Olin Business School

Beverly and James Hance have established a professorship in the John M. Olin School of Business, it was announced by Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton. The gift of $1.2 million will be combined with $300,000 from the University’s Sesquicentennial Endowed Professorship Challenge to create the James and Beverly Hance Professorship in Business.

MacDonaldIt is no secret that advances in technology can greatly impact the value of workers’ skills. Older workers often find the updating of complex technology uneconomic, while younger workers acquire and readily employ skills tailored to the newest technology. The result: the latter group’s productivity rises, diminishing the value of output produced by their older counterparts. A recently published study by Glenn MacDonald, Washington University’s John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics and Strategy, is the first to model and explain the nature and severity of this effect.

Joyce and Howard Wood, both alumni of the John M. Olin School of Business, have created the Joyce and Howard Wood Distinguished Professorship in Business. Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton announced the gift of $1.7 million, which has been augmented with $300,000 from the University’s Sesquicentennial Endowed Professorship Challenge. William P. Bottom, Ph.D., will be formally installed as the first holder of this professorship at a later date.

A conference for board directors of public and private companies will be held June 25-26 at Washington University’s John M. Olin School of Business in the school’s Charles F. Knight Executive Education Center. The board of directors’ conference, “Strategies and Techniques for Improving Board Performance,” will focus on corporate governance issues.

BardachKenneth C. Bardach has been named associate dean and director of ExecEdge Corporate Education at the John M. Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis, announced Stuart I. Greenbaum, dean and Bank of America Professor at the Olin School. Bardach joins Olin from Case Western Reserve, where he served as associate dean of Executive Education Programs at the Weatherhead School of Management. Bardach brings more than 30 years of academic and corporate experience to his post, having twice served in executive education director positions at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University, and having directed corporate management education and development programs for numerous organizations.

In honor of a very special couple, $1.5 million has been raised by friends and colleagues to establish the Geraldine J. and Robert L. Virgil Professorship in Accounting and Management in Washington University’s John M. Olin School of Business. Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton announced the gift, which includes $300,000 from the University’s Sesquicentennial Endowed Professorship Challenge. Mahendra Gupta, Ph.D., professor of accounting in the John M. Olin School of Business, will be appointed as the first holder in a ceremony planned for later this year.

HamiltonMajor gifts from The Bellwether Foundation and from Nancy Morrill Smith will create the Robert Brookings Smith Distinguished Professorship in Entrepreneurship for Washington University’s John M. Olin School of Business, it was announced by Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton. Barton H. Hamilton, Ph.D., professor of economics, management and entrepreneurship in the John M. Olin School of Business, will be appointed as the first holder in a ceremony planned for later this year.

StreeterThe European Union (EU) added 10 new member nations on May 1, enlarging the union to a total of 25 countries with a combined population of 458 million. The U.S., with a total population of 293 million is still the sole political and economic superpower of the world but may yet be challenged by the EU for that status, according to William J. Streeter, a professor of international business at the Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis.

The recently proposed rule by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) that requires companies to treat employee stock-option compensation as an expense on corporate income statements will reduce the reported income of firms, according to Todd Milbourn, a professor of finance at the Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis. The new rule, if finalized after a 90-day comment period, will go into effect next year.

As the Securities and Exchange Commission debates new rules that would require mutual funds to disclose how fund portfolio managers are compensated, research by two scholars at the Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis shows that money manager pay is more influenced by the success of their firm than the investment performance of their clients. The survey of portfolio managers finds that firm success-factors such as firm profitability have more impact on portfolio managers’ bonuses than client success factors like investment performance, though managers are more likely to be dismissed for poor investment performance.