Affiliated Researchers
Rajshree Agarwal
Rajshree Agarwal is the Rudolph P. Lamone Chair and Professor in Entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland's Smith School of Business and director of the Ed Snider Center for Enterprise and Markets. Agarwal is passionate about upward mobility, within and integrating across the intellectual, psychological and economic realms. Agarwal's research interests focus on the implications of entrepreneurship and innovation for industry and firm evolution. Her recent projects examine enterprising individuals and teams as the fountainhead of firm, industry and economic growth. She links knowledge diffusion among firms, industries, and regions to the underlying mechanisms of individual entrepreneurship and mobility. Agarwal has taught a wide range of courses in strategic management, entrepreneurship, technology and innovation, industrial organization and microeconomics. Consistent with her interests in innovation, she strives to incorporate the latest pedagogical technologies in her teaching. She believes in empowering lifelong enterprise by providing strategic leadership frameworks and skills. Agarwal has won many awards for both research and teaching excellence. Salient among these are the Davis Productivity Award from the State of Florida, the University Scholar Award from the University of Illinois, the Graduate Mentor of the Year, and the Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award from the University of Maryland.
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Joe Bailey
Joe Bailey is an associate research professor at the University of Maryland's Smith School of Business and the executive director of the QUEST Undergraduate Honors Program. Bailey's research and teaching interests span issues in telecommunications, economics, and public policy with an emphasis on the economics of the Internet. This includes an identification of the existing public policies, technologies, and market opportunities that promote the benefits of interoperability. He is currently studying issues related to the economics of electronic commerce and how the Internet changes competition and supply chain management. In addition to serving as the executive director of the Smith School's QUEST undergraduate Honors Program, Bailey also founded MQUEST, a similar program for graduate students.
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Jóhanna Kristín Birnir
Jóhanna Kristín Birnir is a professor in the Department of Government and Politics. She's also the director of the All Minorities at Risk Project (AMAR). Birnir studies the effect of identity (ethnicity, religion, gender) on contentious political outcomes (elections and violence), and has done extensive fieldwork in the Andes and in South-East Europe. Her first book "Ethnic Electoral Politics" (Cambridge University Press) examines the relationship between political access and minority strategic choice of peaceful electoral participation, protest, or violence against the state. Her current book project (under contract with Cambridge University Press and supported by the Global Religion Research Initiative – University of Notre Dame) examines the relationship between identity (ethnicity and religion) and minority peaceful and violent political mobilization. Birnir´s articles on identity and politics are published in numerous academic journals including the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Peace Research, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Party Politics, Latin American Research Review, and Journal of Global Security Studies. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism. Her current project examines the relationship between identity (ethnicity and religion) and minority peaceful and violent political mobilization.
Serguey Braguinsky
Serguey Braguinsky is an associate professor at the University of Maryland Robert H. Smith School of Business and the Department of Economics, a research associate at the NBER Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship Program, and professor (cross-appointment) at the Institute of Social and Economic Research, Osaka University. Braguinsky's research interests are in the fields of industry evolution, entrepreneurship, innovation, growth and development, and also in economics of incentives, institutions, and property rights. He has written extensively about the Meiji-Era Japanese Cotton Spinning Industry and has published in leading economics and management journals, such as American Economic Review, Journal of Financial Economics, Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Law and Economics, Journal of Economic History, and Review of Economic Dynamics.
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Arnaldo Camuffo
Arnaldo Camuffo is a professor of business organization at the Department of Management & Technology, Bocconi University, Milan. After getting an MBA from the Sloan School of Management at MIT (1989) and a PhD from the University of Venice (1990), he taught at the University of Venice and Padua and held a visiting position at the Industrial Performance Center at MIT and the University of Michigan, Dearborn. Camuffo's research has appeared in leading international journals and his books (the latest being Lean Transformations for Small and Medium Enterprises, Productivity Press, 2017) have been widely publicized. He has served in the editorial board of European Management Review, International Journal of Operations and Production Management, Human Resource Management and International Journal of Innovation Management, and as director in the boards of listed and private companies, as well as of the Lean Global Network.
