Media Coverage

Violence and poverty took center stage at a west Louisville forum on Wednesday. It was part of "The West Louisville Forum: Solutions for Urban American" held at the St. Stephen Baptist Church Family Life Center. The guest speaker was Dr. Nancy DiTomaso, professor from Rutgers University. Her research on the root cause of violence and poverty in urban areas might be controversial to some because she believes it starts with whites. "They use their family members, they use acquaintances, all of whom, of course, primarily look like them," Dr. DiTomaso said.

Mark Burgess, Rutgers Business School Executive Education faculty member, was a guest on the Wharton Marketing Matters Business radio show on Sirius XM (Sept 7th). He and his business partner and wife Cheryl, also co-author of The Social Employee (McGraw-Hill), were invited to lead discussions on social employee advocacy marketing and social leaders. The host was Catharine Hays, Executive Director of the Wharton Future of Advertising program.

Chinese President Xi Jinping delivered a keynote speech while addressing the Business 20 (B20) summit in east China's Hangzhou on Saturday. Distinguished Professor Farok J. Contractor, Management & Global Business, Rutgers Business School said: "Well, I thought it was a very comprehensive speech which covers not only the concerns about other G20 governments, but also showing China as an example over the last 38 years of reform of how it lifted 700 or more million people out of poverty into middle class status."

I shouldn’t tell you this. Publicity will only make the problem worse. But you deserve to know: Tax cheating is about to rise in the United States. Now, there are at least two counterarguments to my dire prediction: Fewer business transactions are done in cash today, so they’re harder to hide; and, relatedly, in the era of “Big Data,” there’s more third-party information for the IRS to check to figure out if people are cheating, opinion writer Kathrine Rampell writes, citing research presented at New York University School of Law in April by Rutgers Business School professor Jay Soled and Tulane University professor James Alm.

When Terina McKinney of Camden displays her leather bags and belts at events attended primarily by black women, they are often interested in her designs, and in her experience as an African-American business owner. But she seldom makes sales. While calls have been increasing for black consumers to support black-owned businesses with their buying power estimated at more than $1.2 trillion a year, social media campaigns with momentum like #buyblack are relatively new.

The abnormal 2016 presidential election: Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton? Farok Contractor, Distinguished Professor, Department of Management & Global Business, was interviewed on New China TV, the official YouTube channel for Xinhua News Agency. The 2016 presidential election is quite different in many ways, controversial candidates, unhappy voters, rifted Parties.

The dueling promotions are part of a war in the ride-hailing industry to grab market share, industry analysts say, and mark Uber’s latest effort to stomp out competitors by starving them of drivers. The more drivers a service attracts, the more it can lower passenger fares and increase demand, hopefully outpacing its rivals. "These types of markets tend to become winner take all," said Jerry Kim, a professor of management and global business at Rutgers Business School. "If they tip to one side, you don’t have to subsidize."

Jerry Kim, a Management & Global Business professor at Rutgers Business School, said consumers are savvy enough to differentiate when a company's actions are for the good of society and when they are simply veiled attempts to pad their bottom line. Even situations where the motivation may be murky open the door to scrutiny from customers. An obvious example is the common practice among hotel chains to urge customers to re-use bath towels. Do they really want to save the planet, or just save on their energy costs?

For decades, Rutgers University-Newark has offered seed grants to artists whose creations highlight the essence of the city.

One of the best-kept secrets about Newark is how it nurtures the arts.

Through another of the seed grants – obtained by faculty members Ian Watson, chair of the Department of Arts, Culture and Media; and James Abruzzo of Rutgers Business School – Rutgers University-Newark has made plans to launch a two-track Master’s Program in Urban Arts and Cultural Leadership.

China's burgeoning class of financial elites has long been feted at home and abroad as an embodiment of the country's growing economic might. But they now face mounting scrutiny as part of President Xi Jinping's crackdown on corruption and as the Chinese economy cools.

Some companies defend their targeting of African-American shoppers by claiming that blacks shoplift more than other races. "They try to provide a justification, such as, 'Well, there are certain groups that tend to engage more in shoplifting,'" says Rutgers University-Newark provost Jerome Williams, who is co-author of the forthcoming book "Consumer Equality: Race and the American Marketplace." "I have not found any evidence of that."

