Enron. Lehman Brothers. More recently, General Electric and Supermicro. During the past quarter century, a variety of high-profile companies have been caught cooking their books.

But they’re often not caught before they’ve cost investors billions of dollars. That’s why analysts have long tried to sniff out businesses that may be using questionable or flat-out illegal accounting tricks to hide poor performance.

New research from Urooj Khan, accounting professor and the Deloitte & Touche Centennial Faculty Fellow at Texas McCombs, proposes a new and more effective way to gauge companies’ “earnings quality.”

In analyses of corporate financial statements, Khan’s measure, known as earnings quality score (EQSCORE), proved superior to the best existing models at identifying companies engaged in possible accounting misconduct.

Challenging the traditional view of consumption as an isolated, immediate event, Stefania Minardi of HEC Paris and Andrei Savochkin of Bocconi University’s Department of Decision Sciences explore the idea that experiences can create lasting mental imprints that affect future well-being, and that this effect is taken into account when people make current decisions about whether to go for certain experiences or puchase goods or services. In their recent paper, “Time for Memorable Consumption”, published in Games and Economic Behavior, they seek to incorporate this idea into the way economic decision-making is understood and modeled. By integrating insights from psychology with economic theory, the authors provide a new quantitative framework to capture how “memorable consumption” shapes long-term satisfaction and decision patterns.

In today’s interconnected professional world, employees often have affiliations outside their primary workplace. This phenomenon can be harmless—or even beneficial—until two employees find themselves representing rival entities. The article “When Colleagues Compete Outside the Firm” by Thorsten Grohsjean of Bocconi University’s Department of Management and Technology, Henning Piezunka of the Wharton School, and Maren Mickeler of ESSEC Business School published in the Strategic Management Journal offers fascinating insights into this dynamic by examining an unusual case: professional soccer players who become rivals on national teams while playing as club teammates.

The study’s focus is a critical yet understudied setting: when coworkers who typically collaborate within an organization engage in competition outside of it. Using data from the 2018 FIFA World Cup and top European soccer leagues, the researchers observed that teammates who competed against each other on opposing national teams subsequently reduced collaboration within their shared clubs, as evidenced by a significant decrease in passes exchanged during club games.

As Thorsten Grohsjean notes, “The interplay between extra-organizational affiliations and internal collaboration is complex, yet our findings demonstrate a measurable effect: after facing each other as competitors, teammates exhibited a notable reluctance to collaborate at club level.”

New research reveals public discreditation is the most common tactic used across all three sectors to intimidate researchers

Researchers Eben Lazarus and Ned Augenblick from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and Michael Thaler of University College London conducted three experiments and analyzed millions of betting transactions and prices on options contracts. They found that people consistently overreact to weak information and underreact to strong information.

Climate change is the single biggest threat to the global environment and socio-economic development – demanding an urgent transformation of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.