Dick Marcus, Associate Professor and Chair of the Executive Committee at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Lubar School of Business

Office: S430F SBA Building

E-mail me at: marcus@uwm.edu

UWM Homepage: http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/Business/faculty/sbafaculty/marcus.html

My Homepage: http://www.uwm.edu/~marcus

Phones: office (414) 229-4103 or home (414) 228-7731

Our corporate economics class is designed to provide tools and arguments for thinking like an economist. We will explore a variety of social and policy issues with the mind of an economist. One book to help us toward this goal is The Economics of Public Policy. It examines diverse public policy issues from the price of water to the mystery of wealth. We will also intertwine behaviorial financial economics into the standard topics found in a course on microeconomics. We use just the first ten chapters of, Economics for Managers. This is a textbook that covers both macroeconomics and microeconomics, but we will concentrate on microeconomics. We will also read another book that offers a broad introduction into the psychological decision blunders we make, entitled Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistatkes. This book emphasizes traps in financial decision-making and it suggests ways for us to avoid these traps.

You already know that I prefer to use markets to allocate goods and services rather than rely on a benevolent government. Government blunders will appear in our topics as well as blunders by corporate executives. The issue of private accounts for social security or reliance on a purely governmental-sponsored defined benefit plan illustrates the tension between those who want to use markets, and those who do not believe that markets work. We will also explore IPOs, auctions, and some corporate control techniques.

I teach international finance and corporate economics. My research includes international market integration issues, international diversification, defaults, product recalls, and price discrimination. I am exploring competiton in underwriting of municipal bonds. I published an article in 2007 on Korean IPOs.

I enjoy being the the faculty advisor for the UWM Student Investment Club and the Parliamentarian for the UWM Faculty Senate. I am also the secretary of the George Washington 1776 Fund,which is involved in charitable activities. I am a member for many years of a monthly book club on fantasy called the Burrahobbits. For about six years, I have been singing in the Midwest Vocal Express (www.mve.org), which is an a cappella chorus. The 80-member chorus and I have competed in an international competitons in Montreal (2003), Louisville (2004), Salt Lake City (2005), Indianapolis (2006), and Denver (2007) placing among the top ten choruses in North America. We won fifth place in 2006. In July 2008, we will be competing in Nashville.

My wife, Kandy, is a former social worker that now battles multiple sclerosis. We have a daughter, who graduated from UWM in May 2007 and now lives in Watertown, New York.

I taught in the EMBA Program at Cleveland State University for several years before coming to UWM in 1985. Links to the two homepages listed above give more detail on my activities and publications, for the exceptionally curious.

Education:

A.B., Economics, University of Michigan

M.A., Economics, University of Chicago

M.S., Finance, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Ph.D., Economics, University of Chicago