Morris Davis is no stranger to New Jersey, having grown up in Philadelphia and spent summers at the Jersey Shore. But that couldn't have prepared him for what he learned about the state last year, once he showed up to help build a new real estate program at Rutgers University.
“I didn’t realize how fertile the ground was here,” said Davis, the academic director for the Center for Real Estate at Rutgers Business School.

Trump's statement on Monday was perhaps the last straw for many political observers and Trump foes, if not GOP primary voters. The billionaire businessman called for a complete "shutdown" of Muslims entering the United States "until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on" with terrorism.

Ashwani Monga, professor and chair of the Marketing Department at Rutgers Business School, said Trump threatens further damage to his personal brand. He notes, however, that Trump only seems to care about one core group right now — those who support his primary campaign.

The Best Bang for Your Buck: weighing tuition against ROI for EMBA Programs.

Ivy Exec has compiled the best program options based solely on tuition weighed against the average percent increase in salary after receiving a degree.

Rutgers Business School, about an hour from Manhattan, also provides commuter access to the Big Apple while offering a competitive tuition and return on investment. With a price tag of $92,043 and an average post-graduation salary boost of about 49-percent, Rutgers could offer EMBA program participants a much stronger value than the Stern School.

Instead of hoping your luck will change, take control of your career now so that 2016 becomes the year you got that well-deserved pay bump, the dream job or the job title you’ve been yearning for.

That first step to greener pastures starts here: make a catalog of your accomplishments.

An achievement is a big picture deliverable versus a job duty, says Alfred Blake, assistant director of undergraduate entrepreneurship programs at Rutgers Business School—Newark and New Brunswick in New Jersey. It’s the difference between saying, “This year I engaged 5,000 customers and converted 30% to the premium subscription” and “I called 5,000 customers.”

Almost six months to the day since Puerto Rico Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla declared that the Commonwealth could no longer service its $72 billion dollars in debt, resolution to the crisis remains elusive even as economic conditions continue to deteriorate on the island.

"What Detroit showed is that investors who buy government bonds should not expect to be treated like bondholders in a private company," said Michael Santoro, professor of management and global business at Rutgers Business School. "Investing in government bonds is risky and only as good as the full faith and credit of the entity you are investing in. If Puerto Rico defaults on its bonds, they will get new investors to invest. So the hedge funds hold a very weak hand if they are trying to push Puerto Rico around."

Performance bonuses for individuals, particularly CEOs, has been the norm across all industries for decades. Yet, increasing evidence indicates this is not a smart practice, that may actually detract from individual and team productivity and motivation.

Notre Dame’s Matt Bloom has shown that companies with higher pay inequality suffer from greater manager and employee turnover. He found major league baseball teams with larger gaps between the highest-paid and lowest-paid players lose more games; they score fewer runs and let in more runs than teams with more compressed pay distributions. Similarly, Phyllis Siegel at Rutgers Business School and Donald Hambrick at Penn State have shown that high-technology firms with greater pay inequality in their top management teams have lower average market-to-book value and shareholder returns.

Some worry about the influx of Chinese money. "The Chinese savings glut has fully disrupted global financial markets," says Morris Davis, academic director of the Center for Real Estate at Rutgers Business School in Newark, New Jersey. "I have no idea how this ends, but these things typically don't end well." In 1989, Japan's Mitsubishi Estate Co. bought 80 percent of New York's Rockefeller Center, only to jettison its $2 billion stake in the mid-1990s when the landmark building filed for bankruptcy.

In an early-morning call with investors Monday, officers of the two drug-makers portrayed their deal as a boon for health care. Pfizer trumpeted Allergan's strength in drug classes Pfizer had "exited" due to weak returns. The new Pfizer inherits Allergan's pipeline of more than 70 experimental drugs, which includes a new line of biosimilars--essentially me-too versions of existing biotech drugs, says Mahmud Hassan, director of the pharmaceutical management program at Rutgers Business School.

Rutgers Business School Executive Education is launching an accelerated certificate program in Next-Generation Supply Chain Strategy for leaders and emerging leaders. The Mini-MBA™: Supply Chain in a Digitized Network, will be offered Nov. 30 - Dec. 4, 2015 at the Heldrich Hotel, located in downtown New Brunswick.

"The Internet of Things (IoT) is profoundly reshaping the supply chain and is reinventing the entire industry. Many companies have focused their IoT strategy on how the technology can cut costs and improve efficiency. However, IoT can also serve as a foundation for greater differentiation and innovation," said Jackie Scott, global program director of Rutgers Business School Executive Education.

