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2003 MBA Paper Award
With the highest number of submissions ever, the 2003 Best MBA Paper contest yielded a variety of papers on topics ranging from the environment to industry-specific studies to corporate governance.
Winner
The 2003 winner is Jessica Brinkman from The University of Michigan Business School, for her paper,"Does Corporate Social Responsibility Lead to Improved Financial Performance? An Analysis of the Electric Utility Industry". Brinkman analyzed data on 28 companies in the U.S. energy industry to determine if a correlation exists between a company’s sustainability commitment, social performance, environmental performance, and financial performance and discusses the implications for this industry.
Brinkman graduated in 2003 with a joint degree from the Corporate Environmental Management Program; she received an MBA with Distinction from the Business School and an MS from the School of Natural Resources & Environment. Currently, she is a Senior Consultant at DG Volo & Co., a start-up management consulting firm with operations in Canada and the U.S. She is currently working with the General Motors Foundation to launch an employee volunteer program in Latin America.
Brinkman will present her paper at the 2003 Academy of Management conference in Seattle. Her advisor was Professor Bobbi Low.
Honorable Mentions
Because of the number of quality papers received, two honorable mentions were awarded for the following papers:
Wireless Handsets on the Hook, a team paper by Elizabeth Givens, Maile Jedinsky, Heidi Natkin, Rachel Payne, and Marcella Kanfer Rolnick from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Their focus is the hundreds of millions of wireless handsets that are discarded annually with significant environmental and health implications. The paper (1) analyzes various corporate recycling and "cradle to grave" production models, and (2) makes recommendations on how Motorola can lead the industry in economically and socially responsible handset production while tapping into a vast and profitable market for handset sales in the developing world.
The group wrote this paper for their Corporate Social Responsibility Class, and all authors are graduating in 2004 with their MBAs. External Pressure, Internal Change: The Importance of Monitoring the Establishment of Industry Norms, by Dima Reda from Yale School of Management. The aim of this paper is to present the importance of combining an understanding of individual corporate behavior with the external context in which companies make decisions.
Reda graduated in 2003 with a joint degree from Yale School of Management and the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. She hopes to pursue economic development work in the Middle East.
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