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Dan Gropper is Associate Dean for MBA Programs and David and Meredith Luck Professor in the College of Business at Auburn University. He also has a joint appointment as Associate Dean in the College of Liberal Arts. He earned his degrees from the University of Maryland and Florida State University. Prior to coming to Auburn in 1988, he worked for the Florida Public Service Commission and for the consulting firm of Economic Research Services, in Tallahassee, Florida.
Dr. Gropper's economic philosophy is grounded in the classical notion that free markets and competition are a generally superior means of organizing economic activity, because of the moral superiority of voluntary exchange, and also because of the unique ability of free markets to generate price signals that provide information and motivation to market participants. An example of his teaching along these lines can be found in this "fish story" video discussing how free market exchanges promote the interests of all involved, and peacefully coordinate the actions of people across countries and cultures. These ideas are laid out with great clarity in the classic "I, Pencil" by Leonard Read, published in 1958. One of the great champions of free markets is Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, who is shown here interviewed by Phil Donahue.
While at Auburn, Dr. Gropper
has taught courses in Money and Banking, Political Economy, Introductory and
Advanced Macroeconomics, Managerial Economics and Economic Strategy. He
has taught in the undergraduate, MBA, Executive MBA, and doctoral programs.
An award winning teacher, Dr. Gropper has served as a consultant to private
firms and government agencies, primarily in regards to compensation and other
personnel issues. He is past chair of
the University Senate Salaries Committee, and was a founding member of Auburn
University’s Diversity Leadership Council. A
Weaver Fellow of the
Intercollegiate Studies Institute, he is also a member of
Mensa, Phi Kappa Phi,
and a variety of other academic honorary societies.
He is listed in Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in American Education, and
his initial administrative appointment was as Director of the MBA Program in September of 1995.
During his administrative tenure, Auburn’s MBA program offerings have grown
extensively, adding an Executive MBA in 1998, a Physician’s Executive MBA in
1999, a custom corporate MBA program for Jostens in Minneapolis,
Minnesota, in 2002, and a custom MBA program for Pratt & Whitney in Columbus,
Georgia in 2006.
Professor Gropper’s
research on financial institutions has focused on issues related to
institutional efficiency, scale and
scope economies, agency costs, and government
regulation. The overarching results of these studies indicate that
deregulation and greater competition generally work to improve productivity and
reduce agency costs. This work has appeared in a variety of academic journals, including the
Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Review of Economics and Statistics, the
Journal of Banking and Finance, Applied Financial Economics, Applied
Economics, Managerial and Decision Economics, and the
Journal of Business and Economic Statistics. His most recent work with Steve Caudill and Valentina
Hartarska on microfinance institutions is forthcoming in the Journal of
Money, Credit and Banking, and another paper is available from the working paper
series of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan and on
the SSRN. The promise of microfinance is
to improve the economic lot of people in countries with less developed formal
financial sectors. To see an outstanding presentation on the health
situations of individuals in
developing countries, as well as other exceptional presentations, see
www.TED.com.
His research on educational issues has looked at a variety of factors related to student performance, including distance education, and has appeared in the Journal of Financial Education, the Journal of Economic Education, and the Journal of Executive Education. His paper entitled "Does the GMAT Matter for Executive MBA Students?" was published in the journal Academy of Management Learning and Education in June 2007. An article in the Southern Economic Journal (Lo, Wong and Mixon, January 2008) ranked Gropper and his coauthor Steve Caudill in the top 20 in the world (tied with Peter Kennedy of Simon Fraser University and Charles Holt of University of Virginia) for citations to their research in the category of economic education over the 1991-2005 time period.
Dr. Gropper has been an invited speaker for a variety of business and professional organizations, and has also appeared as a commentator on radio and television. He has been quoted in such leading popular business publications as Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, Financial Times, and Forbes.
An enthusiastic golfer, he enjoys traveling with the Executive MBA programs. Dan also enjoys fishing, particularly flyfishing for trout in Montana and for largemouth and Striped bass closer to home in Alabama. He is married to Dr. Sareen Gropper, and they have two children.
Some of his publications
are linked here and his professional resume is
listed here
His presentation at the Association for Private Enterprise Education (APEE) is available here.
Office: 503 Lowder Business Building, Auburn University,
Auburn AL 36849
E-mail: 
groppdm@auburn.edu
Telephone: (334) 844-4060 Fax: (334)
844-2964
MBA Program - Fall 2009
Here you will find the case discussion questions linked for the Volcker case, as well as the DeBeers and Safelite cases.
The case assignment questions for Home Depot and ABC Supply is here.
The questions about Auburn athletics are here.
General links of interest
Federal Reserve Board Wall Street Journal Auburn University From my friend Dr. Brad Hobbs at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, Florida, I share the following links. On the "Good old days" Many politicians claim "the rich" consume too much and pay too little in taxes. Are you one of these rich people?
