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SIMON SCHOOL ANNOUNCES PROFESSORSHIP APPOINTMENTS

Release Date: Apr 22, 2009

Rochester, N.Y.—April 22, 2009—Three longtime, distinguished faculty members at the Simon Graduate School of Business, University of Rochester, will be installed as the next holders of existing named professorships on April 30, 2009, at 6:00 p.m., in Schlegel Hall, Room 103. The installation will be followed by a reception at 6:30 p.m. in the Executive M.B.A. Lounge and dinner in the Eisenberg Rotunda for members of the Simon Executive Advisory Committee, faculty and special guests.

Hansen

Ronald W. Hansen is being appointed the William H. Meckling Professor of Business Administration. In addition, he will become senior associate dean of program development as of July 1, 2009. Hansen joined the Simon faculty in 1971 from the University of Chicago where he completed his doctoral studies. He has served as director of the School’s Systems Analysis Program (1972─1973); associate director of the Center for Research in Government Policy and Business, now the Bradley Policy Research Center (1977─1986); associate dean for academic affairs (1988─1999); and senior associate dean for faculty and research (1999─present). Hansen is also a well recognized scholar on the economics of research and development in the pharmaceutical industry. He helped to establish and collaborates on research with the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development. He has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Research in Pharmaceutical Economics and has also been a member of the National Advisory Council on Health Care Technology Assessment and the Committee on the Children’s Vaccine Initiative at the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences. Under his leadership, the Simon School has instituted partnerships with the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and the Industrial Engineering School at the University of Chile; has collaborated with the College to convert the Management Certificate Program into a Business minor with more Simon School educational content, as well as two new business-related majors—one in Financial Economics and the other in Economics and Business Strategies; and has worked with the University’s College of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Center for Entrepreneurship to develop a promising M.S. program in Technical Entrepreneurship and Management (TEAM), allowing students to complete a bachelor’s degree in Engineering and a master’s degree within five years. The professorship is endowed by contributions from Simon faculty, alumni and friends in memory of the late William H. Meckling, dean of the Simon School from 1964─1983. Meckling played a seminal leadership role in promoting the Simon School’s rise to national prominence.

Long

John B. Long Jr. will become the Frontier Communications/Rochester Telephone Professor of Business Administration. Long joined the Simon School faculty in 1969. His research is primarily in the area of financial economics. In his published articles, he has addressed many of the financial decision problems faced by individuals and firms. These include total savings and portfolio-selection decisions (with particular emphasis on income tax implications and the performance of sophisticated portfolio-selection techniques), investment project evaluation and dividend policy choice. In other articles, he addresses the behavior of relative asset prices, the measurement of “abnormal” asset returns, the implications of taxes and inflation for common stock prices and the term structure of interest rates. His paper, “Real Business Cycles,” jointly authored with former Simon School Dean Charles I. Plosser, has been widely cited since its publication in the Journal of Political Economy in 1983.  It has had a significant impact on research and policy related to business cycles and is frequently referenced in standard textbooks in macroeconomics.  The paper has been reprinted in at least four anthologies of seminal papers in macroeconomics. He is a past editor and advisory editor of the Journal of Financial Economics and a member of Beta Gamma Sigma. Long earned his B.A. degree in mathematics at Rice University and his Ph.D. in industrial administration from Carnegie Mellon University. The professorship was established in 1986 as the Rochester Telephone Corporation Professorship through a gift from the Rochester Telephone Corporation.

Shaffer

Greg Shaffer is being named the Wesray Professor of Business Administration at the Simon School. Shaffer teaches the course on pricing policies to full-time and part-time M.B.A. students and is director of the Simon School’s Center for Pricing in partnership with the Professional Pricing Society and in collaboration with Deloitte. Shaffer’s research employs game-theoretic methods to examine issues in pricing policies, antitrust and regulation, distribution channels, vertical restraints, principal-agent theory and oligopoly models of strategic competition. He has received research grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council (U.S.A.) and the Social Research Council (U.K.). A widely published scholar, Shaffer’s work has appeared in numerous journals including American Economic Review, Economic Journal, the RAND Journal of Economics, and the Journal of Economics and Management Strategy, among many others. Shaffer is an area editor of Marketing Science, a co-editor of the Journal of Economics and Management Strategy and an associate editor of the Journal of Economics and Business. He has been involved in numerous consulting projects and antitrust cases in the U.S. and abroad related to issues on pricing and vertical relations among firms, and he has served as a visiting scholar in the two U.S. government antitrust agencies: the Antitrust division of the U.S. Department of Justice and the Bureau of Economics at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. The Wesray Professorship was established by Raymond G. Chambers, co-founder and former chairman of Wesray Capital Corporation, a Morristown, N.J.-based investment firm. Chambers partnered with William E. Simon, the School’s late benefactor and namesake, to establish Wesray Capital Corporation. A noted philanthropist and humanitarian, Chambers is the founder of Malaria No More, a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization aimed at ending malaria deaths. In February 2008, the Secretary-General of the United Nations appointed him the first Special Envoy of the Secretary-General for Malaria.

            “These three faculty members collectively have given over 90 years of service and dedication to the Simon Graduate School of Business and have significantly contributed to its international success and prominence,” says Dean Mark Zupan. “We deeply appreciate their long-term investment in the future of this great business school and are pleased to honor their positive impact through these distinguished professorships.”

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The Simon School prides itself as the place Where Thinkers Become Leaders™ and is currently ranked among the leading graduate business schools in the world in rankings published by the popular press, including BusinessWeek, U.S. News & World Report, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and Forbes. For example, the Financial Times recently rated the School 2nd in the world for finance and 5th in the world for managerial economics. More information about the Simon School is available on the World Wide Web at www.simon.rochester.edu.