HEC in the press

Short sellers appear to be using rhetorical strategies inspired by 2,370-year-old Aristotelian philosophy based on the triangular model of ethos, pathos and logos, write HEC Paris Professors Luc Paugam and Hervé Stolowy, in an op-ed for Forbes. 

The EU’s energy right now should be directed toward getting needles in arms, not building castles in the air. If there’s one thing that could actually delay a vaccination campaign, it’s this kind of debate, argues Alberto Alemanno, a law professor at French business school HEC, in an interview with Bloomberg. It creates incentives to fake certificates or cut the vaccine line.

Universities are keen to resume in-person teaching, but the new, more contagious coronavirus variant means lockdown policies are likely to remain in place for some time. "It is complicated to know what the future will be, but if the situation allows, we would love to resume our academic and extra-academic activities," said Marcelle Laliberté, the dean of students at the HEC Paris business school, in an interview with the BBC. 

After a four-month international search, HEC Paris has chosen to make its interim Dean Eloïc Peyrache the winner of a process that led to five final candidates for its deanship.

Peyrache, who has been a professor of economics at HEC Paris for nearly 18 years, competed against one other unidentified internal candidate as well as three from outside the school, emerging as “a clear favorite” by a 12-member recruitment committee assisted by the search firm Korn Ferry, writes Poets & Quants. 

According to Alberto Alemanno, professor of European law at HEC Paris, "Merkel deserves recognition for having kept the EU together and afloat through numerous major crises, but her leadership has never been driven by genuine European interest but rather by German interests", he says in an interview with El Pais. 

In a pioneering study of 104 German chief executives facing the dramatic expansion of the European Union in 2004 to include many former communist countries, some of the 104 CEOs predicted it would bolster their firms while others said it would hurt their prospects, according to a study by Nils Plambeck of HEC Paris Business School and Northwestern University’s Klaus Weber, writes the Boston Globe. A third group, however, saw the enlargement of the European bloc as potentially both positive and negative; they were unsure of the ultimate outcome. When the researchers returned more than a year later to see how the executives had fared, they found to their surprise that the deep ambivalence popularly equated with paralysis had had the opposite effect. 

France is currently lagging far behind other European nations with its Covid-19 vaccine rollout, which could potentially hurt the re-election chances of president Macron. In an interview with CNBC, HEC Paris economics Professor Jeremy Ghez said that the French economy is under anaesthesia and it’s only when you pull the fiscal plug that you will truly know how quickly economic actors can rebound. According to him, it this happens quickly, he likes Macron’s chances because there are so few alternatives as of today. If it does not, he would argue that all bets are off. 

A chance to help run the iconic American jeweler Tiffany & Co has catapulted Alexandre Arnault into the luxury world’s top echelons. The 28-year-old son of French billionaire Bernard Arnault was thrust into the limelight on Thursday with a key role at Tiffany, after LVMH completed its $16 billion takeover -- the luxury industry’s biggest.

According to Philippe Pele-Clamour, adjunct professor at business school HEC Paris, “Bernard Arnault is building a fair process between the Arnault siblings by testing them,” he says in an interview with Bloomberg. 

Should the ECB enter the fight against climate change? Not without a precise doctrine, write HEC Paris finance Professor Augustin Landier and MIT Sloan School of Management.finance professor David Thesmar in an op-ed for The Banker. 

Every December for the last few years, Poets&Quants has asked deans and others at the top B-schools around the world to share their plans for the coming year. This year, after the trauma of a worldwide pandemic and its economic reverberations, as well as the resounding cultural repercussions of racial reckoning in the United States, more were eager to share their visions for the coming year than ever before. 

At HEC Paris, Interim Dean Eloïc Peyrache hopes his school and others will “unleash the magic,” making sure that they are “part of the solution.” “We will do so,” he says, “by investing even more in research” to help “change the world, be it around AI, climate change, or new modes of leadership.”