The Center for Business and Public Policy - University of Illinois, College of Business

Faculty Associates

	Rajshree Agarwal - Faculty Profile Page Rajshree Agarwal is the John Georges Professor of Technology Management and Strategy at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. She received a Ph.D. in economics from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Her research interests focus on the implications of entrepreneurship and innovation for industry and firm evolution. Her recent projects examine knowledge transfer through employee entrepreneurship/mobility, experience-based advantages in new product markets, and the influence of dynamic knowledge-based capabilities on firm performance. Rajshree has published articles in journals such as Academy of Management Journal, American Economic Review, International Journal of Industrial Organization, Journal of Industrial Economics, Journal of Law and Economics, Management Science, Strategic Management Journal and Review of Economics and Statistics. Her paper on employee entrepreneurship received the Best Paper Award for 2004 from the Academy of Management Journal, and her work on post exit knowledge diffusion received the Stephen Shrader Award at the 2005 Academy of Management Meetings. She is an associate editor of the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal and the editor of the SSRN Entrepreneurship and Economics Journal. Rajshree also serves on the editorial board of the Academy of Management Journal, the Academy of Management Review, Strategic Management Journal and Strategic Organization. She has received research grants from the Kauffman Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Marketing Science Institute and the US Department of Agriculture. Rajshree has taught a wide range of courses in strategic management, technology and innovation, industrial organization and microeconomics at the undergraduate, MBA, Executive MBA and PhD levels. Consistent with her interests in innovation, she strives to incorporate the latest pedagogical technologies in her teaching, and has won many awards for teaching excellence and a demonstrated increase in teaching productivity. She is passionate, in particular, about providing business education to science and engineering students to enable them to be effective in industry. As part of her role of being Director of the Innovation and Technology Management Initiative, Rajshree is undertaking efforts at creating specialized certificate programs and courses to help serve this need.
	Jeffrey R. Brown - Faculty Profile Page Director, Center for Business and Public Policy Jeff Brown is the William Karnes Professor of Finance in the College of Business at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He also serves as Director of the College of Business' Center on Business and Public Policy, and as Associate Director of the NBER Retirement Research Center. Prior to joining the Illinois faculty, Dr. Brown was an assistant professor of public policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. During 2001-2002, he served as Senior Economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers, where he focused primarily on Social Security, pension reform, and terrorism risk insurance. During 2001 he also served on the staff of the President’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security. In 2006, President Bush nominated, and the Senate confirmed, Dr. Brown as a member of the Social Security Advisory Board. Professor Brown holds a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Masters of Public Policy from Harvard University, and a B.A. from Miami University. He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Faculty Affiliate of the Institute on Government and Policy Affairs, and a Fellow of the TIAA-CREF Institute, the Employee Benefits Research Institute, and the China Center for Insurance and Social Security Research. Professor Brown is a member of the American Economic Association, the American Risk and Insurance Association, and the National Academy of Social Insurance. Professor Brown has published extensively on public and private insurance markets, including publications in The American Economic Review, The Journal of Political Economy, The Journal of Public Economics, The Journal of Monetary Economics, The Journal of Risk and Insurance, The National Tax Journal, and numerous books. He is the recipient of the Lumina Award for Outstanding Research in Insurance and E-Commerce. Professor Brown is co-author of the book The Role of Annuities in Financing Retirement from MIT Press, and is co-founder of the Journal of Pension Economics and Finance, published by Cambridge University Press. He has served as a consultant / expert panel member for the Executive Office of the President of the U.S., the General Accounting Office, the U.S. Treasury, the World Bank, and several private firms. Prior to graduate school, he was a Brand Manager at the Procter & Gamble Company.
	Kristine Brown - Faculty Profile Page Kristine Brown concentrates in the fields of Labor Economics and Public Finance. Her research examines how the structure of employment benefits affects the labor market decisions of older workers and the well-being of the aged. In a recent project, she exploited reforms to a state employees' retirement program to investigate the relationship between pension financial incentives and retirement timing.
	Dhammika Dharmapala - Faculty Profile Page Dhammika Dharmapala is a Professor of Law and a Professor of Finance (by courtesy) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received a PhD in Economics from the University of California at Berkeley and an undergraduate degree from the University of Western Australia. He was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University, a John M. Olin Visiting Fellow in Law and Economics at Georgetown University Law Center, a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan, and an Assistant and Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Connecticut. His research interests include corporate and international taxation, taxes and corporate governance, and the economic analysis of law.
	Don Fullerton - Faculty Profile Page Don Fullerton received a BA from Cornell in 1974 and a PhD in Economics from U.C. Berkeley in 1978. He taught at Princeton University (1978-84), the University of Virginia (1984-91), Carnegie Mellon University (1991-94) and the University of Texas (1994-2008), before joining the University of Illinois in 2008. From 1985 to 1987, he served in the U.S. Treasury Department as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Tax Analysis. His early research in public economics focused on computable general equilibrium models of taxation, marginal effective tax rates, the marginal cost of public funds, and distributional effects of taxes on a lifetime basis. Recent research includes the distributional effects of social security. In environmental and energy economics, he works on household disposal of garbage and recycling, policies for green design, vehicle emission control policies, carbon taxes, and other second-best policies in the energy sector where direct environmental taxes are not feasible.
