Brian W. Jacobs

Michigan State University | MSU · Eli Broad College of Business and The Eli Broad Graduate School of Management

Government trade actions are an increasing source of supply chain risk. This research provides empirical evidence of the stock market reaction to trade actions against a targeted firm on other firms in the targeted firm's supply chain eco‐system. We test our hypothesized stock price effects using the case of the 2018 US government ban on US firms f...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the effect of the September 2015 Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal on the stock prices of publicly traded firms in the global automotive ecosystem. We focus on both the supply chain partners of VW – tier‐1 suppliers; tier‐2 suppliers; and business customers – and three groups of firms that are not VW supp...

Problem definition: This paper provides empirical evidence on the effect of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake (GEJE) on the financial performance of firms. Academic/practical relevance: The GEJE was characterized as the most significant disruption ever for global supply chains. In its aftermath, there was a great deal of debate about the risks a...

Supply chain and reputational risks are often assumed to motivate firms to source production in developed, high-cost countries rather than developing, low-cost countries. To examine this assumption, we provide evidence from the collapse of the Rana Plaza building on April 24, 2013, which with its 1133 fatalities and 2438 injuries is seen as one of...

This article focuses on an important and emergent standard for sustainable operations management: the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification. Unlike similar certifications, its focus is on the entire upstream supply chain, reflecting the criticality of supply chain management to ensure sustainable products. We investigate the financial impa...

Operations managers confront the challenge of deciding when to implement various administrative innovations such as Six Sigma, ISO 9000, and Lean. This research examines the operating performance effects of early versus late adoption of Six Sigma process improvement. Using theories of organizational learning and knowledge transfer, we develop hypot...

This article examines the effect of product development restructuring (PDR) on shareholder value. The results are based on a sample of 165 announcements made during 2002–2011. PDR announcements are associated with an economically and statistically significant positive stock market reaction. Over a two-day period (the day of the announcement and the...

The relationship between emissions reduction and firm financial performance has been studied with mixed results. We consider potential sources of this ambiguity by examining announcements of voluntary emission reduction (VER) from 1990 to 2009. We measure the stock market reaction associated with VER announcements to estimate the effects of time, e...

We assess the operational impacts of Six Sigma program adoptions through an event study methodology, comparing financial data for 200 Six Sigma adopting firms against data for matched firms, which serve as control groups for the analyses. We employ various matching procedures using different combinations of pre-adoption return on assets (ROA), indu...

Extended producer responsibility (EPR) programs typically hold the producer—a single actor defined by the regulator—responsible for the environmental impacts of end-of-life products. This is despite emphasis on the need to involve all actors in the supply chain in order to best achieve the aims of EPR. In this paper, we examine the economic and env...

Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) programs typically hold the producer - a single actor defined by the regulator - responsible for the environmental impacts of end-of-life products. This is despite emphasis on the need to involve all actors in the supply chain in order to best achieve the aims of EPR. In this paper, we examine the important ec...

This paper analyzes the shareholder value effects of environmental performance by measuring the stock market reaction associated with announcements of environmental performance. We examine the market reaction to two categories of environmental performance. The first category includes 417 announcements of Corporate Environmental Initiatives (CEIs) t...

The concepts of synchronous manufacturing look deceptively simple on paper. It appears obvious on the surface that when manufacturing operations are dependent upon one another, then the slowest operation will determine the pace of the combined operations.Theory is one thing. Learning to really get a complex manufacturing and assembly system to work...

Operations strategies, whether prompted by competitive or regulatory forces, can greatly impact firm performance. While operations strategies cover a wide spectrum of issues - supply chain management, technology choice, capacity allocation, etc. - this dissertation focuses on two such issues, namely, sustainability and product development. The thes...