Media Coverage

"Chief Marketing Officers have always been intellectually curious as to how products and services are delivered to consumers," says John Impellizzeri, assistant professor of professional practice and co-director of the Center for Supply Chain Management at Rutgers Business School. "Over the past decade both consumer and supply demands have become increasingly volatile and complex, making the CMO’s awareness and understanding of the supply chain a necessity to survive."

The impact of digital marketing, changes in sales management and the rise of the "Marketing CEO."

These were just some​ of the trends and "Next Practices" discussed at the Summer AMA Marketing Educator's Conference in Chicago. More than 800 scholars, students, experts and select vendors came together to discuss cutting edge Marketing thought.

Scroll through this video gallery to catch a glimpse of some of the thought leadership from this noteworthy event.

New Jersey has its eye on a certain type of entrepreneur.

“We are trying to identify entrepreneurs who can operate profitably in urban environments and also want to make an impact on the community at the same time,” explains Lyneir Richardson the director of the Center for Urban Entrepreneurship & Economic Development (CUEED) at Rutgers University. CUEED is a research-driven, teaching and practitioner-oriented urban entrepreneurship and economic development program, based at the Rutgers Business School.

“Rutgers Business School is excited to partner with Newark Venture Partners investors to realize this forward-thinking plan for attracting new companies to Newark,” said Rutgers University Newark Chancellor Nancy Cantor. “The establishment of a dynamic technology facility and hub for innovation also creates an incredible new avenue of opportunity for Rutgers students and the rest of the academic community in Newark.”

One of the main reasons why racial inequality persists in the workforce, according to experts, is because of the way employees recommend others for jobs in their workplace.

When Heidi Zak was a young investment-banking analyst, stuck at the office until 3 a.m. with her supervisor Lisa Kaplowitz, she couldn't imagine that one day she would start an online lingerie company.

Or that her supervisor-turned-mentor would encourage her to do it.

But now, 15 years later, Zak, 36, and her husband, Dave Spector, are running San Francisco-based ThirdLove, a startup that designs and sells lingerie at a mid-range price point. The company offers half-sizes and has a patented bra-sizing app that's designed to make shopping for lingerie an easier, less invasive proposition.

These days, a lot of people are going back to school. If you’re in business, maybe in middle management, what you’ve heard is true – the best way for you to advance is an MBA. Workers with an MBA make much more than those without, get to higher positions, and have more job security.

There is a need for talent at the top, as supply chains become departments with senior-level management, according to Eugene Spiegle, vice chair of the supply chain management department at Rutgers Business School.
These departments are a way to “sustain competitiveness and manage the fast-paced changes caused by both global markets and changing consumer demands”, he said.

A Rutgers researcher (Kevin Lyons) says climate change is causing allergy seasons to start earlier and last longer and that by 2040, pollen counts will be more than twice the levels they were in 2000.

Bendersky and her collaborator, Neha Shah of Rutgers Business School, have studied how status changes are driven by the perceptions of an individual’s peers.
Bendersky considered the influence of personality type on these perceptions, with a focus on the two dimensions of the Big Five traits that previous research has shown are most strongly associated with status in groups: extroversion and neuroticism (she controlled for the other traits, which are agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness to experience). As interdependent work unfolds, she finds, extroverts lose stature and neurotics gain stature.

Whole Foods’ announcement makes sense. The grocer often is referred to as “Whole Paycheck” because of its prices. The chain risks losing young customers to competitors like Trader Joe’s, whose brand is synonymous with inexpensive prices, said Marc Kalan, a professor at Rutgers Business School - Newark and New Brunswick.

Judy Young, the executive director of the institute, feels a cultural connection may be the most important consideration when reviewing a potential partner.
“It’s critically important when you are doing a merger and acquisition to do your due diligence beforehand,” she said. “If your values are not in synch, you are going to find that you are going to be a mismatch in every vein of business that you are trying to do with this organization.

The Harvard Law School Forum published an abstract by Mark Humphery­Jenner, a Senior Lecturer at the University of New South Wales Business School, of a paper he co­authored with Suman Banerjee, Associate Professor in the Department of Economics and Finance at the University of Wyoming, and Vikram Nanda, Professor of Finance at Rutgers Business School.

