The book, to be published by Cambridge University Press in December, has been praised for closing a gap between research and textbooks. Edward C. Prescott, 2004 Nobel Laureate and professor at Arizona State University, calls the book, “a dramatic improvement on what is currently available for teaching aggregate economics to MBAs and advanced undergraduates.”

The book covers the foundations of modern macroeconomic theory and provides readers with tools to equip them for advanced studies and professional careers. According to Finn E. Kydland, 2004 Nobel Laureate and professor of economics at University of California at Santa Barbara Davis, has “succeeded in introducing dynamics in a manageable way. At the same time, the book is fun to read.”

Davis received his BA and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He worked at the Federal Reserve Board before coming to the Wisconsin School of Business in 2007. As a professor, Davis has taught both undergraduate and graduate level classes in economics and finance. He will be one of the faculty members lecturing in the new Global Real Estate Master (GREM) program which will bring together students from three top business schools around the world to study real estate at Wisconsin.

Davis is a fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, serves on the board of directors at American Capital Agency Corporation and is on the academic advisory council of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. He has worked on over a dozen academic research papers, which have been published in publications that include: Journal of Monetary Economics, International Economic Review and Regional Science and Urban Economics.

Davis is often cited in the national media for his expertise in current housing and macroeconomic issues, and is considered to be one of the researchers at the forefront of real estate economics and finance issues.

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.

Wisconsin is partnering with France’s HEC Paris, China’s HKUST Business School and Costa Rica’s INCAE  Business School to offer a new degree, the Global Real Estate Master (GREM).

Students and alumni from the three partner schools will have a semester of intensive real estate training at Wisconsin that will include real estate coursework, a study tour of a major U.S. real estate market and professional development aimed at sharpening their networking skills and forging industry connections. Graduates will become part of an international real estate network made up of the best and brightest students from around the world.

It’s no surprise that Wisconsin should be at the center of such an innovative international real estate effort. Wisconsin’s real estate program is one of the oldest and most highly regarded programs in the United States, consistently ranked among the top three programs in the country by U.S. News & World Report. Wisconsin real estate faculty are particularly known for expertise in real estate economics and finance. The program is noted for strong connections to industry and for its active alumni network.

Professor François Ortalo-Magné, who chairs the real estate program at Wisconsin, is leading the initiative. “We are excited to have assembled such a stellar partnership of top business schools around the world to help us recruit and train future leaders of the global real estate industry,” he says. “It will be an incredible experience for all involved—students from around the world sharing the same classroom in Madison and learning real estate the Wisconsin way.”

Applications for the four-month program are now being accepted. The first GREM class will graduate in May 2011.

 To learn more, visit the Global Real Estate Master program.

Velshi’s article entitled, “The Return of the American Consumer,” featured business school students’ comments on American consumer spending habits. Thoughts expressed by Arts Administration MBA student Kelly Gauthier and Julian Moncada, an undergrad majoring in finance and international business, are featured on page 80.

Read more.

Davis told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that home prices were stabilizing without further intervention and cautioned that extending the first-time buyer credit will be costly and only pull forward home sales that would have happened at a point in the future anyway. “There’s just a fixed pool of potential first-time homebuyers. So that means if you incent them to buy today, they are not going to be available to buy tomorrow,” said Davis.

Read more.

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.

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

Listen here.

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 survey is conducted bi-annually by the Aspen Institute’s Center for Business Education, and is the only global ranking that evaluates MBA programs for their efforts to prepare students for the new business realities demanding social and environmental stewardship. In 2007, the Wisconsin MBA ranked 33rd in the world, and 24th in the U.S.

 To view the complete “Global 100” list of business school rankings, visit:

“We take seriously our charge of preparing students with the fundamentals to be high-achieving and responsible future leaders,” said Mike Knetter, Albert O. Nicholas Dean of the Wisconsin School of Business. “If we are to be successful in this endeavor, we believe that students must understand how environmental and values-based leadership is integral to the long-term success of any business.”  

The Aspen Institute goes worldwide in its search for the top performing business schools and goes beyond the standard criteria for ranking business schools by including how well schools prepare their business students for the environmental, social and ethical complexities of modern-day business. This year, 149 business schools from 24 countries participated in the survey and 100 programs were ranked.

Wisconsin was recognized for its dedication to integrating the concept of sustainability into existing courses, and developing new courses and programs that specifically address this issue.

One of the most important recent additions to the Wisconsin School of Business is a graduate Certificate in Business, Environment and Social Responsibility in conjunction with UW-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. The certificate is designed to provide knowledge and skills to strategically apply business principles to environmental and social challenges, and to prepare students to systematically integrate sustainability issues into day-to-day management decision making.

Inside the classroom, students find social and environmental responsibility woven throughout the Wisconsin MBA curriculum. Students are required to take an ethics course in their first year. Other sustainability-focused courses include Business and the Social Side of Sustainability, Triple Bottom Line Accounting and Environmental Strategy and Sustainability. Each of the 10 MBA career specializations has a rarified curriculum and a unique way of addressing corporate social responsibility. For example, Real Estate MBA students benefit from classes and conferences in green and sustainable development. Students in the Risk Management and Insurance specialization conduct various sustainability risk management projects with outside firms to identify key risks that organizations face, including reputational risks.

Outside the classroom, students participate in the annual G. Steven Burrill Business Plan Competition, which now includes a $1,000 Nelson Institute Green Entrepreneurial Venture Recognition award for the best green venture.

The school has also taken into consideration its surrounding environment. The $40.5 million, four-story addition to Grainger Hall  that opened in 2008—home to the Wisconsin MBA—was built to meet or exceed LEED standards for green building.

Agarwal is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering. He obtained his BS and MS degrees in biochemical engineering and biotechnology from the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, India in 2002, and a PhD in chemical engineering from Iowa State University in 2007. Agarwal primarily works on translational research projects combining a variety of advances in material sciences with applications in biomedicine. His work was recognized as an “outstanding contribution by a graduate student” at the annual meeting of the Society for Biomaterials and Gordon Research Conference – Polymers (West) in 2007.  Agarwal’s research has been published, and has resulted in one patent application and two intellectual property disclosures filed in 2009.