School Notes: School of Management
September/October 2010

Yale SOM joins healthcare management alliance

Yale SOM has joined the Business School Alliance for Healthcare Management, a collaborative organization committed to improving health care by fostering management education in the health sector. The alliance is focused on raising public awareness of the ways in which its member schools can help bring about solutions to the pressing management and leadership issues in today’s health-care sector through research, service, teaching, and robust health-care management educational offerings. The goals of the alliance correspond closely with the purpose of SOM’s distinctive MBA for Executives: Leadership in Healthcare program, which combines elements of the school’s integrated MBA curriculum with in-depth exploration of the human, economic, political, and technological issues unique to the health-care industry, and draws teaching resources from across Yale’s academic departments and from the School of Medicine and the School of Public Health. For more on the program go to http://mbae.som.yale.edu.

Professor cited for best article of 2009

The Financial Analysts Journal chose an article coauthored by William Goetzmann, the Edwin J. Beinecke Professor of Finance and Management and director of the International Center for Finance at Yale SOM, for its annual Graham and Dodd Award for Best Article, the journal’s highest honor. In the article, “Estimating Operational Risk for Hedge Funds: The ?-Score,” Goetzmann and his coauthors develop a statistical rating, called the ?-score, to assess the operational performance of hedge funds. The ?-score uses such readily available info-rmation as fund performance, volatility, size, age, and fee structures. The study demonstrates that operational risk is more significant than financial risk in explaining fund failure and that a significant and positive interaction exists between operational risk and financial risk. Goetzmann wrote the article, which appeared in the January/February 2009 issue, with Stephen Brown (New York University), Bing Liang (University of Massachusetts), and Christopher Schwarz (University of California, Irvine). Read the article:www.cfapubs.org/doi/pdfplus/10.2469/faj.v65.n1.8.

Students set out to make SOM sustainable

Five SOM students spent the spring coming up with a long-term plan to reduce the school’s consumption of resources and the waste it produces. A grant from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the Yale Office of Sustainability provided the spark, but most of the students in the group had already been thinking of ways for the school to become greener. The students worked first to get an accurate baseline for SOM consumption and waste (which included meeting with ten school departments) and then put together a series of short- and long-term recommendations that they presented to Dean Sharon Oster. They focused on four areas—energy, transportation, procurement, and waste—and their suggestions fit into three broad categories: finding ways to accurately manage and measure intake and waste; aligning incentives so faculty, students, and staff will devise and adapt new ways to conserve; and urging the creation of educational materials to help stakeholders better understand their role in making SOM more sustainable. Read more on this atmba.yale.edu/news_events/CMS/Articles/7184.shtml.