John Buckley, global head of corporate social responsibility (CSR) at BNY Mellon, presented the first ever BNY Mellon Social Finance Prize to a team of Rutgers Business School MBA students at recent breakfast event at the NYC Yale Club for the Aspen Institute’s recent annual Business & Society International MBA Case Competition. Created in partnership with the Aspen Institute, the prize encourages innovation in social finance, a field that encompasses investment activities with both financial returns and significant social impact.

I was disappointed by the headline on The Star-Ledger's editorial page, "Barchi is mainly to blame for Rutgers' next tuition hike." The cost of college education is a difficult national issue, which should not be personalized. The issue is difficult because the cost is driven by widely shared and cherished goals.

Regarding William McGurn’s “The Pope, the Poor and Climate Change” (Main Street, April 21): In a country like India, around 350 million people (more than the population of the U.S.) go to bed early because there is no electric light, often miss meals because there is no food, and huddle together in huts because there is no heat. What they need desperately now and not in the future is energy, and in the cheapest form available, which happens to be coal.

In Late 1980 The Warner-Lambert Company, a pharmaceutical and consumer products goods (CPG) marketer faced a dilemma. It had never had an on-going and effective method to identify and develop new, innovative products for any of its loosely connected divisions. In the late 1970’s its American Chicle Division introduced a new chewing gum product, Freshen-Up Gum, to exceptionally strong acceptance from the marketplace, encouraging the company to heavily invest in special capital equipment required to produce this new form of gum. The Warner-Lambert Consumer Product Group did not include a team dedicated to the identification of New Product Categories or Product Innovation so one was created. The New Products Group was tasked as follows: To identify opportunities both within existing product categories as well as new product categories decisions/actions needed to be identified that would; (1) Leverage under used assets, specifically the large excess capacity within the American Chicle extruder equipment; (2) The group was tasked with exploring and considering any existing manufacturing expertise and capital equipment utilisation; (3) This team was challenged to identify new product categories where then existing Warner-Lambert brands were minor or non-competitive entrants, or where the company had no entrants.

Social networks also play a major role in reproducing racial hierarchies in the labor market, according to a recent study by Professor Nancy DiTomaso at Rutgers Business School. Whites disproportionately hold down jobs of prestige and high pay. And when those in high places bestow favors to their buddies, former classmates and acquaintances, they perpetuate racial divides, whether intentionally or not.

“Whites help other whites, especially when unemployment is high,” Rutgers Business School vice dean Nancy DiTomaso wrote in The New York Times.

In the study to be presented at the American Accounting Association meeting next week in Atlanta, Rajgopal and coauthors Simi Kedia and Xing Zhou of Rutgers Business School examined Moody’s ratings over the 10 years after it went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2000. They identified two large and consistent shareholders over that period: Berkshire Hathaway, which owned 16.5%, and Davis Selected Advisors, which owned 7.5%.

The researchers then examined some 900 bonds issued by companes they considered significant holdings of Berkshire or Davis, representing at least 0.25% of either company’s portfolio for at least three years. For Berkshire, this was an easy task: Buffett runs a tight portfolio with an average of 32 firms. Davis holds more than 180. The researchers called these “related firms.”

The result? Moody’s ratings on bonds issued by related firms were a statistically significant 0.46 notches higher than S&P ratings on the same paper. This translated into an average savings of $500,000 a year per bond in borrowing costs, Rajgopal said, as well as a lower overall cost of capital, important advantages in highly competitive capital markets.

“Whites are disproportionately in positions where they have more authority, more decision-making ability -- particularly in regard to who gets hired (and) who gets opportunities. Then if blacks are not in those same networks … they are less likely to get access to those jobs.”

Keynote Address
Dec. 3, 2012
James R. Doty, Chairman
AICPA National Conference on Current SEC and PCAOB Developments
Washington, DC

See Simi Kedia and Thomas Philippon, The Economics of Fraudulent Accounting, 22 Rev. Fin. Stud., 2169, 2171 (2009).