Christy Ford Chapin
Christy Ford Chapin is an associate professor of twentieth-century U.S. political, business, and economic history as well as capitalism studies at the University of Maryland Baltimore. Chapin has published articles in the Journal of Policy History, Studies in American Political Development, and the Business History Review. Her book, Ensuring America's Health: The Public Creation of the Corporate Health Care System (Cambridge University Press, 2015) won the 2016 Ralph Gomory Prize from the Business History Conference. Chapin is now at work on a new project, "Flexible Finance: Finance Capitalism and the Evolving Culture of Risk." She is currently a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University through a Kauffman Foundation Grant for the Study of the History of Capitalism. She was an inaugural fellow at the Ed Snider Center for Enterprise and Markets at the University of Maryland. She holds a Library of Congress Kluge Fellowship for the 2017-2018 academic year. Chapin has made numerous media appearances to discuss her work, appearing on podcasts as well as local and national NPR programs. Her pieces have appeared in the New York Times and online at the Huffington Post, Forbes, Dissent, and Time magazine, among others.
Joonkyu Choi
Joonkyu Choi is an economist and former PhD student affiliate at the Snider Center. His research interests are in the areas of macroeconomics, firm dynamics, and entrepreneurship. In a recent project, Choi studied how better fallback options against business failure allow entrepreneurs to take larger business risks. He has also studied how corporate lobbying affects resource allocation and job creation in the aggregate economy. Choi received the dissertation fellowship from Ewing Kauffman Foundation in 2016 and the Ann G. Wylie dissertation fellowship from the University of Maryland in 2017. He started working at the Federal Reserve Board in 2018, although he participates as an affiliated researcher in his personal capacity, any views expressed in this capacity do not necessarily reflect the views of the board or the United States government.
Adina Dabu
Adina Dabu is an associate research scholar in the Department of Management and Organization at the University of Maryland's Smith School of Business. Dabu's primary research interests are in the areas of entrepreneurship, the diffusion of management knowledge in less developed economies, the ethics of market processes, and qualitative methodology. Her applied research has concentrated on employment relations systems in central and eastern Europe as well as on the transnational diffusion of management knowledge through early consulting markets, and her theoretical agenda explores entrepreneurship frameworks such as effectuation theory and Austrian economics. She has a special interest in the methodology of grounded theory and comparative analysis. Dabu's work has been published in Organization Science, Journal of Industrial Relations and Eastern European Economics and presented at the meetings of the Academy of Management, Strategic Management Society, European Group of Organizational Studies (EGOS), and European Academy of Management (EURAM).
Francesco D'Acunto
Francesco D'Acunto is an assistant professor at the Boston College Carroll School of Management, where he is a Kauffman Junior Faculty Fellow. D'Acunto's research interests are in the areas of cultural finance, entrepreneurship, and FinTech. In these areas, he studies the formation of beliefs and the financial decision-making of households and corporations. His work has been awarded two Cubist Systematic Strategies Awards for Outstanding Research and has been covered in popular media outlets, such as The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, the Washington Post, The American Interest, Reuters, as well as in international media outlets, such as the World Economic Forum, the Daily Mail, the Globe and Mail, Die Welt, Haaretz, La Stampa, Dinheiro Vivo, and Al Balad.
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Protiti Dastidar
Protiti Dastidar is an associate clinical professor in the Department of Management and Organization at the University of Maryland's Smith School of Business. Dastidar is interested in business globalization including multi-nationality and performance, the liability of foreignness, merger and acquisition performance, and cross-border waves in mergers and acquisitions. As a consultant, she provides strategic advice for leading companies and government agencies in Europe. Dastidar was profiled in the Cherry Tree Yearbook at George Washington University in 2008.
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Paul Dragos Aligica
Paul Dragos Aligica is a senior research fellow and senior fellow at the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Aligica specializes in institutional theory, public choice, social change, and Austrian economics. He has authored seven books. His recent book Institutional Diversity and Political Economy: The Ostroms and Beyond was published by Oxford University Press in 2014. Aligica has written for the Wall Street Journal Europe and a wide variety of academic journals, including American Political Science Review, Public Choice, Revue française d'economie, Constitutional Political Economy, Economic Affairs, Society, East European Economics, Comparative Strategy, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, and Governance: International Journal of Policy, Administration, and Institutions. Aligica has been a consultant for the United Nations Development Program, the World Bank, European Union (EU) organizations, and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
Christina Elson
Christina Elson is the executive director of the Center for the Study of Capitalism at Wake Forest University. Elson's research interests are based on cultural identity and the reasons that teams and organizations flourish or fail. Her current research focuses on understanding how core psychological traits and behaviors influence attitudes towards trust, risk and communication and on using tools such as Design Thinking, Systems Thinking, and Moral Foundation Theory to teach human-centered approaches to enterprise. Elson is an expert in developing strategic, holistic, and systemic approaches to executing an organization's mission and vision with an underlying focus on continuous innovative improvement.