Brett Gilbert, an associate professor of management and global business at Rutgers Business School, discusses how clusters, or groups of companies that congregate in a region around a particular field, are evolving.

Employers really do discriminate against job applicants with disabilities, even when the disabilities might make them better workers, a new study shows. The results may help explain why unemployment rates remain high among people with disabilities.

Employers appear to discriminate against well-qualified job candidates who have a disability, researchers at Rutgers and Syracuse universities have concluded.

The study, though it deals only with the accounting profession, may help explain why just 34 percent of working-age people with disabilities were employed as of 2013, versus 74 percent of those without disabilities.

“We created people who were truly experts in that profession,” said Mason Ameri, a Ph.D. candidate with the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers, who was another one of the researchers. “We thought the employer would want to at least speak to this person, shoot an email, send a phone call, see if I could put a face to a name.” For the gap between disabled and nondisabled to be larger among experienced candidates than among novice candidates, he said, came as a surprise.

One bad corporate apple, it seems, can spoil a whole bunch. That’s the conclusion of a fascinating academic study that examined accounting restatements by thousands of corporations over a 12-year period. Three academics conducted the study, which will appear in the November issue of The Accounting Review, published by the American Accounting Association. They are Simi Kedia of Rutgers University Business School, Kevin Koh of Nanyang Business School in Singapore and Shivaram Rajgopal of Columbia University Business School.

The prospect of falling over the “cash cliff,” as the sudden dropoff in disability insurance is known, is part of what’s keeping people with disabilities out of the workforce, despite many programs put in place over the years to reduce that disincentive.

So many people are now on the assistance rolls that the federal government’s disability insurance trust fund is projected to run out of money next year, bringing new urgency to the search for a fix that goes beyond just throwing more dollars at the problem. If a remedy is not found by the end of 2017, benefits for an already vulnerable population would face a mandatory 20 percent cut.

Earnings manipulation is also more prevalent than we might think. The PCAOB report comes on the heels of a recent study titled, “Evidence on Contagion in Earnings Management.” One of the authors, Rutgers Business School professor Simi Kedia, told me that her research showed that if a company is cheating on its financial reporting and gets caught, other firms will “learn about how costly it is to cheat.” If it’s “not so bad,” she says her research shows, other firms will start cheating in the very same way.

Discrimination is especially real for minority entrepreneurs. According to a study published by Glenn Christensen, an associate
professor of marketing at BYU, Jerome Williams, executive vice chancellor and provost at Rutgers University-Newark and a marketing professor at Rutgers Business School and lead author Sterling Bone, a Utah State University business professor, minorities face more challenges than their white peers in the perennially high-stress process of securing business financing. That racial profiling can lead to discouragement and diminished self-worth.

The same discrepancy exists when it comes to shoplifting, said Jerome D. Williams, a Rutgers University professor working on a book exploring racial profiling in the retail industry. In years of studying the matter, he said, he has never discovered any compelling reason to think that one racial group shoplifts more than others.

Financial restatements can prompt similar companies to misstate their own earnings, according to a new study.

The authors—Simi Kedia of Rutgers Business School, Kevin Koh of Nanyang Business School in Singapore and Shivaram Rajgopal of Columbia University Business School—believe their study to be “the first to document that peer firms begin managing earnings after an earnings restatement is announced by target firms in their industry or in their metropolitan statistical area.” The study will be published in the November issue of the American Accounting Association journal The Accounting Review.

"I give Trump credit for raising this issue of the offshoring," said Michael Santoro, professor of management and global business at Rutgers Business School. "I do think there is a deal to be made here, but you have to be a tough negotiator because right now I bet a lot of these companies want to bring this money back anyway."

“The claim was, in 2002-2003, that the Fed left interest rates too low for too long,” said Morris Davis, academic director of the Center for Real Estate Studies at Rutgers Business School in Newark, New Jersey. Now, “what Fed policy makers will ask is: what is the natural place that this rent-price ratio should be?”

Newark has several other supermarkets, but nothing this grand, said Rutgers Business School professor Jeff Robinson.
This is a prime example of what other cities need to be doing. It’s a source of jobs and it’s a large employer. It’s a place where you can find what you need in the community. This is a home run,” Robinson said.

"This was a good idea for five years ago," said Michael Santoro, professor of management and global business at Rutgers Business School. "There's been reporting that U.S. multinationals are already bringing some of this money back. Especially with the decline of China, for all our problems here in the U.S., our economy is pulling away from the rest of the world as far as being a safe place to invest."

