Essec Business School

ESSEC welcomes new professors for the 2022-2023 academic year, joining the departments of marketing, management, economics, public and private policy, and information systems, decision sciences and statistics.

Pierre Alquier, Informations Systems, Decision Sciences, and Statistics, January 2023

Dr. Alquier will join the ESSEC Asia-Pacific campus in Singapore in January 2023 as part of the IDS department. Previously, he was a research scientist at the RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project in Tokyo (2019-2022), Professor at ENSAE Paris (2014-2019), Lecturer at University College Dublin (2012-2014), Assistant Professor at Université Paris Diderot (2007-2012). He received his PhD from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in 2006. His research interests include high-dimensional statistics, machine learning, aggregation of estimators, and Bayesian methods. He edited the book "Inverse Problems and High-Dimensional Estimation" with G. Stoltz and E. Gautier, Springer, 2011, is associate editor of Journal of Machine Learning Research (since 2020), and of Transactions in Machine Learning Research (since 2022), and is Area Chair/senior PC chair for some of the major conferences in machine learning, including COLT, ALT, NeurIPS and AISTATS.

Pierre Bachas, Finance, January 2023

Dr. Pierre Bachas will be joining the Department of Finance as Assistant Professor. He is an applied economist interested in public finance and household finance with a focus on developing countries. His research investigates how some of the large changes of the past decades such as globalization, and the introduction of new information and payment technologies have impacted inequality, taxes and transfers, and financial inclusion. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from UC Berkeley and worked for several years at the Research Department of the World Bank. 

Diego Delle Donne, Informations Systems, Decision Sciences, and Statistics, September 2022 

Dr. Delle Donne got a computer science degree at the University of Buenos Aires (Faculty of Natural and Exact Sciences), Argentina in 2009 and a PhD in Computer Sciences at the same university in 2016. His main research interests cover topics around combinatorial optimization, applied mathematics, linear integer programming and graph theory. He is also very interested in applied real-life projects concerning these topics. 

Since September 2022, he has held a tenure-track Assistant Professor position at ESSEC Business School of Paris (IDS department), in France. Previously, he was Assistant Professor at the National University of General Sarmiento (Argentina) where he taught courses for the Bachelor in Computer Systems degree, and a part-time teacher at the School of Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires. For the last few years, he  has been working on a project focused on the development of optimization algorithms for a Last Mile Delivery problem which tries to profit from the public transport capacity surplus on non-peak hours for its use in freight delivery within the city. In particular, the project aims to reduce CO2 emissions and traffic in big cities.

Sam Garg, Management, January 2023 

 Dr. Sam Garg (PhD, Stanford University) will be joining the Department of Management as Associate Professor. Previously, he was the Liwei Huang Associate Professor of Business (Entrepreneurship and Strategy) at HKUST Business School in Hong Kong, where he was also the co-director of the elite interdisciplinary program BIBU (Biotech in Business). He has also held visiting appointments at INSEAD and Singapore Management University.

Sam is involved in the startup community, and regularly lends support to governance initiatives such as those that advocate for women on boards and in leadership positions. He serves on the inaugural academic advisory board/discussion circle of Stewardship Asia Center, a key think tank of Temasek (Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund). Before joining academia, Sam worked with established and up-and-coming entrepreneurial firms, and was also a founder-CEO of an online payments venture.

Sam's research focus is at the intersection of governance and high growth technology firms, and he has published pioneering work in the areas of venture boards and venture governance. His current research focuses on effective board processes in privately-held technology ventures, and effective board leadership structures when these ventures scale-up and transition into public-listed firms. His research contexts have included internet firms, fintech, solar, and medical devices. He is an Associate Editor of the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, an FT-50 journal, and serves on the editorial boards of several other top academic journals in management and entrepreneurship.

Sam is an award-winning scholar and teacher. He has taught at undergraduate, masters, doctoral and senior executive levels. He is invited regularly to speak at conferences for technology executives, investors and board members. He co-authored the book "Inspire to Innovate: Management and Innovation in Asia", which was published by Palgrave MacMillan and was a finalist for the Management Consulting Association (UK) Best Management Book Award.

Raoul Kubler, Marketing, September 2022 

Raoul Kubler received his Ph.D. in Marketing from Kiel University in 2012, and was previously Assistant Professor of Marketing at Özyeğin University in Istanbul (2012 - 2018) and Junior Professor of Marketing and Marketing Analytics at WWU Münster (2018 - 2022). He has also held guest professorships at University of Geneva (2013 - 2018), UvA, and VU Amsterdam. Prior to working in academia, he worked in the ad industry for over 10 years, as a consultant for international brands such as PepsiCo, Amazon, and Deezer. 

He is fascinated by everything digital, with a strong interest in harvesting insights from user-generated content through machine learning and AI and helping marketing managers make better decisions based on insights from user-generated content, lately working on the impact of the metaverse on the business world and exploring the connection between social networks and digital communication on society at large. Currently, he is working on two studies that focus on the dynamics of disinformation and how fake news affects political preferences and voting behavior, as well as a study on using tweets to measure stress and psychological well-being, to trace and measure the impact of lockdowns on different parts of society. His earlier work explored the impact of cultural background on marketing sensitivities and impact of corporate unethical behaviour on marketing sensitivities. 

Since 2018, Dr. Kubler has been ranked amongst the Top 10% of German-speaking business professors according to research output in A and A+ journals. He was also winner of the 2020 best paper award of the Interactive Marketing Research Conference and of the 2018 Marketing Science Institute’s (MSI) Most Downloaded Research Paper Award.