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Alfonso Gambardella
Alfonso Gambardella is a professor of management and head of the Department of Management and Technology at Bocconi University. Gambardella studies firm strategy, particularly technology strategy and the impact of innovation on industry structures. He has published in national and international journals. His best-known book is Markets for Technology (2001, MIT Press, with A.Arora and A.Fosfuri). Gambardella is department editor of Business Strategy at Management Science (with Joshua Gans), a fellow of the Strategic Management Society, and research fellow of CEPR, London. He was co-editor of Strategic Management Journal (2013-2019), chair of the Business Policy and Strategy Division of the US Academy of Management (2015-16), and visiting professor of the Department of Economics of Stanford University (1995-96,2003 and 2005) and of the Sloan School of MIT (2015-16).
Brent Goldfarb
Brent Goldfarb is an associate professor of management and entrepreneurship in the Management and Organization Department at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business. Goldfarb's research focuses on how the production and exchange of technology differ from more traditional economic goods, with a focus on the implications on the role of startups in the economy. He focuses on such questions as how do markets and employer policies affect incentives to discover new commercially valuable technologies and when is it best to commercialize them through new technology-based firms? Why do radical technologies appear to be the domain of startups? And how big was the dot.com boom? Copies of Goldfarb's publications and working papers have been downloaded over 1200 times.
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John C. Haltiwanger
John C. Haltiwanger is a distinguished university professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Maryland. He is also the first recipient of the Dudley and Louisa Dillard Professorship in 2013. Haltiwanger has played a major role in developing and studying U.S. longitudinal firm-level data. Using these data, he has developed new statistical measures and analyzed the determinants of firm-level job creation, job destruction and economic performance. He has explored the implications of these firm dynamics for aggregate U.S. productivity growth and for the U.S. labor market. Haltiwanger's own research increasingly uses the data and measures on firm dynamics from a substantial number of advanced, emerging and transition economies. His work with the statistical agencies has been recently recognized in his being awarded the Julius Shiskin Award for economic statistics in 2013 and the Roger Herriott Award for innovation in federal statistics in 2014. He has published more than 100 academic articles and numerous books including Job Creation and Destruction (with Steven Davis and Scott Schuh, MIT Press).
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Kylie King
Kylie King is an assistant professor of business and entrepreneurship at Champlain College. King is passionate about experiential learning, teamwork, design, and innovation and teaches courses on these topics. Her research interests include evaluating the impact of individual and team level variables on team constructs. Previously, King served as the director of the QUEST Undergraduate Honors program while earning her MA in higher education at the University of Maryland.
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David Kirsch
David Kirsch is an associate professor at the University of Maryland's Smith School of Business. Kirsch's research interests include industry emergence, technological choice, technological failure, and the role of entrepreneurship in the emergence of new industries. In 2003, he co-authored an article on the Electric Vehicle Company that received the IEEE Life Members Prize from the Society for the History of Technology. He's also interested in methodological problems associated with historical scholarship in the digital age. Kirsch is building a digital archive of the dot com era that will preserve at-risk, born-digital content about business and culture during the late 1990s.
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Brian Kogelmann
Brian Kogelmann is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Maryland. Kogelmann researches the intersection of philosophy, politics, and economics. He is currently investigating the methodology and structure of public reason liberalism, publicity, and transparency. His work has appeared, among other places, in the Journal of Philosophy and American Political Science Review. Kogelmann's current and past collaborators include Brian Albrecht, Hun Chung, Jerry Gaus, Benjamin Ogden, Alex Salter, Stephen G.W. Stich, and Robert H. Wallace. Brian frames his interdisciplinary research in terms of one guiding question: how can diverse groups stricken by irreconcilable disagreements nonetheless find ways of living better together?
