B-School Bulletin: Tuck MBA To Enhance Core Curriculum

Lehman Brothers Headquarters, September 13, 2008. HBS photo

Harvard Business School’s Baker Library Exhibit Tells Tale Of Rise & Fall Of Lehman Brothers

News from Harvard Business School

“Where were you on Monday, September 15, 2008, when Lehman Brothers, the fourth-largest investment bank in the United States and one that traced its roots back to 1850, declared bankruptcy as the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 504 points? These and other cataclysmic events in the financial world led to the perfect storm that resulted in the Great Recession of 2008, putting U.S. and global markets in jeopardy.

“2018 marks the 10th anniversary of these events, and today Harvard Business School’s Baker Library opens an extraordinary exhibit from its extensive Lehman Brothers Collection documenting the history of the firm from beginning to end, ‘Lehman Brothers: A History, 1850-2008.’”

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Politics professor David Leblang, left, teamed up with Darden professor Robert Bruner, center, and commerce professor David Smith to examine the financial crisis 10 years later. Photo by Sanjay Suchak, UVA Communications

Politics, Business Faculty Teach 2008 Crisis — And Anticipate The Next One

News from University of Virginia Darden School of Business

“Ten years after the 2008 financial crisis, three University of Virginia professors want to make sure their students understand what happened and how it could happen again.

“This semester, Robert Bruner, David Smith and David Leblang teamed up to teach ‘The Financial Crisis Ten Years Later: Politics, Markets and Institutions.’ Bruner is a University Professor and Distinguished Professor of Business Administration at UVA’s Darden School of Business, where he previously served as dean. Smith is a professor of finance and associate dean at the McIntire School of Commerce, and Leblang is a professor of politics and the director of the Global Policy Center at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. This semester, they have arranged two conferences and brought in several guest speakers for their students.”

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Alex Schmeling

SOM Starts Scholarship For Indian Students

News from Yale SOM

“A new scholarship program at the Yale School of Management will reduce tuition costs for several Masters of Business Administration students from India as a part of a broader initiative to distinguish the institution as the most global among its peer business schools.

“The Global Leaders from India program will cover at least half the cost of tuition for as many as five full-time MBA students. According to the School’s website, all Indian applicants to the School’s MBA program will be automatically considered for the merit scholarship, which will then be awarded to the candidates deemed the strongest based on academic, professional and leadership factors. The new scholarship program comes six years after the school set a goal to become the most internationally focused business school in America, according to SOM Deputy Dean for Academic Programs David Bach.”

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Brazil President-elect Jair Bolsonaro. Wharton photo

What Will Bolsonaro’s Election Mean For Brazil?

News from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania

“Expectations run high for Jair Bolsonaro, the 63-year-old former army captain and president-elect of Brazil, the largest country in South America and the world’s sixth most populous with some 208 million people. Bolsonaro’s far right-wing posture and his promises to root out corruption and violence seem to have struck a stronger chord with voters than his other utterances that critics have described as racist and homophobic.

“Called the ‘Tropical Trump’ for his extensive use of social media to bond with his voter base, Bolsonaro won the second round of the two-round Brazilian presidential election on October 28. He earned 55% of the vote, while his nearest competitor, Fernando Haddad of the leftist Workers’ Party, won 45%. Bolsonaro’s win marks a significant shift for a country that has been ruled by the political left for the past 15 years.”

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Study: When Corporate Insiders Sell Stock At A Loss, Watch Out

News from Notre Dame University Mendoza College of Business

“When considering whether to buy stock in a company, investors often look to the trading activity of the company’s top executives. If the CEO or CFO has recently made large purchases of company stock, investors tend to assume the stock price is about to go up; if they are selling stock, on the other hand, the meaning is less clear.

“A new paper by the University of Notre Dame’s Peter Kelly takes a rigorous look at the predictive power of insider trading — not the illegal kind, which is based on access to information not in the public domain, but the normal trading activities of corporate executives.

“Generally speaking, insider purchases have very strong return predictability, but insider sales do not. Kelly, an assistant professor of finance at Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, wondered whether those insider sales might contain more insight into future returns than they appear.”

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