Research

Students Engaged in Academic Leadership (SEAL) Cultivates Academic Success, Professional Development

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SEALHasudin Pehratovic ’15 (BUS) says that the SEAL program has taught him to, “Never take anything for granted and always give back.” And if that’s not enough, the accounting major adds that the program has helped him with everything from questions of dining etiquette—’The bread plate goes on the upper left, the water glass on the upper right,’ he says with a smile—to introducing him to key UConn faculty and administrators as he explores career opportunities in his chosen field.

Pehratovic, who was born in Bosnia and came to Connecticut with his family in 2000, is one of 21 juniors and 13 sophomores who make up the first two cohorts enrolled in Students Engaged in Academic Leadership (SEAL), developed through UConn’s Office of Diversity.

Aimed at students who are the first in their families to attend college, admission to SEAL is through a competitive application process offered to first semester sophomores. Those accepted stay in the program from the second semester of their sophomore year through their senior year providing they maintain GPA requirements and are actively engaged in required activities. During this time, they receive stipends of approximately $500 per semester as they are exposed to networking and mentoring opportunities, internships, and organized team-building exercises.

Jeffrey Ogbar, vice provost for diversity, explains the genesis of the program at UConn this way: “The University does a great job of providing support for various groups of students: The Honors Program, Leadership Legacy through the Office of Student Activities, opportunities such as Upward Bound, Upward Bound-STEM, and McNair Scholars, that are federally-sponsored initiatives for individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds. We reach out to a wide variety of students.”

“But we found we were missing an important group – and that’s students who are the first in their families to attend college. This group, which we refer to informally as First Gen, has a disproportionately high dropout rate, particularly between their sophomore and junior years. We wanted to do something positive to reverse that trend.”

Ogbar explains that this is not a situation unique to UConn. Although overall our graduation rates are significantly better than the national average—with an 83% six year retention rate—on a national level only 26% of First Gen students graduate with a bachelor’s degree within eight years.

Reasons given for a high attrition rate include the fact that these individuals may lack a support system that includes parents who have experienced college and who support the idea of higher education. These students tend to be older with additional work and family responsibilities. And in some cases they come from a lower socio-economic status which makes paying for higher education more difficult.

“UConn’s SEAL program is aimed exclusively at first generation college students regardless of their race, ethnicity, or economic status,” says Ogbar. “As long as applicants have a GPA of at least 2.5 and are committed to developing their leadership and academic skills, they are welcome to apply.”

Kelly Sanchez ’15 (CLAS) and Shantel Honeyghan ’15 (CLAS), both members of the first cohort chosen last year, agree with Pehratovic that SEAL has provided a variety of important opportunities.

A native of Jamaica who lives in Hartford, Honeyghan was first introduced to UConn through the Teacher Preparatory Studies Program at Bulkeley High School. This initiative, which partners high schools with the Neag School of Education, is designed to encourage talented students, particularly from minority groups, to become teachers.

She says, “When I first came to UConn I thought I wanted to major in education because I had so many positive experiences with faculty from Neag when I was in high school. But, somehow I wasn’t confident in my choice. I took a close look at myself and evaluated my interests and now I have a double major in English and Human Development & Family Studies. I’ve decided that I want to get a master’s degree—and eventually a Ph.D.—in higher education and student affairs.

“Part of my decision is the example set by Dr. Ogbar, by Dr. Price in the African-American Cultural Center, and by others I’ve met through SEAL and my exposure to leadership activities. Diversity and multi-culturalism are very important to me and I hope I can give back by eventually working in an office of diversity initiatives or an office of civic engagement.”

Like her peers in the program, Sanchez who hails from New Haven, gives SEAL high marks for exposing her to leadership opportunities and introducing her to individuals on campus who serve as mentors and role models.

“I knew from the time I was in high school that I wanted to major in psychology and when I went for my interview [for the SEAL program] I met Michelle Williams and she has been a wonderful mentor for me – being there when I need her and encouraging me to every step of the way. What I didn’t anticipate was how much I would be inspired by Professor [Guillermo] Irizarry‘s course in Puerto Rican & Latin American studies. As a result, I now have a double major in Psychology and Latin American Studies and I hope, someday, to work as a clinical psychologist.

Williams, associate vice president for research and associate professor in the Department of Psychology, and Irizarry, associate professor of Literatures, Cultures & Language, are examples of the types of relationships forged between students and campus leaders envisioned by Ogbar and SEAL program administrator Seanice DeShields, director of diversity initiatives in the School of Business.

“We’re really encouraged by the progress of this program,” says DeShields. “We have only lost one student so far—and that’s because of a transfer to another school—and the collective GPA of students in the program is over 3.3 and on the rise. We’re really excited about the future and the number of First Gen students who will be graduating from UConn in years to come.”

SEAL is currently funded by a five-year grant from the Coca-Cola Foundation.

