The research - teaching disconnect in MBA education.

An opinion piece today in the Financial Times laments the disconnect between Management research and teaching.   It argues that

What is being taught in management courses is usually not based on solid scientific evidence. Instead, it concerns the generalisation of individual business cases or the lessons from popular management books.

While this may or may not be the case in some management disciplines, it is not the case in Finance.  I usually start off teaching Financial Management (our intro MBA class) by pointing out that we will cover 4 Nobel Prize winning theories.  I'll then draw much more recent research (including some of my own) into lectures.

For example: last week in my Investments class, we were talking about creating portfolios with short positions in foreign securities and I noted that US traded ADRs facilitate shorting in cases where their home countries have short sales bans - a topic of one of my current working papers.

While, there is frequently much hand wringing in the business press about the relevance of some content of MBA education, I think Finance is in pretty good shape.