HEC in the press

Sina Finance met up with HEC Paris finance professor Johan Hombert for its "Talking about Europe" section. In the interview, Johan Hombert explains how financial markets might look like in 2021, if Bitcoin's price will continue to rise and when the European economy might recover from the Covid-19 crisis. 

As GameStop’s share price falls back down, Business Because has asked business school professors whether Wall Street Bets’ bid to take on the establishment could be the start of a new impact investing social movement. 

Johan Hombert, professor of finance at HEC Paris, believes that day trading may have had its day. Ultimately, short term trading is a zero-sum game. “When one of the traders is an individual investor and the other trader is a hedge fund, guess what happens. Hedge funds have more resources and better information, so they are better able to predict short-term movements in stock prices,” he says. “As a result, more often than not, retail day traders' losses are hedge funds' gains."

Impact. It’s a word that comes up often when you speak with the newly named Dean of HEC Paris, a world-class business school and one of Europe’s finest institutions of higher education. Eloïc Peyrache, who assumed the top leadership role on Jan. 18th after serving as the interim dean, knows the school well, writes Poets & Quants. 

New research by Georg Wernicke, HEC Paris Assistant Professor of Strategy & Business Policy and member of the school’s Society & Organizations Institute, suggests that CEOs do hold considerable sway – for better or for worse, writes Brazilian daily Valor Economico. 

Large-scale study links CEO influence to a 30% difference in firms’ performances in the areas of social responsibility – a finding that informs the debate over the power and leeway of senior executives in general and for corporate social responsibility in specific.

The so-called “CEO effect” is hard to measure in reality, because of the confluence of other factors – cash flow, external pressures, market conditions and so on – that can also shape and determine results.

But new research just published in the The Academy of Management by Georg Wernicke, HEC Paris Assistant Professor of Strategy & Business Policy and member of the school’s Society & Organizations Institute, suggests that CEOs do in fact hold considerable sway – for better or for worse, writes Wealth and Society. 

Private equity firms with the most recognizable brand names tend to raise huge funds and make mega deals, grabbing the headlines. But scale and size do not necessarily equate to top performance among peers, according to Oliver Gottschalg, a professor at HEC School of Management in Paris, who founded the HEC-Dow Jones Private Equity Performance Ranking, writes S&P Global. 

Alberto Alemanno, EU law professor at HEC Paris, discusses Mario Draghi forming a new Italian government and what the government might look like. He speaks on “Bloomberg Markets: European Open.”

Business school admissions directors, consultants and academics share their advice with the Financial Times. “We believe that our alumni know best who will succeed on our MBA. That’s the reason we put our ultimate trust in our past students.”, says Benoit Banchereau, executive director of admissions for MBA programmes for HEC Paris. 

In France, HEC Paris resisted calls to cut its tuition fees. Instead it offered free access to executive education programmes, for example, as well as more flexible fee schedules for some students, giving more time to pay, writes the Financial Times.  “Most importantly, we made absolutely no concessions regarding the academic quality and rigour of the programme,” says Andrea Masini, HEC’s associate dean of MBA programmes. “This was the best guarantee for our graduates that the value of their diploma would remain unchanged in spite of the crisis.”

Michael Segalla, a professor of management and human resources at HEC Paris, suggests that a lack of face-to-face interaction has deprived employees of important psychological rewards, like validation and approval, writes Business Because. 

A study Michael carried out last year showed that firms should be focusing on employee health and happiness during the pandemic rather than labor costs and customer experiences.