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Last year, the Smith School committed $12 million in
additional resources to its PhD program. The program is also
benefiting from new leadership: Debra Shapiro, Clarice Smith
Professor of Management and Organization, became director of
the Smith School’s PhD program July 1, 2008.
One of Shapiro’s key concerns is the quality of doctoral
students’ job placement. Over the past five years, 99
percent of Smith’s PhD students have been successfully
placed immediately after they graduate—about 95 percent as
tenure track assistant professors at an accredited
university, and the rest as researchers in either private or
government organizations.
Shapiro would like to see all doctoral students with at
least one or two top-ranked academic journal publications in
order to distinguish themselves on the job market, as a
tangible demonstration of scholarly expertise. “Top
placements will give our students access to resources such
as research assistants; funding to support research,
including summer money and ample travel funds; computer
resources like software, relatively low teaching loads, and
relatively high compensation. That in turn will allow them
to continue doing high quality scholarship as well as great
teaching. In order to get such resource-rich jobs, students
need to produce research output while they are here,” says
Shapiro.
Since writing is an important skill for scholars, the
school recently offered a writing workshop for doctoral
students led by Roland Rust, Distinguished University
Professor and David Bruce Smith Chair in Marketing; Ken G.
Smith, Dean’s Chaired Professor of Business Strategy; Ritu
Agarwal, Robert H. Smith Dean’s Chair of Information
Systems; and Shapiro, all of whom are current or former
editors or associate editors of top journals in their
fields. More than a third of all Smith’s PhD students
attended, and the workshop was so well-received that Shapiro
intends to provide a “Part 2.” This followup workshop
will provide students with specific feedback on papers they
bring to the workshop to improve their readiness for
submission.
Shapiro is also working to build an increasingly
connected intellectual community that supports and
encourages cross-functional research. In the Smith School’s
informal environment, students spend a lot of time working
with faculty one-on-one, and there is a significant amount
of joint research going on. But much of it is concentrated
within academic disciplines. Shapiro recently began an
intranet community that she hopes will ease the ability of
students and faculty to gather across as well as within
discipline-based areas around shared research interests;
indeed, Shapiro believes it may assist students and faculty
in discovering that they have research interests in common.
To learn more about the Smith School’s doctoral program,
visit http://www.rhsmith.umd.edu/doctoral.
This year’s graduating doctoral students have research
that spans a variety of academic areas.
Yun Liu’s dissertation consists of three essays that look
at the influence of networks and connectedness on Chief
Executive Officer (CEO) labor market outcomes, constructing
measures that capture multiple aspects of connectedness and
then test whether, how, and to what direction they affect
the hiring of CEOs, CEO replacement, and compensation paid
to CEOs.
Chaodong Han’s dissertation examines how
globalization—particularly global sourcing, exports, and
operations in foreign markets—may have affected inventory
and financial performance, from both firm and industry
perspectives, enhancing the understanding of inventory
management in a global context and helps management with
decision making on both inventory management and global
strategy.
Peggy Tseng’s dissertation studies performance schedules
of a live performance event and their impacts on ticket
sales. She decomposes the spatial effect into geographic
effect and temporal effect, examines heterogeneity across
markets, and investigates word of mouth effect.
Yingjie Lan’s dissertation examines how to make revenue
management decisions when information about demand is
limited. Lan has developed revenue management methods whose
only requirement consists of upper and lower limits on
demand within various customer (price) classes.
Read more
about Lan’s research with Smith faculty Michael Ball and
Itir Karaesman at Research@Smith Online.
Andrew Hall’s dissertation applies Markov decision
process and goal programming to individual and institutional
decisions in military manpower planning; he also addresses
gradient estimation in stochastic simulation of a new class
of exotic options.
Lori Kiyatkin’s dissertation explores health promotion
and health care cost management to demonstrate the
significant positive organizational performance implications
of employee health and an organizational culture of
wellness, exploring the crucial impact of employee health on
organizations and the potential role of organizations as
agents of social health promotion.
Francine Espinoza’s dissertation investigates how
consumers' goals and motivations influence compliance with a
product recommendation or willingness to pay for a product,
illuminating the interplay of intrinsic and extrinsic
motivations that affect consumers while bringing
implications for advertising and selling.
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