Wayne Landsman’s research focuses on the role of accounting information in capital price formation. Topics of research include pensions, employee stock options, asset securitization, and fair value accounting. He has published over 60 articles in leading scholarly and professional journals.
He teaches courses in financial accounting and financial reporting.
Dr. Landsman is the former associate dean of the PhD Program and chair of the accounting area at UNC Kenan-Flagler.
He received major awards from the American Accounting Association (AAA) in 2014: the Outstanding Educator Award for his contributions to accounting education through his scholarly endeavors in teaching and research over a sustained period of time and the Financial Accounting and Reporting Section (FARS) Best Paper Award for a tradition of academic scholarship and relevance to problems facing the accounting profession and standard-setters.
Dr. Landsman was president of the FARS of the AAA and served on the Financial Accounting Standards Advisory Council, which advises the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), from 1998-2001.
He received his PhD in business, his MBA and his MS in statistics from Stanford University, and his AB magna cum laude in economics from Princeton University.
Eva Labro’s research and teaching interests in management accounting interface with other disciplines such as economics, operations management, financial accounting, tax and purchasing. She is specifically interested in costing system design, and the provision of management accounting information for both decision making and performance measurement.
Dr. Labro is an award-winning teacher and researcher. She received the Impact on Management Accounting Practice Award three times – in 2011, 2013 and 2014 – from the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants. She also received the 2011 Notable Contributions to the Management Accounting Literature Award and the 2007 Best Management Accounting paper award at the American Accounting Association conference. She received the 2017 Weatherspoon Award for Excellence in PhD Teaching and the 2016 Core Faculty Champion in Sustainability Award at UNC Kenan-Flagler, and the 2006 London School of Economics Teaching Prize.
She has published extensively in top journals, including The Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Management Science, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management and Production and Operations Management. She is a senior editor at Production and Operations Management (POM) for its POM-Accounting Interface. She is the incoming senior editor at the Journal of Management Accounting Research (2019-21). She serves on the editorial boards of The Accounting Review, Contemporary Accounting Research, Journal of Management Accounting Research, European Accounting Review and Management Accounting Research.
Dr. Labro’s work has received research funding from the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants in the U.K. and the Institute of Management Accountants in the U.S.
A dual American-Belgian national, she is fluent in Dutch/Flemish and conversational in French and German, with notions of Italian and Danish.
Before she joined UNC Kenan-Flagler, Dr. Labro was a reader (associate professor) at the London School of Economics.
Tarun Kushwaha works in the area of customer relationship management (CRM), channel management and international marketing.
He focuses on understanding customers’ channel choice behavior, marketing resource allocation across channels and segments, financial and non-financial impact of CRM outsourcing and role of national culture in the context of managing customer relationships.
An award-winning teacher, his teaching interests include the use of quantitative and analytical tools for marketing decision making, especially in topics as marketing engineering, marketing research and CRM.
His research has been published in the Journal of Marketing Research, Management Science, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Interactive Marketing, Production and Operations Managementand Journal of Business Research, among other outlets. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Marketing and Journal of Interactive Marketing. He also referees for several top journals in the marketing discipline.
Prior to beginning his academic career, he worked in advertising and media planning for one of India’s largest consumer packaged goods companies.
He received his PhD and MS in marketing from Texas A&M University. He received his MBA in marketing from Nirma University’s Institute of Management and his bachelor’s degree in physics from St. Xavier’s College at Gujarat University in India.
Venkat Kuppuswamy’s research interests lie in two broad domains: entrepreneurship, and corporate diversification.
Within the realm of entrepreneurship, Dr. Kuppuswamy has paid particular attention to the emerging phenomenon of crowdfunding – a novel source of seed capital for entrepreneurs. His research on crowdfunding has focused on better understanding when and why individuals i.e., ‘the crowd’, contribute to crowdfunding campaigns. Furthermore, he has explored the benefits of crowdfunding campaigns for entrepreneurs beyond the immediate funds obtained, as well the importance of an entrepreneur’s social media efforts to generate word-of-mouth.
Dr. Kuppuswamy’s research also focuses on the biases and forms of discrimination confronting minority entrepreneurs. He has explored whether crowdfunding truly represents a discrimination-free platform for entrepreneurs to raise capital. He found that black entrepreneurs continue to face significant discrimination, but he has identified various practices that can be implemented by entrepreneurs and crowdfunding platforms to eliminate this bias. Furthermore, given the low levels of representation of minority actors within Hollywood’s feature films, Dr. Kuppuswamy has examined the effects of a film’s racial diversity on its box-office performance. He shows that films with more racially diverse casts actually perform significantly better at the box-office than films with less diverse casts.
Within the domain of corporate diversification, his work has identified the circumstances under which diversification is more valuable for firms, including the 2008 financial crisis, as well as in countries with weak institutional environments. Recently, he has investigated how the horizontal scope of an organization also influences the rate at which it learns, using the U.S. hospital industry as an empirical setting.
His research has appeared in prestigious scholarly journals such as Management Science, and Journal of Business Venturing. In addition, popular press outlets including The Atlantic, Huffington Post, Washington Post, and NPR, among others, have cited his work.
Dr. Kuppuswamy teaches courses in strategic management, as well as media entrepreneurship and innovation. He received his DBA from Harvard Business School and an Honors Bachelors of Science with high distinction in computer science from the University of Toronto. Prior to graduate school, he worked as an IBM performance analyst in their database division.
