Kristine Beck

Kristine Beck

Kristine Beck is a finance scholar at California State University, Northridge. In 2008, while at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, she co-wrote with Bruce Niendorf Good to Great, or Just Good?, published in Academy of Management Perspectives. The paper studied the eleven companies that Jim Collins's book Good to Great had presented as examples of sustained excellence. This site cites it in its discussion of the halo effect.

Who she is

A California State University, Northridge announcement of 18 September 2013 introduced Dr. Kristine L. Beck, Ph.D. from Florida State University, as an assistant professor in its Finance, Financial Planning and Insurance Department. It said she had taught at the University of Denver and the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, where she also directed the Wisconsin Financial Services Institute. The Oshkosh news release of 17 November 2008 called her and Niendorf two of its business professors, and the 2021 paper on postsecondary education lists her at Northridge.

Her later published work is empirical finance. She is the first author of a 2021 study in the American Journal of Business, with James Chong and Niendorf, on whether a strong corporate reputation brings better investment returns. It uses the Harris Poll Reputation Quotient, which rates the reputations of the 100 most visible companies, to build portfolios by decile and category, rebalanced each year, and measures them with risk-adjusted statistics including Jensen's alpha and the Sharpe ratio. The abstract reports that the portfolio of the highest-ranked firms outperformed the market on a risk-adjusted basis and that returns rose roughly in step with ranking.

She was also one of four authors, with Moll, Kunkel and Niendorf, of a 2018 event study of investment companies' market capitalisation around two changes in fiduciary policy, which found a large decrease in the first and a large increase in the second.

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 Oshkosh release of June 2009 says the article was translated into Dutch and reprinted in the June 2009 issue of the Holland Management Review, and that Beck and Niendorf wrote a second paper, Good to Great or Great Data Mining?, on the problems with data mining and on financial risk, a topic the book does not address. It was announced for the Journal of Financial Education.

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 the best added about $1,694,086 in lifetime value and the least valuable bachelor's combination about $378,466.

Sources

  1. 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.
  2. University of Wisconsin Oshkosh news release on the paper, 17 November 2008.
  3. University of Wisconsin Oshkosh news item of June 2009 on the paper and its follow-up.
  4. California State University, Northridge, college news item of 18 September 2013: her post, doctorate and earlier appointments.
  5. Moll, C. R., Kunkel, R. A., Beck, K. L., & Niendorf, B. D. (2018). "How Do Investment Companies Fare Under Obama and Trump Fiduciary Rules?" Journal of Accounting and Finance, 18(7). doi:10.33423/jaf.v18i7.462.
  6. Niendorf, B. D., & Beck, K. L. (2021). "The Financial Value of Postsecondary Education." Journal of Accounting and Finance, 21(5). doi:10.33423/jaf.v21i5.4826.
  7. 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. doi:10.1108/ajb-06-2021-0070.
  8. The article that cites the paper: "What is the halo effect?".