Strengthening the Academic Foundation

A distinguished research professor and two full professors top a list of
ten faculty members joining The School of Management.

by Jeanne Spreier


Dr. Bensoussan joins The University of Texas at Dallas School of
Management as Distinguished Research Professor in Operations Management
and director of the new International Center for Decision and Risk
Analysis (ICDRiA) (see Two New IT Centers Open on page 9). He comes from
the University of Paris-Dauphine, where he was a mathematics professor
from 1969 to 2004. At UTD, his research will focus on risk management.
"This is probably the main problem managers and engineers have to face in
their business life," he says. "I will compare the methodologies in
various industrial sectors as well as in the financial world. My
impression is that although this is a popular concept in many domains,
little comparison is made. I hope to obtain some generic methodology."

Dr. Bensoussan personally experienced the issues of risk with large
innovative and technology-intensive projects when he served as president
of the French space agency, Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales, from 1996
to 2003, and of the European space agency, from 1999 to 2002. "I am
fascinated by decision making in such areas," he says. "Can research do
something to improve the state of the art? This is the question I would
like to [answer]."

Dr. Bensoussan, who holds a Ph.D. in mathematics and served as president
of INRIA (National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control)
from 1984 to 1996, also is excited about the opportunity to learn about
the cultural differences in teaching between France and the United States.
He is teaching a graduate course on deterministic and stochastic inventory
theory. He plans to establish a course in risk management next year.


Joining UTD as Ashbel Smith Professor of Accounting and Information
Management, Dr. Ali brings to The School of Management more than 15 years
of teaching experience as well as a long-standing interest in the workings
of the stock market. "For a long time, the prevalent academic view was
that stock markets are efficient, meaning that stock prices always reflect
all the available information," says Dr. Ali, who most recently was a
professor at the University of Arizona. "Recent studies have found that
past information can predict future stock prices. This evidence seems
inconsistent with the market efficiency perspective. My research addresses
whether predictable returns are due to market inefficiency or due to some
research design problems."

His interest in accounting and finance research made such research a
logical choice, he says. "Given that the examination of the market
efficiency issue requires knowledge of both the fields, and more
importantly, given the recent peculiar behavior of the stock market, I
became interested in this line of research."

Dr. Ali, who received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, is a member of
The Journal of International Accounting Research editorial review board
and served for five years in a similar position with The Accounting
Review. At UTD, he is teaching a required financial accounting course to
MBA students. "A good foundation of accounting is important for all MBA
students because it enables them to understand and utilize information in
financial statements for making business decisions," Dr. Ali says. He also
will teach doctoral level courses and guide Ph.D. students with their
research.


The second full professor to join SOM's Accounting and Information
Management area this year, Dr. Cready developed an interest in studying
investors' trading responses to accounting information when he was a
doctoral student at Ohio State University. "Several papers concerning
trading volume were presented at our program's weekly workshop," Dr.
Cready says. "It occurred to me that it would be particularly interesting
to understand how the different types of investors, whose trading in sum
constitutes volume, trade in similar or differing fashion."

Since then, he has focused on this area of study. "This research is
particularly useful in developing an understanding of the degree to which
accounting information levels or tilts the informational playing field in
equity markets," he says.

At SOM, Dr. Cready is occupying a soon-to-be-named professorship. He comes
to UTD from Louisiana State University, where he held the Thomas H. Daigre
Endowed Chair of Business Administration. Prior to that, he taught for a
decade at Texas A&M University, where he was the KPMG Professor of
Accounting.

Recent work includes a published paper in which he and his co-author
provided evidence that the broadest, most powerful basis for ascertaining
whether a piece of information evokes a market response is to examine
transaction activity. "Transaction activity, in particular," Dr. Cready
says, "is more likely to reveal such behavior than is price behavior." Dr.
Cready, who is on the editorial board of Accounting Horizons and
previously served on the editorial board of  The Accounting Review, is
teaching doctoral seminars on the use of empirical analysis in accounting
research. He also is teaching cost management   systems to undergraduates.


Nina Baranchuk
Dr. Baranchuk will attempt to apply empirical data to business questions
affected by personality. "My research focuses on analyzing motives and
incentives of corporate executives," she says. "It is an important issue,
since the performance of a firm depends on actions and choices of a few
people who are positioned at the top of the firm's hierarchy." She says
recent news is full of "people who virtually single-handedly were able to
either take their businesses to the pinnacle of success or bring them down
to smoldering ruins. Bill Gates of Microsoft and Kenneth Lay of Enron are
two of the more recent cases. It has always been one of my main interests
to understand what helps firms achieve the former or at least avoid the
latter."

Dr. Baranchuk received her Ph.D. in economics from Washington University
and has previously taught everything from microeconomics for undergrads to
financial strategy for graduate students. An assistant professor in SOM's
Finance and Managerial Economics area, she is teaching introduction to
corporate finance to undergraduates.


