Haas Recruits Tenured Profs From Harvard, Brown, MIT

As the fall semester approaches, the University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School said it has recruited three tenured professors from the East Coast’s finest business schools. They include management and entrepreneurship professor Toby E. Stuart from Harvard Business School, a multi-award winner for his research in entrepreneurship takes the helm as faculty director of the school’s Lester Center for Entrepreneurship; Professor Ross Levine from Brown University, ranked one of the ten most cited finance experts from 2001-2011 by Research Papers in Economics (RePEc), and associate finance professor Gustavo Manso, who had been at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and arrived at Berkeley-Haas in the spring and already holds a teaching award from his full-time Berkeley MBA students.

The three are among nine new professors joining the Haas School’s ladder-track faculty in fall 2012.

“We continue to hire at the very top of the faculty market,” says Haas School Dean Rich Lyons in a statement. “It is a part of what’s making us stronger and stronger. Great faculty attracts great students and great staff – a virtuous circle, and we are in it.”

Toby Stuart

Toby E. Stuart

Professor Toby E. Stuart, a visiting professor at Haas for the past two years and former professor at Harvard Business School, chose the Haas School’s Management of Organizations (MORS) group as his new home this summer. He holds theLeo Helzel Chair in Entrepreneurship and Innovation and becomes faculty director of the school’s Lester Center for Entrepreneurship.

Stuart’s research focuses on social networks, venture capital networks, and the role of networks in the creation of new firms. He is the recipient of the 2007 Kauffman Prize Medal for Distinguished Research in Entrepreneurship, granted every other year to recognize an individual’s contributions to entrepreneurship research. Stuart also received the Administrative Science Quarterly’s Scholarly Contribution (best paper) award.

Stuart says one of his goals is to develop the curriculum’s aim to teach students to think like entrepreneurs regardless of their fields. “Even if they don’t plan to launch a startup company, students can learn how to use innovation to strengthen organizations in any field,” says Stuart.

In 1995, Prof. Stuart earned his Ph.D. from Stanford Graduate School of Business. He received his A.B., summa cum laude, in economics from Carleton College in 1989.

Ross Levine

Ross Levine

Professor Ross Levine, previously at Brown University’s economics department, is the Haas School’s new Willis H. Booth Chair in Banking and Finance, and a member of the Economic Analysis and Policy (EAP) group.

Levine’s just-released book, Guardians of Finance: Making Regulators Work for Us, with James Barth and Gerard Caprio critiques the role of U.S. and international regulators in causing global financial crises and proposes strategies for improving their performance.

Levine’s primary research examines how financial sector regulations and the operation of financial systems affect economic growth and poverty, economic stability, and the distribution of income and economic opportunities. His scope ranges from international finance to entrepreneurship, including the characteristics of successful entrepreneurs. He has published over 100 hundred articles.

Levine is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations as well as a Senior Fellow at the Milken Institute. He received his Ph.D. in economics from UCLA in 1987, after graduating Phi Beta Kappa in economics from Cornell University in 1982.

Gustavo Manso

Gustavo Manso

Haas Finance Group Associate Professor Gustavo Manso arrived at Haas in January 2012 and, after just one semester, Manso’s MBA corporate finance students nominated him for a teaching award. Manso previously taught for five years at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

In 2010, Manso received the Swiss Finance Institute’s Outstanding Paper Award. He was also honored with the Review of Financial Studies Young Researcher Award in 2009. As co-founder (with Itay Goldstein) of the Finance Theory Group, Manso helps foster theoretical research in the areas of corporate finance, financial institutions, and financial markets.

Manso focuses his research on corporate finance, financial institutions, financial markets, and entrepreneurship. Studying financial incentives, his research revealed that combining tolerance for early failure with reward for long-term success is effective in motivating both creativity and innovation.

In 2006, Prof. Manso earned his Ph.D. in Finance from Stanford Graduate School of Business. He earned his M.S. in Mathematics from the Instituto de Matemática Pura e Aplicada (IMPA), Brazil, in 2001 and his B.A. in Economics from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica (PUCRio), Brazil, in 1999.

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