
Entrepreneurship is clearly a driving force for growth and change in the global economy. The Intel + UC Berkeley Technology Entrepreneurship Challenge is a joint project of Intel Corporation and the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley that brings together entrepreneurial teams from world class engineering and business schools. Through education, collaboration, and competition in an international championship event, it provides a forum where teams can present business and technology commercialization plans that will progress their ideas. In emerging markets, innovation and entrepreneurship are particularly important. The Technology Entrepreneurship Challenge showcases the global business opportunities that have the greatest potential for a positive impact on society through the deployment of new and truly innovative technologies. Website: http://www.entrepreneurshipchallenge.org/index.htm
Type: Fellowship Program
The UC Berkeley Social Enterprise Education Design (SEED) Fellowship program provides MBA students who seek social enterprise internship opportunities at leading firms in the sector, with a network of other Berkeley students passionate about the field, and a cash stipend to make social enterprise internships financially competitive. The UC Berkeley SEED Fellowship is one element of a larger initiative to expand social enterprise programming at UC Berkeley and establish the university as the leading academic institution in the field. As the sector’s impact becomes increasingly clear, interest and support for social enterprise continues to grow. New ideas are being applied to a wide variety of problems and issues, from the environment, to education, to health, to policy. Social enterprise spans disciplines and transcends the typical silos that separate universities, businesses, and nonprofits. In order to unlock the potential for the creation of social value at UC Berkeley, and to help prepare a generation for careers in the field, there exists an opportunity to bring together the varied resources of the university to create a social enterprise initiative to coordinate, aggregate, and increase programming and interest in social enterprise.
Type: Fellowship Program
Sponsored by the Center for Responsible Business and supported by the Gap Foundation, the Gap Inc. CSR Scholars Program is a unique fellowship opportunity that supports Haas MBA students who demonstrate a commitment to the field of corporate social responsibility in their professional and educational pursuits. Recipients of the Gap Inc. CSR Scholars Program are required to take a certain number of CSR-related courses and complete a research project for Gap Inc. during their time at Haas. Scholars are selected based on the following criteria: (1) demonstrate a strong commitment to the field of corporate social responsibility; (2) exhibit a strong commitment during their MBA education to practice business in a way that promotes a better world; and (3) hold distinct plans to integrate CSR into their future business careers.
Type: Lecture and workshop series
About the Peterson Series
Each semester, the Center for Responsible Business partners with thought leaders from both the Haas School of Business and the UC Berkeley campus at large to bring a series of events around a topic of corporate responsibility or sustainability. This program promotes exploration of emerging areas that require vision and leadership from our students, corporate partners and faculty members.
While Rudolph Peterson led Bank of America onto the global stage in the 1960s, headed the United Nations Development Program in the 1970s and became a notable philanthropist later in life, he had a knack for not losing sight of what was really important: the responsibility to help those with less and the integrity to never waver in that pursuit.
The Peterson Series (previously the Peterson Lecture Series) is an embodiment of the man it is named for: bold, forward-thinking and possessing a dogged view that corporations, like all people, should be productive and ethical members of our society.
This year we focus on two issues that are at the heart of building a sustainable approach to commerce:
Fall 2010: Sustainable Finance
Spring 2011: Sustainable Consumption (see below for more details)
Feb 2: China's Best Buy? Exploring Leadership, Innovation, and Sustainability in China
Kal Patel, Best Buy President, Asia Region, in conversation with Aron Cramer, President and CEO of BSR
6:30pm, Bank of America Forum (7pm event, Wells Fargo).
Feb 9: Designing for Sustainability: Opportunities in Product Development
Prof. Sara Beckman with leaders from Autodesk, Lunar Design, and Pi Mobility
7:30pm, Faculty Club.
Feb 16: The Path to (Consumer) Enlightenment: Changing the Way We Buy and Sell
Prof. Dara O'Rourke with leaders from Method, Clorox, and others.
12:30-2, Faculty Club, Heyns Room.
Feb 25: Workshop in Creative Problem Solving
Travis Lee, Lunar Design, leads a workshop on design thinking applied to a sustainability challenge.
9-5pm, Faculty Club, Heyns Room.
Mar 4: Workshop in Lifecycle Analysis for Business Leaders
Dr. Omar Romero-Hernandez, LCA expert, along with leading companies in sustainability.
1-5pm, Women's Faculty Club.
