The Institute for Business Innovation administers several fellowships that support coursework and research of Haas graduate students.
In the current academic year, the school selected the students listed below to benefit from three fellowships:
the Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowships, the Bradley Fellowships, and the Claire Goedinghaus Fellowships.
The Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund (Sylff)
The Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund, Sylff, is a collaborative initiative of The Nippon Foundation, the endowment donor, and The Tokyo Foundation, the program administrator. The Program contributes to support the education of outstanding students pursuing graduate level study in the social sciences and humanities with high potential for leadership. UC Berkeley administers the income from a generous endowment to grant Sylff fellowships to Haas PhD students. Many past Sylff fellows have become leaders in their fields, including our own Garwood Center Director, Professor Henry Chesbrough. Click here to read more about Sylff. Click here to read about past SYLFF fellows.
Current Sylff Fellows:
Yoonha Kim
Yoonha is a Ph.D. candidate in the Business and Public Policy department at the Haas School of Business. Her research interest lies in the intersection of personnel economics and entrepreneurship. One part of her research studies how firms can improve their hiring and compensation strategies. Particularly, she investigates how an array of frictions in the labor market prevent firms from attracting and motivating the most productive employees. Since these evaluations must consider the decision of individuals to either start new businesses or work as salaried employees, another part of her research evaluates the motivations to become an entrepreneur. In her dissertation, she investigates what shape differential patterns of small business formation across subgroups of the population by studying the experience of immigrant entrepreneurs who, because of their linguistic-cultural differences, had failed to find a good match with existing firms and opened their own business.
Sibo Lu
Sibo is a fourth year PhD student at Haas School who is studying Business and Public Policy. She was previously the Program Associate in Economics at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Her current research focus is on dynamic learning and decision making under uncertainty, in settings such as strategic games, online labor markets, and voting.
Moshe Barach
Moshe is a Business and Public Policy Ph.D. candidate at the Haas School of Business. His research focuses on labor economics, behavioral economics, and organizational economics. He works on market design and efficient match making within the context of online labor markets. He has studied how market designers can induce better match making by artificially limiting the number of match requests users can send. This method has the potential downside of limiting supply, but by balancing labor supply against the quality of the matches a market designer can create a healthy marketplace. Moshe has also studied the use of a money back guarantee as both a signal of quality as well as a means of shifting risks from the employer to the platform.
Laura Boudreau 
Laura Boudreau is a second year PhD student at Haas School who is studying Business and Public Policy. Laura’s research interests are shaped by her professional background in and personal passion for international development. Since coming to Haas, Laura has begun to explore how public policy, particularly pertaining to social and environmental issues, and globalization impact individuals and households as well as firms and markets in developing countries. Laura is also conducting research on political economy and economic development, particularly in the context of middle-income countries.
Yujin Kim
Yujin is a Ph.D. candidate in the Business and Public Policy department at the Haas School of Business. Her research focuses on innovation, entrepreneurship and strategy. Her job market paper studies the role of institutions on the novelty of innovation originated by entrepreneurial firms. In the context of the Orphan Drug Act (ODA), an act originally aimed to facilitate the development of treatments for rare diseases, her research reveals that the Act reduces the uncertainty and information asymmetry problem associated with commercialization of novel innovations. The positive externality of ODA encourages innovating startups and incumbent firms to collaboratively bring novel orphan drugs to treat more general diseases beyond a group of rare diseases. The findings suggest that an external environment affects the direction of technologies that small innovators decide to commercialize, thereby reducing market inefficiency against novel innovations. She also studies heterogeneous investment strategies of corporate venture capitalists across diverse industry fields.
Oren Reshef
Oren is a student in the Business & Public Policy department at the Haas School of Business. His current research interests are incentives in government procurement and regulation. Specifically, he works on the mitigation of asymmetric information problems in insurance markets, through feedback mechanisms, and in economies of scale. Oren is also interested in industrial organization, behavioral and labor economics, and estimating the effectiveness of public policies.
Aisling Scott 
Aisling is a fourth year Ph.D. student in the Business and Public Policy department of the Haas School of Business. Her research interests lie in development, financial decisions, and entrepreneurship. She is working on a project that examines lottery-linked savings accounts in Mexico. These prize linked accounts tie the probability of winning a prize to a function of one’s savings. A future part of this research will examine how quickly the winners in Mexico spend their money. The findings will contribute to the body of empirical knowledge on the financial decisions of the poor. Previously, Aisling worked for the Kauffman Foundation on entrepreneurship research.