Guillaume Lecué, Informations Systems, Decision Sciences, and Statistics, September 2022

Guillaume Lecué graduated from Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan, France, and received an M.Sc. in applied mathematics from Université Paris XI - Orsay, France, in 2005. He received a Ph.D. in statistics at Université Paris VI - Jussieu, France, in 2007. In 2008, he went to the Mathematical Science Institute in Canberra, Australia and later at the Technion, Haifa, Israel as a Postdoc. He completed his habilitation degree in 2008 at the Laboratoire d'analyse et mathématiques appliquées, Université Paris-Est Marne-la-vallée, France. 

He is currently a full professor at ESSEC in the Department of Information Systems, Decision Sciences, and Statistics. His research interests are in the areas of learning theory, empirical process theory, high-dimensional phenomenons and deep learning. He taught at Ecole Polytechnique from 2012 to 2015 and at ENSAE (the national school of administration and statistics), France from 2015 to 2022.

Dr. Lecué received the "Mark Fulk award" for the best student paper at the 2006 Conference on Learning Theory, COLT06, Pittsburgh, PA and the "Prix de la chancellerie des Universités de Paris" for the best Ph.D. thesis in mathematics and its applications defended in Paris in 2007. He is the author of 45 research papers and a book. Since 2022, he is a fellow of the Institut Louis Bachelier.

 Giordano Mion, Economics, April 2022  

Giordano Mion is currently Professor of Economics at ESSEC Business School, France. Before joining ESSEC in 2022, Giordano Mion was a Professor at the University of Sussex (2015-2022) and at the University of Surrey (2013-2015), a Lecturer at the London School of Economics (2009-2013), as well as post-doctoral fellow at the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium (2005-2008) from which he received a PhD in Economics in 2004. He was also a visiting scholar at the Paris School of Economics, University of Toronto and University of Bologna. Past research awards include the Highly Cited Authors Award from the Journal of Urban Economics and the Mundell Prize from the Canadian Journal of Economics. He is currently a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Economic Geography as well as of Regional Science and Urban Economics.

He is currently a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) and The Productivity Institute (TPI) and is associated to the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) at the London School of Economics, the Center for Economic Studies and the Ifo Institute (CESifo), the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) and the Centre for Research on Globalisation and Economic Policy (GEP) at the University of Nottingham. His research and teaching focus on International Trade, Urban Economics and Applied Econometrics. He has published in international peer-reviewed journals including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of International Economics, the Journal of Urban Economics, the Economic Journal, the International Economic Review and the Review of Economics and Statistics. He has also conducted a number of studies and consultancies for the UK Trade and Investment agency, the UK Department for Transport, the UK Business and Investment agency and the European Central Bank.

Tommaso Ramus, Public and Private Policy, September 2022 

Dr. Ramos has a PhD in management from University of Bergamo. Previously, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at IESE Business School (Spain) and spent 9 years at Catolica Lisbon School of Business and Economics, first as Assistant Professor and then as Associate Professor in the areas of Social Innovation and Business Ethics. He is joining the Department of Public and Private Policy as Associate Professor. 

He is a qualitative scholar and studies how business organizations can drive positive change in society. His focus is on social enterprises and how they combine social value creation and wealth generation. In particular, he studies work integration enterprises, that is, enterprises that provide job opportunities to marginalized individuals and social enterprises that challenge mafia and illegal activities. Along these lines, he has recently launched three research projects. The first is about a UK-based social enterprise that provides job opportunities to ex offenders, in which he studies how they are growing and diversifying activities while remaining faithful to their original mission. The second project aims to study how different actors can collaborate to fight against the gangmaster system in the agricultural sector in Italy (that is, workers being illegally employed in the agricultural sector at very low wages). Third, he is working on a project that investigates how social enterprises that work on mafia confiscated assets collaborate in the agriculture industry. 

Roberto Reno, Information Systems, Decision Sciences, and Statistics, January 2023 

Dr. Reno holds an undergrad in Physics and a PhD in Mathematics from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa.  He works at the intersection of finance and economics and has published in top journals like Econometrica and  the Journal of Financial Economics. He is Associate Editor of Mathematical Finance and Journal of Financial Econometrics. Previously, he was full Professor of mathematical finance at the Università degli Studi di Verona, Associate Professor of mathematical finance at the Università degli Studi di Siena, and a Visiting Professor at the Carey Business School, Johns Hopkins University, USA. He will join ESSEC in January 2023 in the Department of Information Systems, Decision Sciences, and Statistics as a full professor, specializing in econometrics and data analytics.  

His research focuses on various aspects of finance, with specific contributions in asset pricing, volatility modeling and forecasting, and nonparametric statistics. He has published more than 40 research papers in leading finance, economics, econometrics, mathematics and physics journals.

Robert Stoumbos, Accounting and Management Control, September 2022 

Dr. Stoumbos began his career as a CPA in the United States. After that, he got his Ph.D. at Yale University, then worked for five years as Assistant Professor at Columbia Business School, in New York. 

In the past, much of his work focused on how capital markets use and respond to financial information. However, going forward his focus will be on studying accounting and financial reporting in unregulated settings, which are often historical. Financial reporting is heavily regulated, and Dr. Stoumbos believes that we lack a good understanding of the benefits and costs of this regulation. For example, people might think that without regulation, investors would receive little information, but his work shows that companies report earnings to investors and get audits of their financial statements even in the absence of any rule forcing them to do so. (See the following two working papers: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3757679 and https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3837593.)

His work has been published in prestigious journals such as the Review of Accounting Studies and Management Science. In 2021, he received the Midyear Meeting Best Paper Award from the American Accounting Association's Financial Accounting and Reporting Section for his paper "Learning to Disclose: Disclosure Dynamics in the 1890s Streetcar Industry" with coauthors Thomas Bourveau and Matthias Breuer. He is Chaired Professor of the Chair of Excellence in Financial Reporting.