Bruce Niendorf

Who he is

The University of Wisconsin Oshkosh news release of 17 November 2008 called him and Beck two of its business professors. The biography printed with his 2017 paper on study abroad lists a PhD in finance from Florida State University and says he teaches corporate finance at Oshkosh. The 2021 paper on the value of postsecondary education lists him at Oshkosh and Beck at California State University, Northridge.

His 2017 paper, written with the Oshkosh geographer Heike Alberts, studied a two-week study abroad programme in Germany. Using a test before and after the trip, the authors found that students' personal autonomy increased significantly. Business students gained significantly, while students in letters and sciences showed no significant change on any of the four cultural dimensions.

In 2018 he was one of four authors, with Moll, Kunkel and Beck, of an event study of investment companies' market capitalisation around two changes in fiduciary policy. The abstract reports a large decrease after the push to update the Department of Labor's fiduciary rule in 2015 and a large increase after the 2016 election, which it describes as signalling a rollback of regulation.

Key papers

Niendorf, B., & Beck, K. (2008). Good to Great, or Just Good? Academy of Management Perspectives, 22(4), 13 to 20. doi:10.5465/amp.2008.35590350.

The university's release reports that when ranked with the 2006 Fortune 500 the eleven firms had an average ranking of 202nd, that Circuit City, one of the eleven, had recently filed for bankruptcy, and that the firms' long-term stock returns did not differ significantly from the average of the S&P 500. It quotes the authors' conclusion that the firms may be good but are not great. A later release, of June 2009, describes a second paper by the authors on data mining and financial risk.

Niendorf, B. D., & Beck, K. L. (2021). The Financial Value of Postsecondary Education. Journal of Accounting and Finance, 21(5). The study examines 115 Wisconsin degree and school combinations and reports that even the least valuable bachelor's combination added about $378,466 in lifetime value over a high school diploma, and that every combination outperformed the long-term average return of the United States stock market.

Beck, K. L., Chong, J., & Niendorf, B. D. (2021). Investment returns from reputation investing: do good firms provide good returns? American Journal of Business, 37(3), 109 to 119. The authors build portfolios from the Harris Poll Reputation Quotient and report that the highest-ranked firms outperformed the market on a risk-adjusted basis.

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