Mar 7: The Future of Doing More With Less: New Business Opportunity in Sustainable Consumerism
Henry Chesbrough, Executive Director, Center for Open Innovation, Haas (moderator) with Matt Plante, Vice President of Sales, EnerNOC; Kevin Casey, Fonder and CEO, New Avenue; Santokh Badesha, Xerox Fellow and Manager Open Innovation at Xerox.
12:30-2pm, Faculty Club, Seborg Room.
Type: Showcase/mentoring
YEAH is the Haas School's outreach program to disadvantaged middle and high school students. MBA students serve as mentors to encourage their mentees to stay in school and consider how they could change lives -- their own and others -- with their business ideas. In this showcase, YEAH students competed for the best idea to encourage teens to take public transit. Every year, YEAH hosts a competition at which YEAH students showcase their ideas and what they have learned.
Last year, YEAH matched 103 mentors -- mostly Berkeley MBA students but also some Haas undergrads -- with 140 middle school students and 135 high school students, all from public schools. To be eligible for YEAH, the students must be the first in a low-income family to go to college and have average grades. YEAH is launching a pilot summer program called the UC Berkeley Business Academy in June for students who don’t quite fit those criteria; its fees will help fund the nonprofit YEAH program (haas.berkeley.edu/businessacademy).
YEAH mentors work an astonishing 120 hours per middle school student and 76 hours per high school student, teaching computer skills, financial literacy, and business concepts throughout the year.
The Haas Business of Health Care Conference provides an interdisciplinary forum where cutting-edge information and innovative approaches to health care are shared. This is the only event of its kind on the West Coast where health care industry professionals will come together with students from multiple disciplines, predominantly business, public health, and public policy, as well as engineering and science, to present and discuss ideas and learn from each other. The conference is organized by MBA and UC Berkeley graduate students. Last year's speakers included Lloyd H. Dean - President and CEO, Catholic Healthcare West, David Brailer - Chairman, Health Evolution Partners, Peter Maag - Global Head, Diagnostics, Novartis Vaccines and Diagnostics.
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We analyze the impact of winning high-profile tournaments on the subsequent behavior of the tournament winner in the context of chief executive officers of U.S. corporations. We find that the firms of CEOs who achieve "superstar" status via prestigious nationwide awards from the business press subsequently underperform beyond mere mean reversion, both relative to the overall market and relative to a sample of "hypothetical award winners" with matching firm and CEO characteristics. At the same time, award-winning CEOs extract significantly more compensation from their company following the award, both in absolute amounts and relative to other top executives in their firm. They also spend significantly more time and effort on public and private activities outside their company such as assuming board seats or writing books. The incidence of earnings management increases significantly after winning awards. Our results suggest that media-induced superstar culture leads to behavioral distortions beyond mere mean reversion. We also find that the effects are strongest in firms with weak corporate governance, suggesting that firms could prevent the negative consequences.
The financial distress of investment banks and the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs, namely, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) has received intense focus recently in both financial markets and regulatory circles. An investment bank (Bear Stearns), an insurer/investment bank (AIG), and the GSEs have already required specific government bailouts.1 Even larger but dispersed cash infusions are now in process. As a result, there is a consensus that new methods of regulation are necessary to minimize the likelihood of future governmental bailouts. Here I explore the benefits of reregulating the investment banks and the GSEs by applying the monoline principles that have been long established in regulating insurers that offer coverage against mortgage and bond default risks.
Drawing from social categorization theory we found that greater demographic
heterogeneity led to group norms emphasizing lower cooperation among student teams and
officers from ten business units of a financial services firm. This effect faded over time.
Perceptions of team norms among those more demographically different from their work group
changed more, becoming more cooperative, as a function of contact with other members. Finally,
cooperative norms mediated the relationship between group composition and work outcomes.
The recent financial crisis has revealed significant externalities and systemic risks that arise from the interconnectedness of financial intermediaries risk portfolios. We develop a model in which the negative externality arises because intermediaries actions to diversify that are optimal for individual intermediaries may prove to be suboptimal for society. We show that the externality depends critically on the distributional properties of the risks. The optimal social outcome involves less risk-sharing, but also a lower probability for massive collapses of intermediaries. We derive the exact conditions under which risk-sharing restrictions create a socially preferable outcome. Our analysis has implications for regulation of financial institutions and risk management.
An unbiased employer engages in optimal sequential search by drawing from
two equally quali
ed subpopulations of job candidates who di¤er in their dis-
course systems. That is, minorities convey noisier unbiased signals of ability
than non-minorities. We show that when the employer is selective, minorities are
underrepresented in the workforce,
red at greater rates, and underrepresented
among initial hires. Workplace diversity increases if: the cost of
ring falls, the
cost of interviewing increases, the opportunity cost of not hiring increases, or
the average skill of candidates increases. If, however, the employer is su¢ ciently
unselective, minorities may be overrepresented in the workforce.
