12 New Research Academics Arrive at HEC Paris

The October 3 Faculty Day featured welcome speeches for a dozen academic figures who join the ranks of HEC research professors, now numbering a total of 120. Faculty & Research Dean Jacques Olivier and Dean Peter Todd greeted the new staff members.

“We very much look forward to a long and fruitful collaboration with new professors whose professional track records are both hugely varied and remarkably deep.” With these words, Dean Todd welcomed academics who are integrating six different HEC departments. The lion’s share are swelling the Strategy & Business Policy teaching ranks (one of whom, Patricia Thornton, is a one-year Distinguished Visiting Professor from Texas A&M University).

“I’m very glad to return to France as a tenure-track Assistant Professor at HEC,” said Elie J. Sung, who has been working on public policy and innovation strategy at the Georgia Institute of Technology. At Jouy-en-Josas, the French academic will be furthering her research on the interactions between firms and policymakers as they shape science and technology policies together.

Researching the Media

Several other researchers are focusing their research on social media and its impact on innovation, gender or market strategy. Swiss academic Andreas Lanz has been working on the effectiveness of influencer marketing and the role of nudges on user-generated content networks, for example.

Meanwhile, Ghanaian researcher Albert Mensah, who conducts research on the determinants and consequences of corporate interactions with politicians, is also exploring the value of customers’ use of social media to U.S. firms. “The working environment here is fabulous and I have been very warmly welcomed by the department of Accounting and Control Management,” he said as Faculty Day wound down in the HEC Chateau.

From Social Innovation to Netflix Production

Joining Mensah is Assistant Professor Santosh Srinivas, who received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests are in the intersection between social evaluations and entrepreneurship. In his most recent research, Srinivas examines and observes gender differences in the ways entrepreneurs justify their crowdfunding requests.

Ankur Chavda, meanwhile, studies how to organize and incentivize innovation in firms. Freshly arrived from MIT, Chavda has active research on whether Netflix’s approach to television production should be replicated in other industries as well as whether vertical integration is harmful to a firm’s ability to innovate.

From Corporate Scandals to Knitting Communities

Theoretically interesting research with practical implications is at the heart of works by a new faculty at the Strategy Department, Yasir Dewan. Dewan was born in Pakistan and conducted his doctoral studies at Tilburg University, where he worked on status, political ideology, scandals of corporations. His recent Academy of Management Journal article suggests that high-status fraudulent corporations typically get away with their misconduct without much punishment, however, the scandalization of their misconduct enables the punishment for high-status fraudulent firms.

Concurrently to his arrival, HEC’s Marketing Department will be enjoying the services of French academic Anne-Sophie Chaxel. She hails from Virginia Tech where she worked on the intersection of marketing, decision-making and psychology.

Hyejun Kim joins the school’s Strategy Department from MIT Sloan to share her work on the economic sociology of innovation and entrepreneurship. Kim has worked extensively on knitting communities to better understand the process by which people become entrepreneurs and the influence of people’s feedback on innovation. 

Economy and Finance Specialists

Italian economist Gaetano Gaballo has taken a leave from his senior post in the monetary policy division at Banque de France to join HEC’s Economics Department. Gaetano's research interests focus on Monetary Economics and Macroeconomics with particular emphasis on models of expectation formation. He recently co-signed a research paper with his new HEC colleague Eric Mengus, called “Forward Guidance and Heterogeneous Beliefs”, which studies the capacity of central banks to stimulate economic activity when the interest rates are close to zero.

Concluding the list of new arrivals is Irina Zviadadze who joins the Finance Department after spending 6 years as a faculty at the Stockholm School of Economics. Her research includes understanding the sources of risk premia in the foreign exchange market and developing analytical methods for macro-based asset pricing models.

January 2020 will also see the arrival of Sajjad Najafi, who earned his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and is currently a research fellow based in the University of Michigan. His work focuses on the intersection of operations management with economics, marketing and information.