	Fred J. Giertz - Faculty Profile Page Fred Giertz teaches courses in public finance and public sector economics. Research focuses on public finance, public choice, and regional economic development. Specializes in state and local taxation and expenditure analysis in regional economic development issues. Advisor to: the Illinois Bureau of Budget, since 1991; the Illinois Department of Commerce and Community Affairs, 1993; Governor Edgar's Transition Team, 1990-91. Has served as a tax and revenue consultant to many Illinois government commissions and offices.
	David A. Hyman - Faculty Profile Page David Hyman, the Richard W. and Marie L. Corman Professor, is considered to be one of the country’s top health law scholars, teaches civil procedure and health care regulation. His principal research interests are the regulation of health care financing and delivery and empirical law and economics. Professor Hyman has published articles on a wide range of subjects, including medical malpractice, managed care, consumer protection, narrative, professional responsibility, tax exemption, and civil procedure. Professor Hyman has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Texas and George Washington University Schools of Law, and a Professor at the University of Maryland School of Law. He is a member of the American Law Institute and was the chair of the section of law and social sciences of the American Association of Law Schools. Professor Hyman served for three years as Special Counsel to the Federal Trade Commission, where he was responsible for coordinating hearings and a major report on health care and competition law and policy. He is on the editorial board of the American Journal of Law & Medicine, and is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He is admitted to practice before the 6th, 7th and 10th Circuit Courts of Appeal, and the United States Tax Court, and is a member of the bars of Illinois and the District of Columbia.
	David Ikenberry - Faculty Profile Page Dr. David Ikenberry is a professor and chair of the Department of Finance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He holds a B.S. degree from the Pennsylvania State University (1983), an M.M. from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University (1985), and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois (1990). Dr. Ikenberry started his academic career at the Jones Graduate School of Management at Rice University, in Houston, Texas. After twelve years at Rice, he returned to the University of Illinois. He teaches investment and corporate finance to both graduate and executive students and has received several awards for his work in the classroom, including winning prestigious awards for teaching in 1996 and 1999 while at Rice. In 1997 and again in 2002, Business Week magazine named him among the best instructors in the U.S. Dr. Ikenberry's research concerns a broad array of empirical issues in finance. A substantial portion of his work has focused on issues relating to long-horizon stock returns, a young and often debated area of inquiry in finance. Much of his work challenges fundamental notions of informational efficiency in equity markets. Past studies have focused on unexpected long-horizon return performance relating to specific corporate events, including stock splits, exchange listings and proxy fights. His more general work on the unusual properties of long-horizon returns has been used to help explain why professional money managers frequently under-perform the S&P 500 index, even when investing in S&P stocks. Perhaps his most noted work concerns stock repurchase programs. He has authored several papers in this area looking at performance subsequent to both U.S. and Canadian firms who have engaged this now widespread corporate transaction. His work provides insight into issues about how and why firms repurchase stock and garners substantial interest in both the academic and corporate communities. His current research investigates the clustering in the increase in stock prices that has occurred in the U.S. since the move to decimal pricing. Dr. Ikenberry is frequently asked to speak to academic, government, corporate officers, and the broad investment communities. His research is regularly mentioned in the popular press in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, Smart Money, Barron's, Business Week and The Economist. He is a frequent guest on various television programs including CNBC, Bloomberg Television, and the Nightly Business Report. On occasion, corporations ask Dr. Ikenberry to comment on various aspects of their corporate financing decisions including their dividend and share repurchase policies. He lives in Champaign, Illinois, and is married with two young children.
	Charles M. Kahn - Faculty Profile Page Charles Kahn is the Bailey Professor of Finance and Professor of Economics at the University of Illinois. He received his Ph. D. in economics from Harvard University. He has published extensively in economics and finance journals on issues in the economics of asymmetric information and its effects on institutional arrangements. He has been a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University, an Overseas Fellow at Churchill College of Cambridge University. He has served as a consultant to the Bank for International Settlements on inter-authority coordination of bank regulation and as a consultant at central banks, including the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta, Cleveland, and New York, the European Central Bank, and the Bank of England, where he has researched incentive effects of payment and settlement systems.
