New Wharton Faculty Span Diverse Countries and Interests Six New Professors Research Areas from Genomics to Emotions
Could the U.S. semiconductor industry have taken off without a strong stock market? Does the cost of your cell phone plan affect how much you use it? How can emotional intelligence affect your performance in the workplace?
These are just some of the research questions pursued by Wharton’s six new faculty members, whose work ranges from international corporate governance to comparative genomics to entrepreneurial financing.
Mary O’Sullivan Provides International Perspectives
The Management department welcomes Associate Professor Mary O’Sullivan, one of the leading global experts on how corporations interact with their shareholders and stakeholders.
Prof. O’Sullivan studies corporate governance from a comparative, international viewpoint. “I’m interested in differences in institutions and differences across countries,” she explains, “and how that affects how people perform economic activity.”
She has put these international principles into play in her own life: Born in Ireland, she earned an MBA and Ph.D. at Harvard; taught for eight years at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France, the leading European business school with which Wharton has an ongoing alliance;and came to Wharton last year as a visiting associate professor.
Wharton and Penn, she says, are the perfect home for her cross-cultural, interdisciplinary research, which draws on political science, economic history, and business history. Her work focuses especially on how shareholders and stakeholders influence (or fail to influence) corporate activity — and how those relationships can evolve over time.
She tracks these interactions through case studies that start with a firm and an industry, then widen to include the society around them — an emphasis on real-world businesses that she attributes to having an MBA in addition to a Ph.D. She first used this method in her book, Contests for Corporate Control (published by Oxford University Press in 2000), which examined corporate governance and economic performance in the U.S. and Germany.
Her newer work focuses on international financial systems, especially their impact on the development of industries. For example, when looking at the rise of the semiconductor industry in the United States, “what difference does it make in the United States to have a large and active stock market? If you didn’t have it, would the outcome have been different?" From a comparative stance, she then asks whether the lack of a "strong and liquid capital market … is why France doesn’t have such a successful semiconductor industry.”
Recently, doing research in the library, Prof. O’Sullivan discovered that a group of Wharton professors had done pioneering studies in the 1950s in areas relevant to her research. That kind of intellectual activity, she reports, creates an environment for research and teaching that is “very invigorating.”
New Professors Offer Wide Range of Research Areas
Wharton also welcomes five new assistant professors this semester, whose specialties range from science to banking and finance to marketing plans and workplace emotions.
In the Statistics department, Jon McAuliffe brings to Wharton a state-of-the-art focus on comparative genomics and bioinformatics. Prof. McAuliffe has a Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of California at Berkeley, as well as an M.S. in Applied Mathematics and B.A. in Computer Science from Harvard.
The Accounting department adds specialists in venture financing and international banking. Gavin Cassar, an Australian scholar who received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, specializes in financing and opportunity costs for start-ups, small firms, and entrepreneurial ventures, as well as in empirical financial accounting.
Luzi Hail is an expert in international capital markets with a doctoral degree from the University of Zurich. A visiting scholar at Wharton since 2004, he was previously a visiting scholar at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Jennifer S. Mueller joins Mary O’Sullivan as a new faculty member in management. Prof. Mueller specializes in the role of emotions in the workplace, including emotional intelligence in negotiations, patterns of emotional expressivity in work groups, and the influence of time pressure on creativity. She has a Ph.D. in Social Psychology and taught most recently at NYU and Yale.
Raghuram Iyengar, who joins the Marketing department after earning a Ph.D. at Columbia University, wrote his dissertation on pricing schemes in the wireless phone industry, especially their impact on how customers choose, use, and decide whether to stay with their calling plans.
He has worked on a wide range of other consumer-related topics, including the use of data by breakfast food and table syrup companies to predict how consumers will behave.
