UVA Darden’s Hachem Named 2020 Best 40 Under 40 MBA Professor by Poets & Quants

University of Virginia Darden School of Business Professor Kinda Hachem, who joined the School’s faculty in 2018, was named to Poets & Quants’ list of 2020 Best 40 Under 40 MBA Professors.

The annual list aims to “identify young business school faculty from around the globe, educators who have demonstrated research acumen, teaching prowess, and impact on students, former students, their colleagues and administrators,” according to the business school-focused publication.

For Hachem, the award comes in large part due to the indelible mark she leaves on students, which was reflected in their support for her nomination for the award.

When we sent a questionnaire asking Kinda Hachem what she thought made her stand out as a professor, she responded with, “You’ll have to ask my students.” We didn’t need to do that as more than 50 students from the University of Virginia Darden School of Business reached out on their own accord to let us know what sets Hachem, 36, apart from the other world-class teaching faculty at Darden.

“Kinda breaks down even the most complicated economics topics so that everyone an understand it,” enthused one grateful recommender. “She is an expert at leading the class and moderating the discussion which could be really tough given that Darden uses the case method. Even though she has been at Darden for only two years, she has mastered leading the case. In addition, the depth and breadth of her knowledge is remarkable.”

Said another admiring MBA student, “Kinda actually loves to teach. It is her first and foremost love, one that is exudes out of her as she explains economic concepts in three different fashions because she knows there’s at least one student sitting in her class who it won’t click for until the third time.”

Hachem is also a prolific researcher, which helped earn a spot as a Best 40 Under 40 Professor thanks to her examination of topics such as the unintended consequences of financial regulations and shadow banking in China. Poets & Quants asked her to describe her current research and most important discovery.

I’ve become fascinated by the unintended consequences of regulation, particularly financial regulation. There is a lot of research on bank capital requirements, but the liquidity problems experienced during the 2007-09 financial crisis have ushered in a new era of liquidity regulation. My co-author Michael Song and I have delved into these issues and found that an aggregate credit boom can be born out of stricter liquidity regulation. This is a striking result; it’s not that the regulation can be ineffective, it’s that the regulation can be entirely counter-productive. We isolate interbank market power as the key to understanding this result and present a quantitative application to illustrate the practical relevance of the mechanisms in our model. Our results portend an important lesson for policy-makers, namely that tightening liquidity standards when the central bank does not target short-term interest rates (e.g., in countries with managed exchange rates) can have severely unintended consequences.

Read the full Best 40 Under 40 profile of Kinda Hachem on Poets & Quants.