Annual Report 2003
Foundation for the Future
“American managers continue to learn that it’s not always good for business to impose their values on foreign cultures in joint business ventures,” emphasizes Isenberg School management professor Jane Giacobbe-Miller. “We can’t afford to ignore underlying cultural values—to assume that our way is necessarily the best way.” Last spring, Giacobbe-Miller, whose most recent research is a comparative study of workplace values in China, Russia, and the United States, succeeded marketing professor Marc Weinberger as the Isenberg School’s Associate Dean. “My work as dean will build on Marc’s; we need to continue to improve both the visibility of our research and funding opportunities for our faculty.”
The good news, Giacobbe-Miller continues, resides with the faculty members themselves. “Their commitment and accomplishments in teaching and research—in spite of tough times at the University—remains exceptional. Their passion and enthusiasm are amazing,” notes the new dean, who is the first woman to hold a deanship in the fifty-five-year history of the Isenberg School. “Our two home-grown journals, The Journal of Alternative Investments and The Journal of Organization and Society are internationally respected. JAI is the leading scholarly publication in its field and JOS holds an “A” ranking from the Wein Ratings. “I’m also looking forward to collaborative research between faculty in our traditional departments and those in our new departments of Sport Management and Hospitality and Tourism Management. One of my first initiatives is to better inform our faculty about grants opportunities.
Giacobbe-Miller, like most of the Isenberg School faculty, has remained an active researcher throughout her career. Her recent comparative study, published this year in the Journal of International Business Studies, challenges some common assumptions about the “inevitability” of former collectivist societies’ move toward managerial values that predominate in Western societies. “That’s not what we found in China, where egalitarian work/reward values continued to dominate, regardless of organizational type,” observes Giacobbe-Miller. “In Russia, egalitarian values also predominated in state owned enterprises, but in joint ventures between Russian firms and foreign-owned enterprises, there was convergence toward more individualistic Western values.”
Sheila Bair on Financial Regulatory Policy
“By resisting voluntary registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB) System is creating the impression that it is resisting transparency. That’s an untenable position in the post-Enron environment,” observes Dean’s Professor of Financial Regulatory Policy Sheila Bair. “It’s critical that FHLBanks make their risks known to the taxpaying public as they take on new ventures,” emphasizes Bair, who joined the Isenberg School this Spring after a distinguished Washington career that included posts as Assistant Treasury Secretary for Financial Institutions in the second Bush Administration, and Commissioner on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Bair also served for five years as Senior Vice President of Government Relations with the New York Stock Exchange.
Established in 1932, the FHLB System, through a decentralized network of twelve FHLBanks, fosters residential mortgages through the wholesale provision of credit and other services to thousands of member financial institutions. (The member institutions cooperatively own the FHLBanks.) “Congress designed the system to be a stable, low-risk source of wholesale mortgage liquidity,” notes Bair. “It was never set up to be an investment fund.
But the financial institutions that cooperatively own it are pushing it in the higher-risk direction of purchasing and securitizing home mortgages.” Those are standard procedures for the Federal government’s other two mortgage-purchase programs, Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac. Last year, in the wake of the Enron and other scandals, the Treasury Department called on the three programs to register voluntarily with the SEC. To date, Fannie Mae, and more recently, Freddie Mac
(following a scandal of its own) have complied. The FHLB system, however, remains a holdout. For the sake of public confidence alone, SEC regulation is warranted, insists Bair, whose study on the subject has received attention in Dow Jones International, The American Banker, and Business Week Online.
Bair’s first project after joining UMass was a paper, funded by the Inter-American Development Bank, on ways to improve Latino immigrants’ access to the US banking system. The Isenberg School professor is currently working on a comprehensive study of the implications for consumers of a proposed optional federal charter for life insurers. Chartered exclusively by the states, life insurers contend that an optional federal charter would make them more competitive in financial services markets with banks and other players. State insurance commissions disagree, insisting that the state-based regulatory system would find itself in jeopardy and that insurers would ultimately become less responsive to local consumer needs.