This paper provides the first credible evidence on the economic value of 'green buildings' derived from impersonal market transactions rather than engineering estimates. We analyze clusters of certified green and nearby buildings, establishing that 'rated' buildings command substantially higher rents and selling prices than otherwise identical buildings. Variations in premiums are systematically related to energy-saving characteristics. Increased energy efficiency is associated with increased selling prices -- beyond the premiums paid for a labeled building. Evidence suggests that the intangible effects of the label itself may also play a role in determining the values of green buildings in the marketplace.
We investigate firms’ operating performance subsequent to the repricing of executive and non-executive employee stock options. We find that, relative to non-repricers, repricing firms have a larger increase in operating income and cash flows in subsequent periods. This performance improvement is attributable to the underlying economic determinants of the decision to restore the options’ incentive properties. However, only repricings of executive stock options are associated with improvement in performance; we find no such evidence for non-executive employees. Our findings suggest employee stock options provide sufficiently large incentive effects to favorably affect firms’ performance, but primarily so at the executive level. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V87-4Y34SPH-1...
We test for customer discrimination with data from more than 800 retail stores employing over 70,000 individuals matched to census data on the demographics of each store's community. While our tests detect some increase in sales when the workforce more closely resembles potential customers, the effects we find are modest in magnitude. Customer discrimination is neither strong nor pervasive. We find little payoff to matching employee demographics to those of potential customers except when the customers do not speak English.
Recent research suggests that the unique legal and organizational structure of REITs, relative to other types of corporations, may vitiate the need for and the effectiveness of internal corporate governance. Our results indicate that
information asymmetry, as measured by the percentage bid-ask spreads demanded by the market, is reduced by appropriately structured REIT governance. Using data during the 2003-2006 period, we find that increasing the financial incentives for board members reduces asymmetric information, and that the combination of experienced board members and independent audit committees with financial
expertise diminishes asymmetric information.
Research has confirmed that leader behavior influences group and organizational behavior, but we know less about how senior leaders ensure that group and organizational members implement their decisions. Most organizations have multiple layers of leaders, implying that any single leader does not lead in isolation. We focused on how the consistency of leadership effectiveness across hierarchical levels influenced the implementation of a strategic initiative in a large health care system. We found that it was only when leaders' effectiveness at different levels was considered in the aggregate that significant performance improvement occurred. We discuss the implications of these findings for leadership research, specifically, that leaders at various levels should be considered collectively to understand how leadership influences employee performance.
Ratings of corporations’ environmental activities and capabilities influence billions of
dollars of “socially responsible” investments as well as some consumers, activists, and potential
employees. In one of the first studies to assess these ratings, we examine how well the most widely
used ratings—those of Kinder, Lydenberg, Domini Research & Analytics (KLD)—provide
transparency about past and likely future environmental performance. We find KLD “concern”
ratings to be fairly good summaries of past environmental performance. In addition, firms with
more KLD concerns have slightly, but statistically significantly, more pollution and regulatory
compliance violations in later years. KLD environmental strengths, in contrast, do not accurately
predict pollution levels or compliance violations. Moreover, we find evidence that KLD’s ratings
are not optimally using publicly available data. We discuss the implications of our findings for
advocates and opponents of corporate social responsibility as well as for studies that relate social
responsibility ratings to financial performance. http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/levine/papers/ChatterjiLevineToffel_060...
In a highly competitive environment global firms face the challenge of increasing productivity to compete with firms sourcing production in low-wage developing countries. This paper presents a new paradigm of production which provides a solution to the productivity challenge. The new paradigm is both a philosophy of management and a set of methods that draw upon the experiences of firms employing quality management and lean production. This approach has proven to yield substantial gains in quality, productivity, and competitiveness. The methods and the requirements to successfully implement it are discussed. How to transplant these systems to developing countries is also considered. The role of the CEO in successful implementation of the New Productivity Paradigm is discussed in the final section.
The article focuses on an interdisciplinary application of the transaction cost theory of the firm which is associated with Nobel Prize in Economics winner Oliver Williamson. The issue of governance in and the effect of transaction cost economics on private and public organizations are discussed. Examples are given which explore the application of Williamson's logic in the non-market environment of firms. The topics of information asymmetry and transactional hazards are noted. The inefficiency of government bureaucracy, the prediction of environmental policy, and government regulation of occupational health and safety are mentioned. An analysis of international business from an institutional theory perspective is noted.
