The New York Times published the above-titled article on March 14th. The author interviews a variety of academic and business sources exploring this question and issues whether an increasingly quantitative and research-based focus of business faculty places inadequate emphasis on real world situations and ethical concerns.

In connection with its series on immigration in the United States, the New York Times has used census data to develop an interactive immigration map. From 1880 to 2000, you can track selected immigrant groups (including groups from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas) in their movement to, and around, the United States. It’s a wonderful and visual use of census data.

An article in yesterday’s New York Times describes search funds, or venture capital firms that use recent MBAs to identify midmarket acquisition targets, which the funds buy, and the MBAs help to run for one or two years. In about a quarter of the cases, these investments return thirty percent, making a lot of money for everyone involved. This business model started at Stanford twenty-five years ago.

This is the way a search fund typically works: One or two ambitious graduates of a top-tier business school, who want to run their own business but recognize they lack practical experience, offer themselves as fledgling entrepreneurs who can make some tough-minded investors a lot of money.

Read the rest of the article, part of Bill Bowers’ small business and entrepreneurship column, “In The Hunt,” here.

In January the Journal of Business and Finance Librarianship published a comparison of the six major MBA rankings and a review of the literature about them entitled “Comparing the Rankings of MBA Curricula: Do Methodologies Matter?” Included in this analysis are the rankings of Business Week, Economist Intelligence Unit, Financial Times, Forbes, US News & World Report, and the Wall Street Journal.
The most interesting part of the paper are the brief descriptions of each system’s methodology.

Although other business school ratings often make comparisons based on salary offers received by recent graduates, Forbes is the only source to take account of salaries before enrollment and to calculate a cumulative gain from the MBA over the first five years after graduation.

After a statistical analysis of the rankings over time, the authors see that “the ranking of U.S. MBA programs does not change greatly, at least over a 4-year period.”
Find the entire paper here.

Two pieces bringing some causes of the recession into focus.
1. From This American Life, an award-winning show putting Keynesian theory and subprime mortgages into equal focus. The hour-long show itself is available to listen to here. A transcript is here. This show first aired in May of 2008 and has since led to a daily blog on NPR.org, Planet Money, with details of the financial crisis.
2. From a New Yorker issue earlier this month, this article by George Packer, “The Ponzi State.” In it he describes the overheated Floridian real estate culture of the last few years, and how everyone was speculating. Some earning $30K a year had a million dollars in homes that they were waiting to flip. Not as comprehensive or explicit as the This American Life piece, but it’s one of the best on-the-ground reporting pieces I’ve read about the mortgage crisis.

Check out this Treasury website for the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Once on the page, click on the most recent link to look at all payments to all institutions since October.
This page is the primary source for information on payments from this program, used by journalists and business analysts alike.

Check out this Treasury website for the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Once on the page, click on the most recent link to look at all payments to all institutions since October.
This page is the primary source for information on payments from this program, used by journalists and business analysts alike.