Umit Gurun
Dr. Gurun joins The School of Management as an assistant
professor of accounting after completing his doctoral studies at Michigan
State University. His research interest lies in investor behavior. "I am
working on the relationship between investor sophistication and market
efficiency," he says. "I believe the level of investor sophistication,
which is a byproduct of the proper use of accounting information, is one
of the most important aspects of an efficiently working market." Dramatic
events in the financial markets, such as the 1987 crash and the subsequent
run-up in Internet stocks followed by the similarly dramatic bust, spurred
Dr. Gurun's interest. "I wanted to understand why different people
interpret financial information differently," he says.

At the SOM, he is teaching financial management information courses. "The
most exciting thing in my course is to show the relationship between use
of accounting statements and valuation models used in most investment
banks," he says.


Xu Li
This fall, Dr. Li is giving SOM undergraduate students their first
taste of financial accounting. Dr. Li, who joins The UTD School of
Management as an assistant professor, recently received his doctorate in
accounting from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School
of Management, where his dissertation studied the effect on equity
valuation of the discretionary part of accounting earnings of initial
public offering firms. "I found that behavioral theories do not explain
why the market does not price the discretionary part of accounting
earnings correctly."

Dr. Li's research will focus on the markets by studying the roles of
accounting information and in-sider transactions on equity valuation. "My
research can make contributions to the informational efficiency of the
equity market," Dr. Li says. This line of research is logical for Dr. Li.
"I have a master's of finance and a Ph.D. in accounting. Naturally, I am
interested in financial accounting."


Xiaohui (Gloria) Liu
Dr. Liu is teaching business students one of the core skills they will
need as they progress not only in their studies but as they enter the work
world. Financial accounting gives students and managers the ability to
understand financial reports, which is crucial in business. At the same
time, Dr. Liu, who received her Ph.D. in accounting information and
management from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management,
will be researching the interaction between financial analysts and
managers. "Researchers and the press believe managers manipulate earnings
to meet or beat financial analysts' earnings forecasts. My study focuses
on the impact of such a manipulation on both the forecasts and the actual
earnings," she says. "For example, based on managers' motivation to beat
the forecasts, analysts might intentionally lower the forecast to
cultivate" a relationship with those managers.

Dr. Lui says her dissertation, which launched her in this field, was the
first study in the literature that considered the strategic interaction
between analysts and managers. She joins The School of Management as an
assistant professor of accounting and information management.


Holly Lutze
Dr. Lutze, like many of her colleagues at UTD's School of Management,
started in engineering. "I began as an industrial engineering
undergraduate student with a strong desire to pursue advanced
mathematics," says Dr. Lutze, who received her doctorate earlier this year
in management science and engineering from Stanford University. "I ended
up as an operations research master's student with a strong desire for
relevant applications for the tools I was learning." Supply chain
management and inventory control research satisfies both engineering and
math needs, she says, and "allows me to develop insights that are useful
to people throughout the business world."

An assistant professor in SOM's Information Systems and Operations
Management area, Dr. Lutze is teaching an undergraduate course in
operations research and a master's level class in inventory control while
researching the incentives behind how firms behave and interact with each
other. Her research will focus on the study and transformation of these
incentives through new supply chain relationship structures, including
contracts and requests for quotations.


Abhijit Biswas
Mr. Biswas joins the school as a senior lecturer in marketing and is
teaching MBA students various marketing classes, including Principles of
Marketing and Promotional Strategy. For the past several years, he has
taught a variety of marketing classes at UTD as an adjunct faculty member
and last year received the Outstanding Adjunct Faculty Teaching Award. Mr.
Biswas, who studied marketing at Purdue University, has an additional role
at the university Ñ to develop and start a new marketing certificate
graduate program designed for those who already have begun their career
and who would like additional training in marketing without launching into
an MBA course of study. In the past, Mr. Biswas has done marketing
research consulting projects for clients. "I especially enjoyed [this]
since the output usually had a tangible impact on the client's marketing
strategy and operations," he says.


Ron Blair
Ron Blair begins what he calls his third career as a full-time senior
lecturer in the Accounting and Information Management area. Mr. Blair has,
however, a long-standing affiliation with The School of Management, which
includes his second career. Until this fall, when he assumed his full
teaching load, he was the school's director of budget and finance Ñ a
position he had held since 1999. His first career was with the Internal
Revenue Service (IRS), where for many years Mr. Blair served as assistant
regional director of appeals, overseeing the appeals operation in the
eight-state Southwest Region, and later the 12-state Midstates Region. The
purpose of the IRS Appeals Division is to resolve tax controversies. Since
1991, Mr. Blair has been an adjunct faculty member at UTD, teaching no
more than one course each semester. This year he is teaching graduate
courses in corporate tax, partnership tax and tax research, all areas
where he is able to bring his firsthand knowledge of taxation to the
classroom.