August 11, 2014
(6/12/2014) – 4.4 million jobs will be created worldwide to support big data by 2015, according to a Gartner press release on key issues facing the IT industry.
To prepare students for big data careers, the UConn School of Business offers graduate and undergraduate degree programs in business analytics that focus on data management, analytics, and using emerging technologies to better manage financial risk and other business needs.Continue Reading
(6/30/2014) – The UConn School of Business is proud to announce a premier group of financial institutions supporting the School’s new undergraduate Financial Management major in Stamford.
The Financial Management major was designed and developed, in part, by CFA charterholders from prominent local hedge funds and investment firms. The major has been accepted into the CFA Institute’s University Recognition Program and stands to serve as inspiration to a program intent on helping cultivate a young generation of future CFA charterholders. The CFA credential has become one of the most globally respected designations and the Financial Management major, along with those selected within this program to join the Investment Management Program (IMP), will be exposed to academic and practical applications in finance coupled with reinforcement of strong ethical behavior.
“Through a progressive relationship with the CFA Society of Stamford, students who excel in the Financial Management major will be invited to join an exclusive Investment Management Program (IMP), which, among other benefits, provides access to a wide array of tools and research from financial institutions like Barclays, CreditSights, and Atlantic Asset Management,” said Jud Saviskas, executive director for the UConn School of Business in Stamford. “This innovative relationship encourages and facilitates an exchange of ideas, networking opportunities and career development for aspiring investment professionals – and it’s already received outside interest from many other colleges and universities.”
Last year, a group of IMP students travelled to Wall Street for a visit to several institutions such as Barclays, Bloomberg, and CreditSights. As program supporters, these companies allow students and faculty complimentary access to their client web portals such as, Barclays Live, which provides a range of research and financial analytics tools, and CreditSights’ online global research platform and an analytical staff of almost 80 investment professionals.
“Barclay’s and CreditSights’ web portals are an excellent tool for IMP students as they undertake the challenges of the program and the pursuit of the CFA Level I exam,” said Michael Dineen, senior vice president of Atlantic Asset Management and UConn adjunct professor.
Thomas Walsh, managing director at Barclays added that the collaboration with IMP is just one example of the importance the bank places on developing an early foundation of ethical investment knowledge. “The most successful students will be those who develop the skill sets they need to be productive and innovative members of the next generation’s workforce,” Walsh said. “We are delighted to be able to make Barclays Live available to IMP students and hope that they will derive significant benefit from these new resources.”
“We have had the pleasure to meet a number of IMP students, and they are coming into the space during interesting times in the evolution of the credit markets,” said Glenn Reynolds, CEO of CreditSights. “We hope the background information from prior credit cycles and our analysis of the structural shifts taking place today – most notably in banking and finance – can be of value as they prepare themselves for the role they can play in the markets. Credit has grown dramatically in all areas of the global economy from sovereign to corporate to household, and there are a lot of moving parts to the puzzle.”
Brookfield, Wis. and Hartford, Conn. (5/27/2014) – Fiserv, Inc. (NASDAQ: FISV), a leading global provider of financial services technology solutions, and the University of Connecticut School of Business, one of the top public business schools in the nation, today announced that Fiserv is participating in the university’s Financial Accelerator Program to help educate students and foster innovation.
The Financial Accelerator Program was established in 2002 to create opportunities for UConn students and faculty to apply classroom concepts to real business challenges. With the Fiserv initiative, UConn MBA students are collaborating with area business leaders from Fiserv and two of its clients, the Savings Bank of Danbury and Greylock Federal Credit Union, to explore how financial institutions can attract and serve Gen Y consumers using state-of-the-art banking technology.
“The Financial Accelerator Program at the University of Connecticut School of Business shines a spotlight on the exciting and innovative career opportunities available to students in the state,” said Connecticut Governor, Dannel P. Malloy. “Collaborations like this, which bring the leaders of tomorrow together with the leaders of today, foster the innovation and opportunity that help make Connecticut such an attractive place to live and work.”
