A two-day conference focused on recent developments in theories of money, banking and asset markets was held Nov. 13 and 14 at the Wisconsin School of Business.  Finance Professor Randy Wright has played a key role in bringing to Madison noted experts from around the nation to speak at the conference, which was coordinated by the school’s Puelicher Center for Banking Education.

Presenters included noted figures from academia and government—including officials from the Federal Reserve Banks of New York, Philadelphia, and Atlanta, and from the Bank of Canada. Leading thinkers will share their expertise with UW-Madison faculty and Ph.D. students in business and economics.

Topics included: “Payments and Liquidity Under Moral Hazard” and “Banking: A Mechanism Design Approach.” More than 65 individuals are scheduled to attend.

The event was held in Grainger Hall on the UW-Madison campus. To view a conference schedule, click here.

Author and veteran entrepreneurship reporter Donna Fenn was on campus November 9-12 as the fall Business Writer in Residence, a joint effort by University Communications, the Wisconsin School of Business, and the School of Journalism and Mass Communications, bringing nationally known business writers to campus to interact with students.

Members of the UW-Madison community and the public were invited to attend a special Q&A with Fenn on Tuesday, Nov. 10, to discuss her new book:“Upstarts! How GenY Entrepreneurs are Rocking the World of Business and 8Ways You Can Profit from Their Success.’ The Q&A was held fr in the Plenary Room of 1310 Grainger Hall, with a book sale and signing to follow. A live webcast of the Upstarts! Q&A will be available.

Moderating the Q&A session was Dan Olszewski, director of the Weinert Center for Entrepreneurship.

Fenn’s talk was sponsored by University Communications, Wisconsin School of Business, INSITE (Initiative for Studies in Technology Entrepreneurship), and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. The Business Writer in Residence program is funded in part by a grant from the UW Foundation.

Fenn has more than 20 years experience writing about entrepreneurship and small business trends. Her latest book, “Upstarts!,” analyzes young entrepreneurial success strategies and what to expect from these highly collaborative and team-oriented individuals in the future. She provides readers with eight critical lessons every entrepreneur and marketer must learn.

In addition to “Upstarts!,” Fenn wrote “Alpha Dogs: How Your Small Business Can Become a Leader of the Pack,” which profiles eight successful small companies in ordinary industries, including a sock manufacturer and motorcycle dealership. Fenn is a contributing editor at Inc. magazine, a community leader at Work.com, a featured expert on SBTV.com, and a blogger on Inc.com. Her work has appeared in Inc., The New York Times, Newsweek, and many other national publications.

In 2001, Fenn was a co-recipient of the Women’s Economic Round Table Entrepreneurship Prize, sponsored by the Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership. From 1988 to 1992, she lived in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where she was a correspondent for The Associated Press and covered a variety of issues, including business, culture, the economy and the Gulf War.

Morris Davis, assistant professor of Real Estate and Urban Land Economics, was a guest on Marketplace radio to discuss Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s call to action on financial regulation.

Davis discussed with host Bill Radke the implications of regulation and why he believes it will be difficult to monitor systemic risk.

Listen here.

Brian Hellmer, director of the Stephen L. Hawk Center for Applied Security Analysis, reacts to the new investor.gov website sponsored by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in SmartMoney magazine.

According to Hellmer, the website could help investors avoid mistakes and better understand the risks and costs of their investments.  “A lot of people even in their 40s or 50s who have been investing for a while wouldn’t necessarily know what red flags to look for when they talk to investment advisers,” says Hellmer.

Read more.

The essence of the WI-FUR plan is to attach a housing “voucher” to each unemployment check that could be directly applied to a mortgage payment.

The U.S. Treasury, according to top Fed officials, is beginning to concentrate very closely on the effect of unemployment on the housing crisis and foreclosures. There is increasing concern that the foreclosure problem cannot be addressed without providing financial assistance to unemployed homeowners.

Proposals to prevent foreclosures by attaching government housing vouchers to unemployment checks is gaining traction among officials. Recent discussions for relief plans have been along the lines of a foreclosure relief plan proposed by three Wisconsin School of Business real estate professors earlier this year. Read recent USA Today coverage here.

“The Wisconsin Foreclose and Unemployment Relief Plan” (WI-FUR), was developed in the Graaskamp Center for Real Estate by Professors Morris A. Davis, Stephen Malpezzi and François Ortalo-Magné. WI-FUR calls for the rapid expansion of two established programs—unemployment insurance and housing vouchers—to prevent a wave of foreclosures among recently unemployed workers.

“In a nutshell, the WI-FUR plan gives unemployed people a housing voucher to enable them to make their mortgage payment,” says Davis. “It doesn’t require any mortgage modification and it’s temporary in nature. You receive a voucher when you are unemployed and then when you are employed, you stop receiving a voucher.”

Davis says the other foreclosure proposals currently being debated, including the “Making Home Affordable” plan put forward earlier by the Obama Administration, have focused on mortgage modifications—to take a person who has a bad or ill-suited subprime mortgage and convert it to a more appropriate 30- year, fixed rate mortgage.

“Those plans really do to nothing to help the unemployed who have completely sensible mortgages but simply can’t afford to make payments on them,” says Davis. “Our plan is the only plan that we know of, outside of one by the Boston Fed, that helps people make mortgage payments while they are unemployed.”

The essence of the WI-FUR plan is to attach a housing “voucher” to each unemployment check that could be directly applied to a mortgage payment. The amount of the voucher would be based on the Fair Market Rent, which is already computed for each county by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The cost of the WI-FUR plan has been calculated by the faculty members, but would depend on parameters set by policymakers in terms of size of the voucher, number of people eligible, and the length of time an individual could receive the vouchers.