Pictured: Jeffrey Ogbar, vice provost for diversity, left, Shantel Honeyghan ’15 (CLAS), and Hasudin Pehratovic ’15 (BUS). (Peter Morenus/UConn Photo)

UConn Finance Professors Propose New Method to Estimate the Full Value-Effect of an Event

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PPACA Passage EventStorrs, Conn. – 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.

>>More about this research

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.

Bill Ross and Co-authors Receive Prestigious Lehmann Award

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Bill Ross, ING Global Professor, and his colleagues, Sanjay Puligadda (Miami University) and Rajdeep Grewal (Penn State University) were awarded the coveted Lehmann Award for their article, “Individual Differences in Brand Schematicity,” Journal of Marketing Research (February 2012). The Lehmann Award (in honor of Donald R. Lehmann, Columbia University) is given annually to the best dissertation-based paper (within the past 2 years) in either of the two premier marketing journals, Journal of Marketing and Journal of Marketing Research. The article was Puligadda’s dissertation, which he completed at Penn State with Ross and Grewal as his advisers.

If you had decided to buy a camera, would you focus on which brands the store carried? Or, would you focus on the characteristics of the different cameras the store had in stock?

This paper suggests that if you are high in brand schematicity, you would be more likely to attend to the different brands the store carried, whereas if you were low in brand schematicity you would be more likely to attend to the characteristics of the cameras the store carried.

A schema is a set of expectations a person has about what will happen in a certain situation. Most folks, for example, have a schema for what they will experience in a fast food restaurant. Schematicity is the tendency on the part of consumers to process information using specific schema. People who are high in brand schematicity are likely to process products in terms of brands, not product characteristics, whereas people who are low in brand schematicity are likely to process products in terms of product characteristics not brands.

Don’t confuse brand schematicity with brand loyalty. Someone who is high in brand schematicity does not necessarily have a preference for a certain brand; instead, they have a preference to organize their thinking by brands.

In this article, Ross, Puligadda, and Grewal built a theoretical basis for brand schematicity and report on three studies that develop measures of brand schematicity; three studies that consider brand schematicity in the context of associated constructs and establish its predictive validity; and a final study that reveals that a consumer’s brand schematicity influences brand extension evaluations.

OPIM Research Productivity Ranked Among the Best Worldwide

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UConn’s Operations & Information Management Department was recently ranked among the best business schools internationally—and #1 in the Northeast—for information systems research productivity over the last five years.

“These rankings are a clear indicator that we have one of the top research faculty groups in the country and around the world,” said Ram Gopal, professor and department head of OPIM. “Some of the most cutting-edge research in areas such as intellectual property rights, healthcare IT, auction markets, and advanced analytics is going on right here at UConn.”Continue Reading

UConn Real Estate to Present at International Conference on Residential Housing Policy in China

Posted on by Claire Hall

The UConn Center for Real Estate and Urban Economic Studies is playing a key role in the International Conference on Residential Housing Policy in China, taking place at the end of July in Shenzhen. The conference will focus on housing policies and systems in China after twenty years of reform in their housing market system. The UConn Real Estate Center co-sponsored the conference together with the Shenzhen Real Estate Research Center and the Real Estate Research Institute at Tsinghua University.

Two UConn professors are among five guests from the United States invited to make presentations to an audience of Chinese scholars and government administrators. Professor and Center Director John Glascock will be discussing housing markets development and Professor Katherine Pancak will be discussing real estate law issues. The additional U.S. speakers asked to share their expertise in housing policy are Professor Robert Edelstein from the University of California-Berkeley, Dr. Alex Schwartz, author of “Housing Policy in the United States,” and Frank Nothaft, chief economist at Freddie Mac.

Center for Real Estate and Urban Economic Studies Releases Real Estate Markets Update

Posted on by Claire Hall

The Center for Real Estate and Urban Economic Studies at the University of Connecticut School of Business has released its latest update on Connecticut Real Estate Markets.

Connecticut housing markets showed significant signs of improvement according to preliminary numbers for the third quarter of 2012. In a typical town and metropolitan area, prices in the third quarter were virtually unchanged from a year ago. Moreover the number of transactions was up by more than 20%, confirming a pattern of increases.

For more information, access the report here: “CT House Prices 2012 3rd Quarter”

Universitas 21 – Doctoral Research Conference in Business

Posted on by Claire Hall

The University of Connecticut School of Business hosted the Universitas 21 Doctoral Research Conference in Business (DRCB) April 10-13, 2012. Ph.D. students from twelve U21 schools, including UConn, presented research and received feedback regarding their dissertations from their counterparts, faculty from the participating universities, and UConn faculty. The vision of U21 DRCB is to create a global learning and research platform to prepare the next generation of intellectual leaders in the fields of business, commerce and economics.

