News & Events

In a year when MBA applications plunged at just about every U.S. business school, the Jones Graduate School of Business experienced a surge – joining the University of Chicago as the only Top 25 MBA programs that increased applications. Of course, Rice has long been an ascendant program. It is the Southeastern sparkplug with grand ambitions, never satisfied and always evolving. In the process, Jones has increasingly lived up to the larger university’s “Ivy of the South” reputation.

Over two-thirds of all mergers fail, with the failures blamed on post-merger issues such as execution gaps, lack of cultural alignment and integration problems. Closer scrutiny of failed mergers and acquisitions in the oil and gas industry paints a different story. It appears CEOs and board members often create the conditions for failure by ignoring the most critical stakeholder, the customer, and instead focusing on cost cutting and efficiency as the primary source of shareholder value.

Major oil companies are seriously looking into low-carbon energy sources, said energy management professor Bill Arnold at Rice University. And it’s no longer just for PR reasons like in the past. “Developing wind power, electric vehicle recharging stations,” Arnold said. “But I think what they try to do is to say where do we actually have known skillsets right now and how can we apply them that’s compatible with this new interest.”

Utpal Dholakia, the chair of marketing at Rice University who specializes in pricing strategies, noted that analyzing tweets about crypto to invest in crypto could contribute to a cycle, making it easy for traders to drive up prices.“Crypto are niche markets, they are made up of a specialized group of investors and participants,” he said.

In a new study from Rice University, researchers found the outcome of presidential elections at the county level from 1992 to 2016 were directly influenced by stock market performance. The researchers unearthed this gem of a stat: a one-percentage-point higher dividend income ratio is associated with an increase in incumbent vote share by 2.4 percentage points.

New academic research finds that the market has a measurable influence on how people who own shares vote -- potentially a big one. The study, which compared electoral preferences with levels of dividend income, suggests that had stocks rallied instead of plunging in 2008, John McCain may have won key states like Florida and Ohio.