In the paper, Does the Revolving Door Affect the SEC’s Enforcement Outcomes?, which was recently made publicly available on SSRN, my co-authors (Ed DeHaan of the University of Washington, Kevin Koh of Nanyang Technological University, and Shivaram Rajgopal of Emory University) and I examine whether revolving doors are associated with compromised regulatory oversight by the SEC. In particular, we investigate whether regulatory enforcement against financial reporting fraud is influenced by the future job prospects of prosecuting SEC lawyers. Revolving doors lead to both the SEC hiring officials from firms that they regulate as well as SEC officials leaving to work for firms that are regulated. The revolving door exists because (i) the SEC needs industry specific expertise to regulate its constituents effectively, and (ii) regulated firms value experience and knowledge of complex regulations to minimize their cost of compliance.

The new study – by Simi Kedia, Mr Rajgopal and Xing Zhou – builds on their previous work analysing credit rating agencies and finds that Moody’s was slower than S&P by an average 71 days to downgrade bonds related to its long-term large shareholders.

It also identifies a similar pattern in the ratings awarded to commercial mortgage-backed securities, which bundle together loans secured by shopping malls, office buildings and the like.

The following is by Robert Khuzami, Director of Enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission. It’s a response to a piece Alison Frankel wrote earlier this month.

Alison Frankel’s On the Case column challenged the findings of an academic study designed to measure the impact of the SEC’s so-called “revolving door.” The academic study, entitled “Does the Revolving Door Affect the SEC’s Enforcement Outcomes,” by Simi Kedia and coauthors, is the first to actually apply some rigorous analysis to the proposition that SEC staff let future job considerations affect their professional judgment. The outcome, not surprising to me, is an emphatic “no” -- employment considerations had no measurable impact on enforcement outcomes and that SEC alumni appear to have no measurable advantage on behalf of their clients facing investigation.

Listen to the Podcast

Jeff Horwich: Politicians and government watchdogs are perpetually worried about something they call “the revolving door”: private sector people take jobs in government for a while, then leave again for the private world. The worry is that their own economic incentives affect their work as public servants.

A team of researchers has a new paper out today that looks at this effect on lawyers at the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC.

Simi Kedia is a professor of finance and economics at the Rutgers Business School. Good to talk with you.

Kedia: So the specific concern might be for example that if they want to get a job in a private law firm and they are involved in a case where a private law firm is defending a client against the SEC, that they might somehow compromise the SEC regulatory effort and be sort of more lenient towards the private law firm, who they might eventually want to join.

The new study, whose authors are Simi Kedia of Rutgers, Ed deHaan of the University of Washington and Kevin Koh of Nanyang, in addition to Dr. Rajgopal, collected data on the career paths of 336 S.E.C. lawyers and their involvement in 284 S.E.C. enforcement actions from 1990 through 2007.

It found that roughly one-third of those lawyers left to join private law firms — the types of jobs most often cited as evidence of revolving-door outcomes. But the study found no evidence that the enforcement results produced by revolving-door lawyers while they were at the S.E.C. differed from those of lawyers who remained at the S.E.C. or who went on to other fields of work.

Re “How to Avert a Financial Overdose” (Fair Game, April 1), in which Gretchen Morgenson described two professors’ proposal for the equivalent of a Food and Drug Administration to approve new financial products:

The idea is intriguing. The standard argument made by Wall Street and many of my academic colleagues is that these instruments are useful for risk management and hedging. What is troubling, however, is whether some of these innovations manufacture risks where none existed before, amplify them and then create the need to hedge those risks. Credit default swaps are a prime example.

Hearing Before the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, United States Senate One Hundred Twelfth Congress, First Session on Examining Job Growth Through Capital Formation

Simi Kedia and Thomas Philippon, ‘‘The Economics of Fraudulent Accounting’’ (January 2005). AFA 2006 Boston Meetings Paper. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=687225.

Asking the banks to monitor the creditworthiness of its counterparties in a derivatives transaction is another foolhardy exercise, especially when it isn't in their self-interest to do so. The loss of trust in our financial institutions is so great that until that trust is recovered, any and all protection against adverse price changes, namely hedging, ought to be paid for up front through the posting of margins.

Re “When Deals on Wall Street Resemble a Casino Wager,” by Andrew Ross Sorkin (Dealbook column, April 20): The comparison of the Goldman Sachs civil fraud suit to wagering in a casino is quite apt. Goldman will probably win its suit in court by arguing, in effect, that like a casino it does not have a legal obligation to provide the odds of winning or losing at the table. Did it have a moral obligation to do so, especially to its clients, whom it claims to work for? In all likelihood the answer is yes.

The universal naivete of "greens" never fails to amaze. Ingi Salgado in Green Agenda ("ExxonMobil dinosaurs blaze trail to extinction," June 5) attacks ExxonMobil and Sasol for blazing "a trail to their extinction" by not sufficiently investing in alternative energy sources.

She is dead wrong. First, ExxonMobil is an energy company and not an oil company. It will do what is economically feasible to power our homes and cars. Second, it is spending billions of its owners' money in what it does best - finding oil and gas.

The company says fossil fuels will power our economies for generations. Despite what doomsters predict, the markets agree.

Sasol, on the other hand, is a remarkable company. It literally squeezes energy out of a stone (coal), and is trying its very best to do it economically. Both companies need to be admired and appreciated for what they are doing rather than attacked for their profits. If not for them we would be all be freezing in the dark.

A recent paper by Simi Kedia, of Rutgers, and Thomas Philippon, of N.Y.U., for instance, looked at all the companies known to have been managing earnings between 1997 and 2000. In those years, the companies boosted hiring by a full twenty-five per cent, while other companies increased hiring by less than seven per cent. As soon as the companies were forced to come clean, employees were sacked. Kedia and Philippon estimate that the re-stating companies fired between two hundred and fifty thousand and six hundred thousand people between 2000 and 2002, slashing payrolls by more than twenty-five per cent, while other companies cut them by just 1.5 per cent.

Tyler Cowen links to this informative Daniel Gross article in the New York Times about possible explanations for the relatively weak job growth the economy has experienced over the past few years.

Gross then summarizes an NBER working paper by Philippon and his colleague Simi Kedia. Their abstract:

We study the consequences of earnings management for the allocation of resources among firms, and we argue that fraudulent accounting has important economic consequences…. We first show that periods of high stock market valuations are systematically followed by large increases in reported frauds. We then show that, during periods of suspicious accounting, insiders sell their stocks, while misreporting firms hire and invest like the firms whose income they are trying to match. When they are caught, they shed labor and capital and improve their true productivity. In the aggregate, our model seems able to account for the recent period of jobless and investment-less growth.

In a recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, Professor Philippon and a colleague, Simi Kedia, assistant professor of finance and economics at Rutgers, argued that the widespread accounting problems for which Enron was emblematic might have helped suppress employment growth -- in the affected companies, and in the industries in which the misreporting was concentrated.

On the whole, Professors Philippon and Kedia conclude, companies that had to restate earnings in 2000 and 2001 axed anywhere from 250,000 to 600,000 jobs in 2001 and 2002. That would account for a significant chunk of the jobs lost during the period.

Your editorial "Heartless capitalism" (ST, April 11) truly piqued my interest, and I would like to present a rebuttal to the editorial:

1. "...the Citicorp-Travelers merger puts profits ahead of people because of the inevitable downsizing of the workforce."
Doesn't this kind of reasoning suggest that GE should not have mass-produced the light bulb because it would have decimated the candle-making workforce?

2. "The world should be skeptical of the US corporate model of merge, rationalize, cut costs, downsize."
Why? Rather, the model should be admired. The simple fact is that this "heartless downsizing" has produced the lowest unemployment and inflation rates in recent memory.

George Vecsey's criticism of those who switched their vote and selected Nebraska the top team in the nation (''So What Was It, Exactly, That Michigan Did That Was Wrong?'' The Times, Jan. 4) is preposterous.

How would Vecsey have voted if Michigan won the Rose Bowl when one of its receivers kicked the football and another caught it for the game-winning score?

How you win matters. If it did not, then Nebraska would not have lost its top ranking after the Cornhuskers tied Missouri on that bizarre play. Nebraska's crushing victory over No. 3 Tennessee, and Michigan's squeaking by No. 7 Washington State, properly influenced the final vote. Even the New York Times computer thought so.

It was such a pleasure to read Murray Chass's July 24 article "Winfield Creating Yank-Met Skirmish." where he discuses the value of ballplayers an the remuneration they receive.

The myth has long been perpetrated that ballplayers are overpaid and that, as a result, the owners and the general public suffer.