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Kimberly Lumpkins
Kimberly Lumpkins is an associate professor of surgery at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and an executive MBA graduate of the Robert H Smith School of Business. As a practicing pediatric surgeon, she has been awarded the British Association of Paediatric Surgeons Gold Medal and is a Baltimore Magazine Top Doctor. She focuses on bringing leadership education to students, residents, and faculty at the medical school. She is also active in the angel investment community. In 2021, she was named one of Maryland’s Top 100 Women by the Daily Record.
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Vojislav (Max) Maksimovic
Vojislav (Max) Maksimovic is the William A. Longbrake Chair in Finance at the University of Maryland Smith School of Business. Maksimovic investigates how a firm's organizational structure affects the flow of resources across its divisions. He has also worked on how competition in high technology industries determines the timing of initial public offerings. Maksimovic is interested in international finance, specifically in how a country's legal and institutional environment influences the financing and investment by firms. His research has been published in the Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, Rand Journal of Economics, Journal of Financial Economics, and Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis.
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Chris Morris
Chris Morris is a professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland. Morris investigates moral and political philosophy, practical ethics, legal theory, and the theory of practical rationality. Some of his current research develops the implications of his book, An Essay on the Modern State, for international affairs and world order and, in particular, legitimacy. Other topics he is interested in include justice and reasons for action and a number of questions about moral standing.
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Erin Mosely
Erin Mosely is an assistant professor of history at the University of Maryland. She specializes in modern East and Central Africa with a thematic focus on human rights and transitional justice. Erin is currently working on her first book, provisionally entitled “The Future of Rwanda’s Past: History and Historians After Genocide.” This project, which draws on fieldwork carried out between 2011-2018, examines the impact of the 1994 genocide on the Rwandan historical field, with a particular emphasis on the experiences of the country’s academic historians. She is also working on an article based on one of the key sites of analysis in her book, the Kigali Genocide Memorial Center—Rwanda’s flagship commemorative space and museum. Beyond its memorial, educational, and archival functions, this Center also happens to be a thriving social enterprise, which uses the revenue it generates to support genocide survivors in need. As such, it has emerged as a fascinating case study of the possibilities and challenges entailed in applying socially minded entrepreneurship to help heal and rebuild a nation after mass violence.
Atsushi Ohyama
Atsushi Ohyama is an associate professor at the Institute of Innovation Research at Hitotsubashi University in Japan. Ohyama focuses on issues related to entrepreneurship, innovation, industry evolution and management practices. He conducted a Management and Organizational Practices Survey (MOPS), and currently examines how Japanese management practices are related to productivity improvement, product innovations and the formation of a transaction network.
Mircea Raianu
Mircea Raianu is an assistant professor in history at the University of Maryland. Mircea studies the evolution of capitalism in modern South Asia. His book, Tata: The Global Corporation that Built Indian Capitalism (Harvard University Press, 2021), charts the transformation of India's largest business group from a family firm engaged in long-distance trade to a diversified industrial conglomerate strongly identified with the national economy. More broadly, he is interested in the development of infrastructure, technology, and human capital in emerging markets. His future research will examine exchanges of ideas about corporate organization in the mid-20thc., focusing on questions of scale, growth, and innovation.
Jeremy Reid
Jeremy Reid is a post-doctoral research associate. Reid researches the history of ethics and political philosophy, primarily in Greek & Roman philosophy. On the political side, he is interested in the development of constitutionalism, democratic theory, and the use of moral psychology and theories of character in political philosophy, particularly in non-ideal circumstances. On the ethical side, he has worked mostly on ancient theories of love, sex, and friendship. As somebody who is not yet a Sage, Reid is also interested more generally in how to progress towards virtue and what it means to have lower grades of virtue. Reid finds himself at his happiest working on Plato and the Stoics (who are both fun and probably right), though he also has major research and teaching interests in Aristotle, Cicero, Hobbes, and contemporary virtue ethics.
Alberto Rossi
Alberto Rossi is an associate professor of finance at the University of Maryland Smith School of Business. Rossi focuses his research on theoretical and empirical asset pricing, portfolio choice and financial econometrics. His recent work concentrates on networks, institutional investors' performance, and the risk-return trade-off in financial markets. He also studies stock return predictability and commodity markets. Rossi's work has been published in leading academic journals such as the Journal of Finance and the Review of Financial Studies.