The initiative, currently underway for the Spring 2014 semester, introduces UConn MBA students to the DNATM account account processing platform from Fiserv. DNA is a modern, enterprise-wide software platform relied upon by Savings Bank of Danbury and Greylock FCU as well as hundreds of other banks and credit unions for transaction processing, data management and customer relationship management. DNA offers a unique development toolkit – DNAcreatorTM – that allows users to create seamlessly integrated applications called DNAappsTM that extend the platform in new and powerful ways. At the conclusion of the Financial Accelerator Program, UConn students will present a business case for a new DNAapp that DNA users like Savings Bank of Danbury and Greylock FCU can use to enhance the millennial banking experience.
“DNA from Fiserv incorporates the latest industry standard tools and languages currently being taught at UConn and other leading universities where banks and credit unions can find a deep and talented pool of software engineers,” said Steve Cameron, president, Open Solutions Division, Fiserv. “By partnering with some of our region’s brightest minds at UConn, the Savings Bank of Danbury and Greylock Federal Credit Union, Fiserv is investing in the local community and continuing to build on our vision to drive the global digital transformation of financial services.”
The students will work with Savings Bank of Danbury, Greylock FCU and Fiserv associates throughout the program to ensure their proposal is both viable and compelling. After completing their research, idea development and return on investment (ROI) analysis, the students will present their findings to Fiserv associates at the end of the semester. The program may be extended into the Fall semester with a new group of students to execute the business plan using DNAcreator to build the proposed DNAapp.
“The DNA platform from Fiserv fits nicely with UConn’s goal of fostering an entrepreneurial ecosystem within our state,” said Jeffrey Scarella, Industry Liaison, Physical Sciences & Engineering at the UConn Office of Economic Development. “By leveraging the intellectual power of our students and faculty, we hope to help community institutions like the Savings Bank of Danbury and Greylock Federal Credit Union, as well as leading financial innovators like Fiserv, provide the best possible banking experience to the next generation of Connecticut consumers.”
“This collaboration allows our students to use the knowledge, research skills, innovative thinking, and work ethic they’re acquiring at UConn in a very welcoming business environment provided by Fiserv,” said UConn Professor Michel Rakotomavo, faculty advisor for the project. “They have invaluable access to and interactions with executives from the partnering organizations and benefit from those organizations’ resources and information, making the experience truly distinctive in higher education.”
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Storrs, Conn. (5/20/2014) – Paul Borochin, assistant professor of finance at UConn School of Business, together with finance professor Joseph Golec, propose an event study method using stock and option prices to account for the degree of investor anticipation to more accurately measure the full value effect of an event.
Finance researchers and practitioners both use the event study method to measure whether the announcement of new information has a statistically significant effect on a firm’s stock market value. Paul Borochin and Joseph Golec, professors of finance at the University of Connecticut, recently proposed a method that uses stock and option prices to account for the degree of investor anticipation of an event to therefore more accurately measure the full value effect of that event.
“The purpose of our study is to introduce a general method of estimating the degree of investor anticipation applicable to all significant events that affect firms with traded options,” says Borochin. “We apply this more general method to estimate probabilities to a complex event: U.S. House of Representatives passage of the healthcare reform law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (PPACA). We also examine a related event with different potential for investor anticipation: the subsequent 2012 Supreme Court ruling on PPACA constitutionality, which was potentially a greater surprise due to the Court’s higher opacity.”
Borochin and Golec essentially interpret the financial market as a betting market. “…we get the same information from options prices that we could obtain from looking at the Intrade [or other betting market] website,” says Borochin.
“Indeed, one reason that we select PPACA passage to illustrate our method is that it also had event securities traded on Intrade, the leading prediction market at the time,” he says. “We compare the Intrade-generated probabilities for the 2010 and 2012 events to those we generate from options and stock prices as a robustness check. Our financial market-generated probabilities have two advantages over prediction market-generated probabilities: (1) they are derived from assets with much larger dollar volumes of trades,1 and (2), they can be estimated for any event that impacts companies with traded stock options.”
Borochin and Golec believe that their method could be useful for ex ante as well as ex post public policy analysis, citing legislation that often contains offsetting provisions negotiated among different political factions—in this case, the PPACA fee (tax) on brand name pharmaceutical sales.
They measure the effects ex post, but the method could be used for ex ante analysis by government or industry officials. “For example, Congress could publicly release a bill and a vote date. Based on the option market reaction to the vote announcement, both government and industry officials could determine investors’ estimates of the net effect of the bill’s provisions,” says Borochin.
“Our method could also be used to better estimate public or private damages associated with an event,” he adds. “The Securities and Exchange Commission often estimates damages from corporate fraud and the Federal Trade Commission estimates damages from illegal business practices. As long as some of the firms involved have traded stock and options, our method can give a more accurate estimate of total damages.”
Many event studies do not adjust for the fact that their events are partly anticipated, and in many cases, the degree of anticipation is difficult to measure. For the PPACA House vote event Borochin and Golec consider, the adjustment triples the measured effect of the event on the market value of the affected firms.
“We believe that [our method] is likely to be more precise than alternative methods such as using public data on firm-specific attributes to estimate event probabilities, or using event securities from relatively small prediction markets, because our method employs high-volume assets whose prices may partly reflect nonpublic information. For an event with substantial public information available (House passage), we find our probability estimate and that of a prediction market are quite close. But for an event with little public information (Supreme Court constitutionality), the estimates differ considerably,” said Borochin.
The working paper, “Using Options to Measure the Full Value-Effect of an Event: Application to the Healthcare Reform Act,” can be downloaded here.
1The daily value of PPACA contracts on Intrade averaged about $90,000 around the 2010 House vote event, while the average daily dollar value of stock ($277 million) and notional value of options ($397 million) traded for each company in our model totaled $674 million. The daily Intrade value was $35,000 during the 2012 Supreme Court event, while the average dollar stock and notional options trade value was $640 million.
Figure 1 –
The model-generated probability of PPACA passage compared to the Intrade-generated probability.
This figure plots the model-generated probability of PPACA passage by the U.S. House of Representatives, which is the probability implied by the stock and options prices of six hospital firms and six insurance firms. The Intrade-generated probability of PPACA passage is the price of an event security traded on the Intrade prediction market. Probabilities are shown for three weeks of trading before the event, the event day (March 22, 2010), and the day following the event.
August 7, 2014
The latest alumni news from UConn School of Business.
Scott D. Beggs ’94 MBA has joined Basin Street Properties as chief financial officer. Basin Street Properties, a real estate investing firm, has acquired 19 locations involving nearly a million square feet over the past two years.
Howard J. Bryerman ’75 has opened a franchise of PROSHRED®, a shredding business. Bryerman is an investment professional with 20 years of experience as a high yield bond portfolio manager and analyst. Bryerman has partnered with his wife, Simone, in their new business.
Carol Cox ’00 has been named vice president of strategy and corporate communication at NuVasive, Inc. Cox is an executive with extensive global healthcare experience in corporate strategy, investor relations, corporate communications, media relations, brand strategy and government relations.
Melissa B. Cummings ’98 MBA has joined Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island as senior vice president and chief customer officer. Cummings currently serves on the Board of Directors for the University of Connecticut Center for Healthcare and Insurance Studies.
Gregory J. Fedele ’00 MBA has been named president of Innovative Capital Holdings’ subsidiary Sabreliner Aviation. Fedele was most recently the senior vice president of customer business, helicopters and light turboprops at Rolls Royce.
Thomas M. Foran ’81 has joined Standard Insurance Company as vice president of underwriting and product development for the Employee Benefits Group. Foran joined Standard Insurance Company from Symetra where he was vice president of Group Life and Disability.
Betsey B. Gainey ’97 is the 2014 winner of Hartford Business Journal’s 40 under 40. Gainey is currently the vice president and director of client services at Cronin and Company, the largest full-service independent marketing communications agency in Connecticut.
Haiyan Grzelak ’06 EMBA has been awarded the Teacher of the Year award at the Chinese Cultural Center at Central Connecticut State University where she taught Chinese to a class of students ranging in age from 11-50.
William S. Hall ’08 MBA has been designated as a premier advisor at Wells Fargo Advisors. The Premier Advisors Program is a distinction that reflects Mr. Hall’s achievement of professional success by meeting or exceeding Wells Fargo Advisors’ high standards as measured by one or more of the firm’s criteria for revenue generation, educational attainment and client-service best practices.
Douglas J. Hammel ’89 will be joining Guilford Public Schools as principal of grades 5 and 6 at Abraham Baldwin Middle School. Hammel was previously the principal at Deans Mill Elementary School in Stonington, Connecticut.
Sarah B. Jeffrey ’14 MBA has received the prestigious Early Career Healthcare Executive Regent’s Award by the Connecticut Association of Healthcare Executives. The award recognizes Jeffrey’s contributions toward the achievement of the goals of the American College of Healthcare Executives and the advancement of healthcare management excellence. Jeffrey is currently an administrative fellow at Bristol Hospital.
Eric J. Kaplan ’90 MBA has joined Reval, the leading global provider of a comprehensive and integrated software and service solution for treasury and risk management as a solution consultant on the North America team. Kaplan has nearly 15 years of finance experience with a focus on cash management that spans senior positions at GE Capital and PepsiCo.
Sean F. Mulready ’93, ’02 MBA has been promoted to senior vice president, commercial real estate at Webster Financial. Mulready serves on the board of the Northside Institutions Neighborhood Alliance and on the local advisory committee of Local Initiatives Support Collaborative.
Donna A. Rosequist ’76, ’82 MBA was promoted to vice president at Segal Rogerscasey. Rosequist was most recently Director, Alpha Investment Research in Darien. Rosequist has 20 years of experience as a fiduciary and advisor on private equity research. She assists clients with the design of private equity programs including plan structure, strategy and performance monitoring.
Gary Z. Siegel ’79 has been appointed by Vision-Sciences, Inc. to vice president of finance and the company’s principal financial officer and principal accounting officer. Prior to joining Vision-Sciences, Inc. Siegel was the vice president of finance at Genta Incorporated.
Thomas Sullivan ’00 MBA was appointed as senior advisor insurance at the Federal Reserve, Board of Governors, in June. Sullivan was most recently a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Hartford after serving for four years as Insurance Commissioner in Connecticut. He is a former executive at The Hartford Financial Services Group, Inc., where he worked for more than 20 years.
Clyde W. Tinnen ’01 MBA has been elected to special counsel at Kelley Drye & Warren LLP, an international law firm. Tinnen is a partner in the Chicago and Stamford offices and focuses his practice on corporate law matters, including finance and securities law, banking and mergers and acquisitions.
Shuai Yang ’14 Ph.D. has successfully defended her dissertation titled, “Two Essays on Matching Strategy in Paid Search Advertising.” Yang has accepted an offer at Donghua University (Shanghai) and will be joining in Fall 2014.
Leslie A. Zoll ’93 has been appointed to serve on the Connecticut Society of Certified Public Accountants Advisory Council for the 2014-2015 activity year. Zoll is a manager for BlumShapiro in West Hartford, Connecticut and will represent the CTCPA Governmental Accounting and Auditing Committee on the Advisory Council.
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August 6, 2014
August 1, 2014
July 30, 2014
The University of Connecticut School of Business is pleased to announce that updates to its MS HRM degree program, as well as a new graduate certificate in HRM, have been approved unanimously by UConn’s Board of Trustees. Following a rigorous academic review by the Management Department in January 2014 and subsequent approval by the Faculty of the School of Business, the former MPS HRM program was redesigned to accommodate today’s working professional and align the curriculum with the needs of tomorrow’s HR leaders. Every course in the program was updated and several new courses were added to the Graduate Catalog, including Managing Risk in the Workplace, Talent Management Through the Employee Lifecycle, and Consultative Management for Business Function Professionals. The new program is a 33-credit cohort program with concentrated seven-week sessions in a defined sequence. The benefits of this design include greater integration across the curriculum, collaborative learning across the cohort, and the ability to focus on one course per session while completing the degree in 22 months.