	Richard Kaplan - Faculty Profile Page Professor Richard Kaplan, the Peer and Sarah Pedersen Professor of Law, graduated from Indiana University with highest honors and earned his law degree from Yale University. He practiced law in Houston with Baker & Botts, specializing in U.S. tax consequences of international transactions, before joining the faculty in 1979. An internationally recognized expert on U.S. taxation and tax policy, he has lectured in these areas on three continents, testified before the U.S. Congress on several occasions, and written innovative course books on income taxation and international taxation. Professor Kaplan developed one of the first law school courses on Elder Law, an emerging specialty dealing with the legal implications of extended life, and is the co-author of Elder Law in a Nutshell (4th ed. 2006). He has served as faculty advisor for the Elder Law Journal since its inception in 1992. He has also been recognized with the Outstanding Professor in the College of Law several times and has received the Campus Award for Excellence in Graduate and Professional Teaching at the University of Illinois. Professor Kaplan is a Fellow of the Employee Benefits Research Institute and a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance. He served on a 12-member panel on The Future of the Health Care Labor Force in a Graying Society, chaired by former U.S. Secretary of Labor Lynn Martin. In 2002, he was a delegate to the National Summit on Retirement Savings organized by the U.S. Department of Labor.
	Ron Laschever - Faculty Profile Page Ron Laschever is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics and the School of Labor and Employment Relations. His fields of interest are Labor Economics and Applied Econometrics. He received his B.A. in Mathematics from Brooklyn College CUNY, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Economics from Northwestern University. His dissertation, Social Interactions and Labor Market Outcomes of War Veterans, received an Honorable Mention at the 2008 W.E. Upjohn Institute Dissertation Award. His recent research examines how social networks affect labor market outcomes, such as employment, choice of occupation, and retirement decisions. He also examines the effect of benchmarking and salary comparisons on executive compensation. His research has been funded by grants from Northwestern University, the Center for Population Economics at the University of Chicago GSB, and the NBER Retirement Research Center.
	Darren Lubotsky - Faculty Profile Page Darren Lubotsky is an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has been at the University of Illinois since 2002 and currently holds appointments in the Department of Economics, Institute of Government and Public Affairs, and School of Labor and Employment Relations. From 2000 to 2002 he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 2000. Most of his research falls within the broad areas of immigration to the United States, the health and cognitive development of children, and health and health insurance more generally.
	Nolan Miller - Faculty Profile Page Nolan Miller is a Professor of Finance at the University of Illinois. He studies the economics of information and incentives across a wide range of topics, including healthcare, the environment, economic development, insurance, industrial organization and competitive strategy, and his work on these issues has been published in journals such as The American Economic Review, The Journal of Health Economics, Management Science, and the RAND Journal of Economics, among others. He currently serves as an associate editor of The Review of Economics and Statistics and the Berkeley Electronic Journals in Theoretical Economics. Prior to coming to the University of Illinois in 2009, he was an Associate Professor of Public Policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University’s J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management and holds bachelor’s degrees in economics (Wharton) and philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania.
	George G. Pennacchi - Faculty Profile Page George Pennacchi is a professor of finance and a co-director of the Office for Banking Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Also, he is the Program Coordinator for Deposit Insurance at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's Center for Financial Research and is a Research Associate at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. His research focuses on financial intermediaries and the valuation of fixed-income securities and government guarantees. Currently, he is the Managing Editor of the Journal of Financial Intermediation and an associate editor of the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, the Journal of Financial Services Research, and the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking. Previously, he was an associate editor for the Journal of Banking and Finance, the Journal of Finance, the Review of Financial Studies, and Management Science, and a co-editor of Advances in Futures and Options Research. His consulting experience includes work for the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. He has been a visiting professor at the Università Bocconi in Milan, Italy, and was a member of the finance faculty at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Mr. Pennacchi received a Sc.B. degree in applied mathematics from Brown University in 1977 and a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1984.
	Elizabeth Powers - Faculty Profile Page Elizabeth Powers is a professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to joining the University of Illinois in 1996, Elizabeth was an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland and a junior staff economist with President George H.W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.A. in Economics from Vassar College. Elizabeth is the author of numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and serves on the editorial board of National Tax Journal. Much of Elizabeth’s research investigates the impact of public programs on behavior. Her work on the effects of child health on maternal labor supply has been widely cited. Ongoing research projects are in the areas of child well-being, work disability, and developmental disabilities. Elizabeth is currently advising the Donors Forum Public/Nonprofit Partnership Imitative on the development of principles for state contracting with private nonprofit human service providers. She also serves as a consultant to the Inter-American Development Bank on early child development.
	Scott Weisbenner - Faculty Profile Page Scott Weisbenner is an associate professor (tenured) in the Department of Finance and a James F. Towey Faculty Fellow. He earned a Ph.D. in economics from MIT and has been on the Illinois faculty since 2000. Before coming to Illinois, he worked as an economist for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in the capital markets section. Professor Weisbenner has been a research fellow at the National Bureau of Research (NBER) since 2002. Professor Weisbenner teachers MBA courses in corporate finance and behavioral finance. His research interests include household portfolio decisions and how they are influenced by taxation and psychological factors, issues concerning retirement saving and pension plans, and corporate financial policy. He has published articles in leading finance and economics journals, including The American Economic Review, The Journal of Finance, The Journal of Financial Economics, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, The Journal of Public Economics, The Review of Economics and Statistics, and The Review of Financial Studies and his work has been cited in numerous news publications including Barron’s, Business Week, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, Smart Money, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Washington Times.

College of Business: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign