Olin Business School

“High-quality research is the lifeblood of a great research university,” says Olin Business School Dean Mahendra Gupta.  It’s also how faculty create knowledge, inspire their students and transform business.  Abstracts and links to the lastest research from Olin’s faculty have just been published.

Dancing classrooms, online philanthropy, a resale shop, produce market and programs to empower youth are among the projects in the final round of this year’s social entrepreneurship competition.  The YouthBridge SEIC competition will award $155,000 in April to the business plans with the most promise and solutions to help resolve social issues. 

Entrepreneurs with business plans to make the world a better place will have 90 seconds to pitch their ideas to a panel of judges at 6 p.m. tonight in the next-to-final round of the annual YouthBridge SEIC (Social Entrepreneurship & Innovation Competition) in May Auditorium, Simon Hall, on the Danforth Campus.

Faculty and graduate students from St. Louis-area universities with an interest in labor, households, health care, law and social welfare are invited to take part in a series of Monday brown-bag luncheon seminars to be held biweekly through April 26.

Undergraduate tuition at Washington University in St. Louis will be $39,400 for the 2010-11 academic year — a $1,600 (4.2 percent) increase over the 2009-10 current academic tuition of $37,800. The required student activity fee will total $394, and the student health fee will be no more than $580. Barbara A. Feiner, vice chancellor for finance, made the announcement.

Banks and borrowers went on a leveraged consumption binge that led to the financial crisis in 2008 according to Anjan Thakor. And the entire economy is still feeling the hangover pain from the credit-fueled party that caused bank failures and forced foreclosures across the country. Thakor’s new research examines the cycles of leveraged borrowing by banks and consumers as a possible cause of the crisis. His new theory of ‘infectious leverage’ could help prevent future financial meltdowns.

Olin Business School is taking its executive education programs on the road and due west on I-70. Destination: Kansas City. Senior faculty will offer the same top-ranked seminars and the 20-month Executive MBA degree program to Kansas City-based professionals as those offered on the St. Louis campus. Olin’s executive MBA program was established in 1983 and has been offered in conjunction with Fudan University in Shanghai, China since 2002. 

An international gathering of business executives will don caps and gowns for their graduation ceremony at the Olin Business School. Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution will deliver the keynote speech.

Human guinea pigs do their homework before volunteering for high-paying clinical trials. New research shows that people equate large payments for participation in medical research with increased levels of risk. And when they perceive studies to be risky, potential participants spend more time learning about the risks and nature of the study. Findings published this month in Social Science and Medicine, suggest there is a “mismatch” between current research guidelines for setting compensation levels and the assumptions participants make about the levels of pay and risk.

A record number of aspiring entrepreneurs entered 45 ideas for new ventures in the annual Olin Cup business plan competition this fall. As the race toward $75,000 in seed money enters its last stage, seven finalists are crunching numbers and honing their plans for the crucial final presentation to judges in January.