Jordan Siegel

Jordan Siegel is a Professor of Strategy at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business. Professor Siegel is also a Research Fellow at the William Davidson Institute and an Associate-in-Research at the Harvard Korea Institute of the Harvard Asia Center.

Professor Siegel specializes in the study of how companies gain competitive advantage through their global strategy. Professor Siegel finds that there are numerous opportunities for companies to attain superior sustainable corporate performance through creative strategies for corporate governance and human resource management.

A set of studies written by Professor Siegel explores how companies borrow, leverage, and arbitrage institutions across borders as a means of attaining long-term competitive advantage. By institutions Professor Siegel refers to the formal and informal rules of the game that affect companies’ competitive behavior and resource access. Formal institutions include corporate, securities, and bankruptcy law; informal institutions include a society’s cultural stance toward meritocracy and egalitarianism. (While a thorough list of rules of the game might be near-infinite, Professor Siegel concentrates on those that directly affect governance of companies.) The main idea is that companies — even single-country-focused companies — exhibit a surprising ability to attain competitive advantage via their choices of other countries’ institutions.

Another set of studies written by Professor Siegel and his coauthors shows that companies can make their approach to the labor market a core component of their competitive advantage. The goal has been to examine whether the hiring and promotion of female managers leads to improved corporate performance, whether foreign multinationals disproportionately engage in the hiring and promotion of female managers, and whether foreign multinationals act differently in the hiring and promotion of senior female managers in Japan and South Korea compared to what they do at home. Overall, the results show that foreign multinationals have been the most active in both Japan and South Korea in exploiting the social bias and hiring and promoting women to senior management positions. Professor Siegel and his coauthors argue based on panel analysis with company fixed effects, and based on systematically ruling out alternative explanations, that the aggressive application of this outsider’s advantage has led to demonstrable improvements in performance over time for foreign multinationals in Japan and South Korea. Moreover, this source of competitive advantage is not short-lived, but appears to be as much as a decade-long opportunity.

Professor Siegel’s work has been published in Administrative Science Quarterly, Management Science, Organization Science, the Strategic Management Journal, the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of International Business Studies, the Journal of Comparative Economics, and the Journal of Economic Literature.