Tashni-Ann Dubroy is not the type of woman to back down from a challenge.

The Rutgers MBA graduate lived up to the challenge at 18, when she immigrated to the United States from Jamaica, applied to a medley of colleges and was denied any scholarships and admission.

She lived up to the challenge when she instead applied, and then attended community college in New York City, and then transferred into Shaw University on scholarship in Raleigh, North Carolina. Years later, she would walk on the same campus grounds, except instead of being a student, she was president.

“I have reaped significant returns on my investment on my Rutgers MBA,” she said.

Said Alfred Blake, assistant director of undergraduate entrepreneurship programs at Rutgers Business School, "Will you spend another Netflix Friday alone? That depends on your pitch. The perfect elevator pitch is the lure that leaves the listener wanting more. Your pitch must create enough intrigue to warrant another date."

"Many people think strictly about business when discussing a pitch," Blake said. "I liken pitching to a date."

"Is your pitch attractive? Questions to ask: Is your message appealing, who else believes you, do you own it, is it authentic? Compared to dating, these qualities are: appeal, validation, confidence and trust."

There are organizations on campus that support hundreds of students' creative endeavors, such as The Center for Urban Entrepreneurship and Economic Development (CUEED) and organizations like the Rutgers Entrepreneurial Society, said Jeffrey Robinson, associate professor of management and entrepreneurship in the Rutgers Business School and director of CUEED.

Millennials have the reputation of not being in a hurry to settle down, and it's true that young people are waiting longer to purchase property than previous generations, a trend that's likely contributed to historically low homeownership rates. But this is changing as my generation acquires wealth and starts to want the stability my adult-but-boring Arizona friends have.
"I think it depends how old you are," said Morris Davis, a real estate professor at Rutgers Business School. "If you're 23, no, you should not be thinking about buying a house. But if you're 28, yes."

Aloo gobi. Mattar paneer. Dal tadka.

Akhil Shah grew up on dishes like these, Indian staples prepared by his mother. But he knows that meals like these are unfamiliar to many, and that busy people who enjoy home-cooked meals don’t have the time to seek out new ingredients and learn how to prepare them.

So Shah, a 24-year-old Rutgers Business School graduate who lives in Edison, created Chutney Chefs.

“It kind of fit my need,” said Shah, who began working on the business concept in July 2014 while employed as a claims specialist for Liberty Mutual. “I work a full-time job, and right now I have a mom who is able to make food for me. But I was thinking long term. I love Indian food, and also, there are a lot of first-generation, American-born Indians that can use this.”

Arash Azadegan, associate professor in the department of supply chain management at Rutgers, says the supply-chain management program trend started about 10 years ago, after companies decided they couldn't do everything in-house and decided to recruit suppliers, especially cheap suppliers in emerging economies such as India, China and Brazil. Now, says Azadegan, his students go on to a host of different careers under the supply chain umbrella, including procurement, supplier development engineering, management, supply chain analysis, or supply risk management.

But before judging the response to the refugee crisis by some EU countries, consider the existing social conditions in the Europe, where this wave of displaced people seek sanctuary. Across much of Europe, youth unemployment is already at an all-time high, with one in five young people ages 15 to 24 being idle. In countries like Greece, Spain and Italy youth unemployment ranges from 40 percent to over 50 percent. "In Greece youth unemployment is 50 percent, but in Germany youth unemployment is only 7 percent, with overall unemployment well below 5 percent and jobs going begging,” says Farok J. Contractor, professor of management and global business at Rutgers Business School.

Andrew Huszar, senior fellow, Rutgers Business School and former Federal Reserve official, was interviewed on CNBC about the Fed possibly raising the interest rate.

Huszar gave his views on the Federal Reserve’s changing role in financial markets and the Fed’s independence from Wall Street dissipating.

Rutgers Business School MBA alumnus Desi Saran and his partners Abby Taylor and Robert Giuliani see sales soar after they invest prize money from annual business plan competition.

In the dog days of summer, a tiny company selling fruit bowls and smoothies made with exotic acai berries was one of the hottest businesses in Belmar.

Playa Bowls opened last summer as a sidewalk stand built around a giant cooler on the cement. Still, it drew crowds – large ones. This year, fans of the acai berry bowls returned as if they had been waiting all winter for another taste of the fruity snacks. It wasn't long before lines of customers started forming again, sometimes winding down Ocean Avenue toward Eighth.