Santiago Truffa
Santiago Truffa is working on his job market paper “Sorting Urban Inequality.” The main question he investigates is what determines the distribution of talent across space and what are the consequences this can have over wages and housing prices. He builds an urban-‐macro model where workers of different skills can sort across cities and jobs seeking the highest return for their human capital. He explores the physical features of cities that explain the mobility of human capital and their implications on aggregate productivity and inequality. He calibrate the model using micro data from the CPS and use it to understand the role of skill sorting in explaining aggregate wage inequality and to assess the general equilibrium effects of place-‐based policies.
Yuqian Wang
Yuquian is a third year Ph.D. Student in the Business and Public Policy department at Haas School of Business interested in conducting research in industrial organization. Recently, he developed a theoretical model to study the impact of an information clearinghouse on firm strategy and consumer welfare, when firms exhibit different levels of productivity. He studies the equilibria and firm selection that results in two cases: free and costly entry into the clearinghouse. After examining the impact of new information sources on consumer behavior, Yuqian intends to assess the empirical validity of his model’s predictions.
The Bradley Fellowship Program is part of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation interest in strengthening America’s intellectual infrastructure at the higher-education level. In providing assistance to young scholars during a critical phase in their education, Bradley Fellowships make it possible for doctoral candidates and post-doctoral fellows to complete their studies, prepare drafts for publication, conduct research, and enhance their competitiveness in the job market.
website: //www.bradleyfdn.org/What-We-Do/Special-Initiatives/Bradley-Fellows
Current Bradley Fellows:
Abjay Aneja
The project (with Carlos Avenancio, and his advisor Christopher Palmer in Real Estate) seeks to examine the impact of the criminal justice system on access to credit. We’ve tentatively negotiated an agreement with a credit ratings bureau for them to match court data that we’ve collected/cleaned with credit histories.
Hyo Kang
This project studies the effect of competition on different types of investment and innovation. One stream of theory on competition and innovation suggests that monopolistic firms do not have incentive to innovate (“Arrow”). On the other hand, another set of theory argues that market power promotes innovation (“Schumpeterian”). It is thus an empirical question which of the two opposing effects dominates and what the mechanisms are. To the extent that competition affects firm investment and innovation (either positively or negatively), the findings have important implications that have been overlooked. Furthermore, the project will will distinguish between two different types of innovation activities – competence-enhancing innovations vs. competence-destroying innovations (a la Tushman and Anderson, 1986) – which could explain the opposing views (Arrow v. Schumpeterian) on the causal relationship between competition and innovation.
Aisling Scott
My goal is to build on and add to the growing body of knowledge being developed around institutional analysis. My work includes a lab experiment in the United States, a field experiment in Mexico, and a partnership with firm to answer interesting questions. For my lab experiment, I seek to examine which environments and characteristics increase trust and reciprocity. My paper in Mexico focuses on incentives for savings. We offer a lottery attached to a savings account as a short-term incentive to induce savings. We observe that a short-term incentive of lotteries has long-term impact on the savings of individuals who open accounts due to the lottery. My last paper focuses on statistical inferences in marketing. We investigate the experimentation processes for companies conducting A/B tests to decide which website to employ. We use the p-values generated by the different experiments to test when experimenters decide to stop experiments. Through this analysis we expect to shed knowledge on how experimenters make use of statistical information, and how the display and generation of information helps to alleviate false positive results and other incorrect results. There has been significant focus in academia recently on the doctoring or misuse of experimental result, a practice that has received the nickname p-hacking. There is little analysis, however, of how a large-scale platform for experiments impacts the industry.
Santiago Truffa
The main question addressed in this project is what determines the distribution of talent across space and what are the consequences this can have over wages and housing prices. The project includes an urban-‐macro model where workers of different skills can sort across cities and jobs seeking the highest return for their human capital. The research explores the physical features of cities that explain the mobility of human capital and their implications on aggregate productivity and inequality. The model is calibrated using micro data from the CPS to understand the role of skill sorting in explaining aggregate wage inequality and to assess the general equilibrium effects of place-‐based policies.
Claire Goedinghaus Fellows
The Claire Goedinghaus Fellowship Fund was established in 1994 to improve the understanding of US firm performance in the global economy. The fellowship terms stipulate that selection among Berkeley-Haas graduate students would be based on academic merit, and that women would be given special consideration.
Past Goedinghaus Fellow:
Sibo Lu
Sibo is a PhD student at Haas School who is studying Business and Public Policy. She was previously the Program Associate in Economics at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Her current research focus is on dynamic learning and decision making under uncertainty, in settings such as strategic games, online labor markets, and voting.