Michael Jensen Econ 490 Fall 2019

Playing sports all of my life was amazing – sports have and always will be my passion. The downside, though, is when you’re on a team that’s facing adversity on a daily basis. It’s not easy, it tests your limits of the team and you as an individual. Growing up in a small town, we didn’t have as much talent as some of the other suburbs, which was extremely difficult to deal with. We were just a small group of guys playing the sport we loved, which was baseball. Baseball was my go to when I was down or struggling with anything, but the fact that we weren’t as successful as many other local teams definitely affected me. It wasn’t fair; how could we control where we lived and who we got to play the game we loved with? Although I wanted to move at times to try to get on a better team, I was not able to and had to handle what I was given. I trained harder and harder every single day in efforts of making myself better, but my team especially. Throughout my four years of high-school, we strug...

Throughout my time here at the University of Illinois, I have been lucky enough to work for a company that I really like. The company is called Storage Squad LLC.. The company picks up people's things at the end of the school year, stores them for the summer and then delivers it back to them when they get back on campus. The way this "organization" is set up is very unique, and it avoids unnecessary transaction costs. What is so unique about storage squad is that it is all decentralized. The CEO lives on the east coast and he works exclusively remotely. He hires a "regional operations manager" on each campus that the business exists, and they are in charge of running the entire operation. This person sets up office in the warehouse itself and is responsible for planning routes, communicating the schedule and  communicating with the customer. Everyone else under them is a regular employee. The way I see it, Storage Squad is a three tier organization with the ...

Michael Jensen is a famous financial economist born in Rochester, Minnesota in 1939. He received his BA in economics for Macalester college, and then went on to receive his MBA and a PhD from the University of Chicago. He then went on to teach economics at the University of Rochester, and later Harvard's school of business. Aside from strictly academic work, Jensen is also known for the working for Deloitte, a major consulting firm. Jensen is most notably known for his research in economics. His most notable paper is titled  Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure. There is a prize in financial economics called the Jensen Prize to honor his work in the field. Jensen is a modern day leader in research of financial economics and corporate finance. Before taking this class I was unaware of him and his accomplishments, so I am glad I got the chance to do some research on him.