“Right now the U.S. is experiencing the greatest housing crisis in its history since the Great Depression, “ Davis says. “As members of one of the top real estate programs in the country, we felt it was our responsibility to come up with a potential solution for this housing crisis and that’s why we developed a foreclosure relief plan.”

Read details on WI-FUR here

Wisconsin School of Business Dean Michael Knetter recently contributed to a statewide primetime special on the economy, featuring Dennis Winters of Wisconsin’s Department of Workforce Development and Bill Testa of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

During the special, Dean Knetter provides an analysis of the current national and state economy, and describes key indicators to watch as we await an economic recovery.

Click to watch.

Senior Marketing Lecturer Deborah Mitchell responds to Chris Anderson’s new book, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” as part of NPR’s first in a three-part series on how the concept of “free” is changing how companies do business.

Mitchell says we’ve come to expect things for free in the digital world, including music, other kinds of content, and news. “You know, the so-called ‘Google generation,’ or people under the age of 30, certainly under the age of 20, have grown up just having all kinds of access to things online that didn’t cost anything,” she tells NPR’s Wendy Kaufman.

For a full version of the story, click here.

GM must focus on its brands to boost sales: that is the message from marketing experts. Deborah Mitchell, who teaches marketing at the Wisconsin School of Business, was quoted in an Associated Press article that appeared in the Washington Post and elsewhere  on the importance of brand building for GM.

Read the article here

Morris Davis, an assistant professor in real estate at the Wisconsin School of Business, maintains three databases that he created (with coauthors) over the 2004-2006 period while serving at the Federal Reserve Board.

Davis created the databases to provide estimates of data he viewed as key to understanding house prices that were not available elsewhere at the time. The data is being published in detail by the Lincoln Land Institute of Land Policy.

Realtor Magazine wrote about the new databases.

Read the article here

Learn more about the databases here

While illegal insider trading has high visibility in the mass media, there are surprisingly few empirical studies about it.

New research from the Wisconsin School of Business seeks to improve understanding of the behavior of informed traders and the impact of their trading on prices and liquidity. Elizabeth Odders-White, associate professor of Finance, Investment and Banking, recently shared snippets of her ongoing research on the topic as part of the school-sponsored Rays of Research faculty seminar series.

Odders-White, along with fellow Wisconsin Finance Professor Mark Ready and Associate Professor Diane Del Guercio of the University of Oregon, is examining specifics surrounding more than 200 insider trading civil cases filed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Committee (SEC) between January 1, 2002 and December 31, 2007 on trades occurring as far back as August 1996.

Their research analyzes specifics of each illegal trading case filed including the type of inside information obtained, date the illegal trading occurred, firm or firms involved, date and time the information became public, specific type of securities and quantities traded and any profits earned.

Among key findings she presented:

•  The nature of informed trading is broader in scope than in the 1980s, and cases range from single, small episodes to vast, multi-year schemes with profits varying from $0 to $15.8 million per case. 
• Typical trading cases garner average profits of $52,000 per trader—a marked increase from the $24,000 average cited in the 1980s by previous research. 
• Insider strategies include trading in both stock and options and potentially attempting to conceal trades among non-insider trading.
  Seventy-seven percent of cases reviewed involve trading in only stock, 16% involve both stock and options, 6% involve options only and 1% involve bonds. 
• Some price discovery occurs on insider trading days, but much of the information remains private until the announcement.
•  Evidence seems to support insider trading on higher-volume days.
•  Liquidity is not reduced by insider trading.

 Topics still to be explored include whether prices and/or liquidity can be used to detect or predict illegal insider trading.

 Click here to watch her talk.

University of Wisconsin-Madison Executive Education was named the “Best School for Continuing Education” by  Corporate Report Wisconsin magazine in its “Best of Wisconsin Business” competition. More than 2,600 subscribers cast ballots online.

Associate Professor Charles A. Krueger, who directs Financial Management offerings and is chair of Wisconsin Executive Education, accepted the award on behalf of the Wisconsin School of Business at a luncheon held June 12 at the Kalahari Resort & Convention Center in Wisconsin Dells. The top three finishers in 30 categories were honored.

Wisconsin Executive Education offers more than 200 open-enrollment courses on more than 80 business topics and 10 certificate series. It also offers custom programs designed for businesses and other organizations.

Corporate Report Wisconsin is a statewide magazine with readership largely composed of owners, presidents, CEOs, and board members.

Companies can reduce unintended effects of downsizing, according to research conducted at the Wisconsin School of Business that was recently featured in BusinessWeek. 

The BusinessWeek article examined ways for companies to reduce the negative effects of downsizing. It included research on the topic by Charlie Trevor, an associate professor of management at the Wisconsin School of Business, and Anthony Nyberg, a former PhD candidate at Wisconsin, who is now an assistant professor at the Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina.  

As BusinessWeek summarized their research findings: “Companies that had a history of harboring HR practices that were aimed at assuring procedural fairness and justice—such as having an ombudsman who is designated to address employee complaints; confidential hotlines for problem resolution; the existence of grievance or appeal processes for nonunion employees, etc.—did not see their turnover heighten after a downsizing effort. Apparently, remaining employees were confident that, in such a company, the downsizing effort had been fair and unavoidable.” 

Earlier this year, Trevor and Nyberg received the Scholarly Achievement Award from the Academy of Management’s Human Resources Division for an article they authored on their research findings.