This inaugural event was created as a model for future international conferences to be sponsored with Universitas 21. Participants were welcomed at an opening reception at the Hartford Hilton by Robert Bird, Program Chair; Gary Powell, Ph.D. Program Director; and Michele Metcalf, Program Manager. Interim Dean Karla H. Fox greeted the group at the Graduate Business Learning Center the following morning where presentation sessions were held throughout the day. All presentations were video recorded with copies of tapes being provided to presenters. That evening, a Gala Dinner was held at the Hartford Society Room featuring Mr. Jonas Haertle, UN PRME Secretariat. The final day of the conference was held at the Storrs campus at the School of Business and the Alumni Center. Two panel sessions were held on “Finishing the Dissertation” and “From Dissertation to Publication”- which were also recorded and will be available on the website soon. Participants also enjoyed lunch at the School of Business Café, dinner at the Alumni Center as well as a tour of the campus. An optional trip to Boston was also available to participants on Friday.

Attendees at the event included faculty and Ph.D. students from the National University of Singapore, Tecnológico de Monterrey, University College Dublin, University of Amsterdam, University of Auckland, University of Birmingham, University of Delhi, University of Glasgow, University of New South Wales, University of Nottingham, and University of Queensland.

The tracks included International Business, Exchange Rates, Advertising and Branding, Knowledge, Accountability, Investment, Consumer Behavior, Leadership, Management Information Systems, Economics, Corporate Finance, Creativity, Strategy, Taxation and Auditing, Strategies, Markets and Products/Services, and Cognitive Theory.

Photo: Attendees of the Universitas 21

Annual Faculty Awards

Posted on by Claire Hall

At the beginning of this month, the Teaching and Research Committee met and evaluated nominations for the annual Faculty Awards.  A total of nine winners, a runner up, and two honorable mentions were awarded.

Under the Research category the winners are Sarah Rice and David Weber for Best Paper.  Their paper is titled “How Effective is Internal Control Reporting under SOZ 404? Determinants of the (Non-) Disclosure of Existing Material Weaknesses.” Continue Reading

Paper Received Best IS Publication of the Year Award 2010

Posted on by Claire Hall

A paper co-written by faculty members of the University of Connecticut School of Business Department of Operations and Information Management has been nominated as the best ACM TMIS paper of 2010 and is also one out of five recipients of the Best IS Publications of the Year Awards 2010.  The paper, titled “Why Give Away Something for Nothing? Investigating Virtual Goods Pricing and Permission Strategies,” was co-written in December 2010 by Dr. Sulin Ba, Professor; Dr. Dan Ke; Dr. Jan Stallaert, Associate Professor; and Zhongju Zhang, Associate Professor.

The Best Publications Awards were established to recognize the breadth of high quality work that is being published in the Information Systems discipline. This award was designed to bring outstanding papers across a range of journals to the attention of the IS community, and to give due credit to the journals in which they are published. Each year journal editors nominate the best paper published in their journal in the preceding year. A committee composed of Senior Scholars reviews the nominations from journal editors and selects five papers as the recipients of this prestigious award.

“Why Give Away Something for Nothing? Investigating Virtual Goods Pricing and Permission Strategies” is about the world of virtual goods.  The question of how a creator sets prices for a virtual good, as to maximize their profit, is discussed.  The major difference with virtual goods is that many times consumers will want to use multiple copies of the same good, which results in an increase in the consumer’s utility.  The focus of the research is on the copy permission of virtual goods.  An economic model is developed and examined under different conditions, to find which setting is best for the copy permission that leads to the highest profit, as well as how subsequent pricing strategies are affected.  Both theoretical and practical implications of researched are discussed within the paper.

Three Management Professors and a Ph.D. Student Receive a Scholarly Impact Award for their research

Posted on by Claire Hall

The Journal of Management (JOM) reviews all articles published in JOM five years prior and awards the top five highest impact papers . All JOM papers published in 2006 were considered for the 2011 Scholarly Impact Awards. A committee of four Associate Editors considered each paper according to the following criteria:

  • Number of citations (both with and without self-citations)
  • The breadth and quality of the papers/journals citing each paper
  • Total downloads
  • Perceived quality and potential for continued impact

The committee explored who cited each paper–whether the papers are being cited by top journals, as well as whether the papers are having wide penetration. Then the committee considered the strength of each paper and its potential for continued contribution.

The University of Connecticut School of Business is honored to have a paper written by three of its professors and a Ph.D. graduate recognized by the JOM. The paper, titled “Ambidexterity and performance in small- to medium-sized firms: The pivotal role of top management team behavioral integration” was written by: Michael Lubatkin, Thomas John & Bette Wolff Family Chair in Strategic Entrepreneurship and Professor, Management Department; Zeki Simsek, Associate Professor and Ackerman Scholar, Management Department; Yan Ling, UConn Ph.D. graduate; John Veiga, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor and Northeast Utilities Chair in Business Ethics, Management Department.

Sage, SMA, and JOM will be recognizing this achievement at their annual board meeting at the Academy of Management conference. At this event, a Best Paper Prize will be awarded. The Best Paper Prize comes with a cash honorarium.