Rutgers Business School claims many firsts in the world of business education. In 1950, it was the first to offer a master of accounting, and in the early 1970s, it was the first to offer a course that had students working on consulting projects for real companies, a practice that has been imitated by many schools since.
More recently, in 2014, RBS became the first business school to have more women students in the full-time MBA program than men, says Sharon Lydon, associate dean and executive director of MBA Programs at Rutgers Business School. This is significant because most business schools -- even top-tier ones -- are fighting to get more women candidates, who notoriously reject graduate business school in favor of other programs that better conform to their personal and professional needs.

The reported Chinese sell-off of Treasuries comes at a time when the American economy remains the brightest spot on the planet for global investors. U.S. gross domestic product grew 3.7 percent between April and June, well above an initial estimate of 2.3 percent, a sharp contrast with Europe's anemic recovery and stagnation in Latin America, as well as other emerging markets damaged by China's slowdown.

"We are not fortress America," said Farok Contractor, professor of management and global business at Rutgers Business School. "But the U.S. looks like the least bad place."

The Rutgers Center for Urban Entrepreneurship and Economic Development announced last week its partnership with ETSY — the publically traded e-commerce company focusing on handmade and unique manufactured items — to host a Craft Entrepreneurship Program in Newark.

“CUEED is working to build partnerships with companies such as ETSY to further economic opportunities for small entrepreneurs who live and/or operate in urban markets and contribute to local economic development,” said Lyneir Richardson, executive director at CUEED. “The ETSY platform will provide an opportunity for urban entrepreneurs to gain exposure, generate new sales and reach new customers in places all around the world.”

According to a recent study by Consumer Reports, one-third of patients said the cost of their usual prescription rose $39 on average over the last year. One in 10 said they're now paying at least $100 more than they did a year ago.

"I think everyone would agree that the price of many branded drugs is way too high," said Mahmud Hassan, a healthcare economist at Rutgers Business School. "But we still have the cheapest generic drugs in the world."

A number of leaders from New Jersey's academic and business communities will gather Friday morning at the Rutgers Business School in Newark in an effort to come up with new ways for the city to take advantage of public-private partnerships, particularly between its largest and smallest employers.

“You have all of these big anchor institutions in Newark,” said Kevin Lyons, Rutgers Business School professor and event organizer. “Why aren’t they buying from the local area? The money could be very significant.”

Law school applications have been dropping for years now and are facing their lowest enrollment numbers in years, prompting some to cut their budgets and change their programs to attract more students, as my Post colleague Danielle Douglas-Gabriel reported in this April 2015 story.

It said that in the most recent admissions cycle, some 53,000 applications were expected, compared to 77,000 applicants in 2010 and 90,000 in 2004. Why is this happening? And what should legal-minded students do?

Michael Simkovic and Frank McIntyre explain in this post. Simkovic is an associate professor of law at Seton Hall University School of Law and a Visiting Research Scholar at Fordham University. McIntyre is an assistant professor of finance and economics at Rutgers Business School. (They thank Access Group and LSAC for supporting their recent research on a paper titled Timing Law School.)

For China, the challenge requires balancing the need to preserve stability at home with generating strong enough growth to foster innovation and build wealth. Crisis management on this scale also requires sending confident signals for both domestic and international consumption that China remains a good long term bet.

"When the people that have been successful and pulled together these kinds of assets are leaving in droves, that is problematic on a number of levels," said Michael Santoro, a professor of management and global business at Rutgers Business School. "It signals the economy is in trouble, the environment is deteriorating, and it sends a depressing message to the hundreds of millions of members of the new urban middle class who don't have the means to emigrate."

Silicon Valley is recognized globally as the birthplace of some of today's most popular and iconic technologies. Many of its startups have a particular dynamic to thank for their success: the formation of clusters, or groups of companies and organizations that congregate in a region around a particular field.

Brett Gilbert, an associate professor in Rutgers Business School's department of management and global business (and @ProfGilbert on Twitter), studies the formation and influence of these clusters. When a prominent university or a powerhouse company draws other, smaller organizations to its region, a tech cluster forms, supporting entrepreneurs as they develop their own breakthroughs. This model has been observed for decades in the United States. Now, emerging markets such as South Africa are seeing nascent cluster formation. And the success of these nations in the global economy may depend, at least in part, on their ability to make clusters work.