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Felipe E. Saffie
Felipe E. Saffie is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Maryland. Saffie 's primary research is in international finance and economic growth. His research focuses on the effects of international financial crises on aggregated productivity. In particular, he examines how drastic reductions in capital inflows (sudden stops) affect the creation and development of firms, scarring the process of productivity accumulation. Financial development is a key ingredient for understanding the transitory and permanent components of these episodes, as more developed financial systems are better able to allocate scarce resources during crises. A secondary stream of research focuses on the determinants of capital misallocation in the economy. For instance, how rent-seeking behavior distorts the investment decision of firms by altering the effective corporate tax rate that they face.
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Christine Masterson Schaaf
Christine M. Schaaf is a professor of business communication and marketing at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. She teaches in the Office of the Dean’s Business Communication Initiative in the undergraduate, MS, MBA, and executive MBA programs. In addition to teaching, Schaaf is responsible for the continued development of the business communication initiative at Smith. This initiative focuses on preparing Smith students with the business communication skills needed to succeed in today’s business environment. Prior to joining the Smith School, Schaaf taught for thirteen years as an adjunct professor of marketing at John Hopkins Carey School of Business and Loyola University of Maryland Sellinger School of Business in the MS and MBA programs.
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David B. Sicilia
David B. Sicilia is an associate professor of history at the University of Maryland. He's also a Henry Kaufman Fellow in Business History at the Smith School of Business. Sicilia's research and teaching center on business, economic, and technology history and include a special emphasis on the history of capitalism. He is known for his expertise in applying historical analysis to contemporary issues. His book, Greenspan Effect: Words that Move the World's Markets, co-authored with Jeffrey L. Cruikshank, was voted a Library Journal Best Business Book of the Year. He is active in consulting and also frequently appears in local, national, and international print and broadcast media.
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Steve Sonka
Steve Sonka is an eminent agricultural economist with extensive experience in innovation and development in the global agricultural sector. He is interested in big data and its potential to drive innovative change and enable decision-makers to better anticipate and understand the implications of innovation in the sector. He is the founding director of the ADM Institute for the Prevention of Postharvest Loss at the University of Illinois and is currently leading a multi-year Rockefeller grant to study these issues in Africa.
Evan Starr
Evan Starr is an assistant professor in management and organization at the University of Maryland Smith School of Business. Starr examines issues at the intersection of human capital accumulation, employee mobility, entrepreneurship, and innovation. A recent set of projects utilizing employee-employer matched data and survey data examined the use and impacts of non-compete agreements and their enforceability on the provision of firm-sponsored training, employee mobility and earnings, and on the creation, growth, and survival of new ventures. His work has been cited by President Obama's White House in policy papers about non-compete agreements.
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Chad Syverson
Chad Syverson is the George C. Tiao Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He has been on the University of Chicago faculty since 2001. He teaches classes in Competitive Strategy and Industrial Organization. His research spans several topics, with a particular focus on the interactions of firm structure, market structure, and productivity. Syverson has authored or co-authored dozens of scholarly articles and is the co-author (with Austan Goolsbee and Steve Levitt) of the intermediate-level textbook, Microeconomics. Syverson is an editor of the Journal of Political Economy, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and has served on multiple National Academies committees. Syverson received a PhD in economics from the University of Maryland in 2001. Before that, he earned bachelor's degrees in economics and mechanical engineering from the University of North Dakota in 1996.
David M. Waguespack
David M. Waguespack is an associate professor in management and organization at the University of Maryland Smith School of Business. Waguespack focuses his research on non-market influences, such as social networks and political institutions, on innovation and venture performance. He pursues these questions in the domains of film production and distribution, internet technology development, international patenting, and environmental management.
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John Wallis
John Wallis is the Mancur Olson Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland. Wallis researches the interaction of economic and political development, particularly in the case of the United States. His primary interest is in understanding why governments behave the way they do, with particular emphasis on the kinds of government policies that promote or retard economic development by applying tools of economic analysis, quantitative and theoretical, to the history of American government. Since the early 1990s, Wallis has worked towards understanding early American government and the critical decades of the 1830s and 1840s.