The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Young Kwak on public-private partnerships for infrastructure development, one by Damian Dominguez on public utilities that adopt strategic planning methods, and one by Andrew Davies, David Gann, and Tony Douglas on process innovation ininfrastructure megaprojects. --- Physical infrastructure – in both developed and developing economies – is crucial to the continuance and growth of every community and state, and ensuring that everyone has access to the services they provide at affordable costs is necessary to protect equity and public welfare.
This paper models and provides empirical evidence for the quality of assets that are securitized through bankruptcy remote special purpose vehicles (SPVs). The model predicts that assets sold to SPVs will be of lower quality ("lemons") compared to assets that are not sold to SPVs. We find strong empirical support for this prediction using a comprehensive data set of sales of mortgage-backed securities (Freddie Mac Participation Certificates, or PCs) to SPVs over the period 1991 through 2002. Valuation estimates based on a structural two-factor model indicate that PCs sold to SPVs are on average valued $0.39 lower per $100 of face value relative to PCs not so sold. For the four largest coupon groups in our full sample of Freddie Mac PCs, we find a "lemons spread" of 4--6 basis points in terms of yield-to-maturity, and this spread accounts for 13--45% of the overall prepayment spread of these securities. The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org, Oxford University Press.
Using personnel data from a large U.S. retail firm, we examine whether the race or ethnicity of the hiring manager affects the racial composition of new hires. We exploit manager turnover to estimate models with store fixed effects and store‐specific trends. First, we find that all nonblack managers—that is, whites, Hispanics, and Asians—hire more whites and fewer blacks than do black managers. This is especially true in the South. Second, in locations with large Hispanic populations, Hispanic managers hire more Hispanics and fewer whites than do white managers. We also examine possible explanations for these differential hiring patterns.
Seeking lower costs of production, many global firms have offshored production of products, parts and services. Results of these efforts have often disappointed in terms of quality, productivity and sustainability issues. Firms need to take a strategic view of offshoring decisions emphasising the role foreign production plays in their supply chain. Modern systems, such as lean production, require a tightly linked global supply chain. Lean production also fosters a sustainable global supply chain making practices such as sweatshop working conditions and environmental pollution incompatible and uneconomic.
Five studies demonstrated egocentric pattern projection, in that the implicit personality theories (IPTs) that participants held about other people tended to recapitulate the terrain of their own personality. To the extent that participants believed they possessed 2 traits to a similar degree within themselves, they tended, through their judgments of others and estimates of population parameters, to claim that the 2 traits were positively correlated in other people; and if they believed they possessed 2 traits to a dissimilar degree within themselves, they tended to claim that the 2 traits were negatively correlated in other people. Further evidence showed that information about the self plays a causal role in the construction of implicit theories, making a unique contribution to the shape of IPTs over and above that of information about another person. The relevance of these data for recent controversies over egocentric social judgment is discussed. -- This article discusses the lower barrier to entry in technology-intensive industries, so that even small businesses can now participate.
This article studies optimal mortgage design in a continuous-time setting with volatile and privately observable income, costly foreclosure, and a stochastic market interest rate. We show that the features of the optimal mortgage are consistent with an option adjustable-rate mortgage (option ARM). Under the optimal contract, the borrower is given discretion of how much to repay until his balance reaches a certain limit. The default rates and interest rate payment on the mortgage correlate positively with the market interest rate. Gains from using the optimal contract relative to simpler mortgages are the biggest for those who face more income variability, buy pricey houses given their income level, or make little or no down payment. Our model thus may help to explain a high concentration of option ARMs among riskier borrowers.
People exhibit peer-induced fairness concerns when they look to their peers as a reference to evaluate their endowments. We analyze two independent ultimatum games played sequentially by a leader and two follow-
ers. With peer-induced fairness, the second follower is averse to receiving less than the ¯rst follower. Using laboratory experimental data, we estimate that peer-induced fairness between followers is 2 times stronger
than distributional fairness between leader and follower. Allowing for heterogeneity, we ¯nd that 50 percent of subjects are fairness-minded. We discuss how peer-induced fairness might limit price discrimination,
account for low variability in CEO compensation, and explain pattern bargaining. (JEL: A12, A13, C72, D63.) This paper focuses on the self-interested assumption and investigates how social comparison may lead to fairness
concerns between peers. http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aer.99.5.2022
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