For more information, please contact us at 860-486-4176 or HRM@business.uconn.edu.
July 29, 2014
Back East Brewing Company is a small Craft brewery located in Bloomfield, Connecticut, founded by alums Tony Karlowicz ’01 MS and Edward Fabrycki, Jr. ’92 (ENG), two cousins with a passion for great-tasting, high-quality beer.
Tony developed his appreciation for Craft beer during his undergraduate years in Vermont and always imagined launching a brewery. Tony is an entrepreneur at heart and a CPA with extensive experience in accounting, auditing, and insurance. He gained a love of building a successful business from the ground up from his parents who owned a candy store in Bloomfield, and he also started a landscaping business while in high school. Edward, originally from Connecticut, began to home-brew while living in San Diego in the early 1990s. He eventually moved “Back East” to Connecticut in 2000, with the dream of someday operating a Craft brewery. As a Professional Engineer, Edward enjoys the technical aspects of brewing. Tony and Edward began homebrewing in early 2006 with a small pilot brewing system in a Southington garage.
With investments from family and friends and an $80,000 small business grant from the state, the company hired an experienced head brewer who had worked at the Harpoon Brewery in Boston and moved into its current location on Blue Hills Avenue in Bloomfield in January 2012. In July 2012 their dream became a reality, in the form of a 4,500-square-foot state-of-the-art brewery capable of producing tens of thousands of gallons of beer a year.
Over time, they have developed several exciting recipes, including the company’s signature beer, Back East Ale, which won 2nd place in the American Amber Ale category at the 2013 Great International Beer Festival. Their Back East Porter also took home awards in both the 2012 and 2013 Great International Beer Festival.
Back East brews several different styles of beer, distributed in draft, six-packs of 12 ounce cans, and 750ml bottles at fine establishments. Their tasting room is open to the public Wednesday through Friday, 4-7:00 p.m., and Saturday noon-4:00 p.m. Tours are offered on Saturdays, beginning at noon, 1:00, 2:00 and 3:00.
The United Way of Naugatuck and Beacon Falls had more to celebrate at its 50th annual meeting than the organization’s golden anniversary.
The United Way exceeded its 2012 campaign goal by $15,000 and raised a total of $440,000, said Laurie Yelding, campaign chairwoman.
The evening’s highest honor — the Mary H. Connolly Community Caring Award — was given to Lee Schlesinger ’82. The Mary H. Connolly Community Caring Award is presented annually to recognize an individual or individuals who have demonstrated outstanding support to the United Way and the entire community and who have set the standard for service to the community.
Schlesinger, a Naugatuck native who now lives in Waterbury, is the associate director for Safe Haven of Greater Waterbury. Twenty years ago, he worked for Naugatuck Valley Savings and Loan. At the time, he was approached by Mary Connolly, who was the executive director of the United Way, about volunteering.
“Mary has that kind of personality where you just do not say no to her,” Schlesinger said. Schlesinger didn’t say no. He served on the United Way’s Board of Directors for two terms. He was treasurer for nine years and a member of the Allocations Committee, which controls the distribution of funds to local service agencies.
Schlesinger’s volunteerism extends beyond the United Way. He served as president of the board of directors of the Morris Foundation, which provided mental health and addiction services and is now part of Wellmore. For the past 12 years, he has been co-chairman of the Finance Committee for the American Cancer Society – Greater Waterbury Relay for Life. Lee has also been an event volunteer for Special Olympics’ Penguin Plunge. He was the recipient of the United Way of Naugatuck & Beacon Falls Van Allen Medal in 2012 and Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence – First 100 Plus – honoring male leaders from across the state who have worked to raise awareness of the availability and access to domestic violence services in Connecticut. He also received the Volunteer Award from Morris Foundation.
“My first and sustained impression of Lee over the years is what an incredibly kind, compassionate and decent soul this is,” said Kevin DelGobbo, who introduced Schlesinger.
Schlesinger thanked Connolly for asking him to volunteer all those years ago and said he was honored to be recognized. “It is such an honor to even be considered for this award among the distinguished previous recipients,” he said.