Preparing a new generation of scholars

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.

To learn more about the Smith School’s doctoral program, visithttp://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.