Camelia Kuhnen is an expert in household finance, labor and finance, and neuroeconomics. Her work has an interdisciplinary nature, with the overarching theme of trying to understand how people make financial and economic choices that concern them as individuals or as decision makers in firms.
She serves as department editor at Management Science and associate editor at the Journal of Finance. Previously she was an editor at the Review of Corporate Finance Studies and associate editor at the Review of Financial Studies.
Dr. Kuhnen is the incoming president of the Society for Experimental Finance, has served as president of the Society for Neuroeconomics, and is a director of the American Finance Association.
She is a faculty affiliate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and also serves as director of research at the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Prior to joining the faculty at UNC Kenan-Flagler, Dr. Kuhnen served on the faculty of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
She received her Ph.D. in finance from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and two bachelor’s degrees – in finance and neuroscience – from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Jeffrey Kuhn’s research and teaching interests include technological innovation, intellectual property, corporate strategy and entrepreneurship.
Much of his research focuses on the causal impact of the patent system on firm decisions and outcomes. For instance, Professor Kuhn examines how winning a patent race or receiving broader patent protection affects firm decisions to invest in cumulative innovation, transfer technology or maintain a patent portfolio.
Prior to graduate school, he worked as a U.S. patent attorney for several years and is an active member of both the California State Bar and the United States Patent Bar. He applies his background as an attorney to ground his research in the functioning of institutions.
Professor Kuhn also applies his training in computer science and mathematics to advance the empirical analysis of technological innovation through big data. For example, he develops new data sets and measures by writing computationally intensive programs and executing them in cloud computing environments.
He was a summer scholar in the Technology Policy Research Initiative at Boston University. At Stanford University’s Hoover Institution he was an IP2 Fellow in the Working Group on Intellectual Property, Innovation and Prosperity. He received a Google Research Award in 2014 and was a Robert N. Noyce Memorial Fellow from 2012 to 2014.
He is completing his PhD in business and public policy from the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, where he also received his MS in business administration, and his JD from the School of Law. He received a BA in psychology and a BS in computer science and mathematics from Purdue University.
Saravan Kesavan conducts research on supply chain management for retailers, with emphasis on benchmarking operational performance and management of retail store labor. He uses publicly available financial data as well as proprietary archival data from retailers in his research.
His research has appeared in Management Science and M&SOM. He is a senior editor at POMS and an ad hoc reviewer at Management Science, M&SOM and POMS.
Dr. Kesavan teaches business statistics for undergraduate business students and retail operations for MBA students.
He worked for several years at i2 Technologies, where he helped clients deal with supply chain management issues.
He received his doctorate in technology and operations management from Harvard Business School. He also has master’s and bachelor degrees in engineering from University of Massachusetts at Amherst and IIT Madras, India, respectively
Kristopher Keller studies private label marketing, particularly the transition of private labels into true consumer-packaged goods brands.
His other research interests include retailing, branding, marketing-mix effectiveness and innovation. His work has been published in the Journal of Marketing.
Dr. Keller’s teaching interests include general marketing courses, and specifically marketing channel management, retailing, and marketing models.
He was an AMA-Sheth Foundation Doctoral Consortium Fellow (2015) and received the GfK Market Research Award in 2014) as well as Research Talent Grant from the Dutch Organisation for Scientific Research in 2013.
Prior to joining academia, he founded a small jewelry retail store chain in Frankfurt in 2007 and sold it in 2011.
Dr. Keller received his PhD (cum laude, the highest distinction) from Tilburg University in the Netherlands, where he also earned his research master’s degree in marketing and his master’s in marketing research, both cum laude. He obtained his undergraduate degree in business administration and economics from Goethe University, Frankfurt in Germany.
Steve Jones has international experience developing strategy, leading change and building organizational capability in a variety of industries.
Jones served as dean of UNC Kenan-Flagler from 2003-08. He came to UNC Kenan-Flagler after serving as CEO of Suncorp Metway Ltd., one of the 25 largest companies in Australia, based in Brisbane, Queensland.
Prior to Suncorp, Jones served ANZ, one of Australia’s four major banks, over an eight-year period, first as a consultant, then as an executive in Melbourne and, finally, as managing director and CEO of ANZ-New Zealand in Wellington.
Jones was a management consultant with McKinsey & Company from 1984-89, in both Atlanta and Melbourne. He helped clients in construction materials, chain drug stores, alcoholic beverages, electricity, textiles and banking to develop growth strategies, improve operations and manage merger integration. He was a member of McKinsey’s practice development groups in merger integration and managing major change.
Jones earned his MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School and his BA in economics from UNC-Chapel Hill, where he was a Morehead Scholar.
Pranav Jindal studies quantitative marketing and empirical industrial organization with a focus on pricing, product insurance, consumer beliefs and inter-temporal preferences.
His research has been published in journals such as Marketing Science and Quantitative Marketing and Economics. He has received research grants from the Marketing Science Institute, Institute for Study of Business Markets and Smeal College of Business at the Pennsylvania State University. He serves as a referee for several top journals in marketing and economics.
Dr. Jindal’s teaching interests focus on using quantitative and analytical tools to understand consumer behavior, and derive managerially relevant insights and practices for firms, especially in topics such as marketing research, pricing strategies and big data analytics.
Before he began his academic career, Dr. Jindal worked at AbsolutData Research and Analytics. He led projects on designing and analyzing surveys and implementing consumer analytics studies, and was responsible for recruiting and training.
He received his PhD and MBA in marketing from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a B. Tech in industrial and production engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology.