Business & Entrepreneurship

Some economic observers continue to warn about signs of a potential U.S. recession. Glenn MacDonald, the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics and Strategy at Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis, says many signs aren’t particularly reliable — but keep an eye on housing starts.

Words company officials use in quarterly earnings calls with investors and analysts can be telling. An Olin Business School researcher and co-authors conducted a detailed, machine-learning study of such earnings calls.

Riots that resulted in anywhere from 10 to 1,000-plus deaths in their hometowns ultimately influenced lending decisions among hundreds of loan managers in India — and the effect endured for decades, reveals a new study involving Washington University in St. Louis. The research shows a country’s ethnic fissures can create crevasses in its road to economic progress.

Key leaders from some of the United States’ largest financial-adviser firms are featured speakers at the fourth annual Wealth and Asset Management Research Conference Aug. 22 and 23 at Knight Hall’s Emerson Auditorium on the Washington University in St. Louis campus.

An Olin Business School faculty member teamed up with three researchers from Michigan State University to examine investors’ decision-making, and they came up with a novel idea for a laboratory: ABC’s reality TV show “Shark Tank.”

A Washington University in St. Louis finance and regulations scientist has published a paper with a theoretical model that basically proposes bridging the divide between bankers and politicians to link such capital requirements to something of a political football: credit allocation — a bank’s business of financing loans.

Before customers jump on the bandwagon of online crowd information and buy a dinner, a book, or a movie ticket, suppose there were a way to make the bandwagon better? That’s the central question behind “Harnessing the Wisdom of Crowds,” a research paper co-authored by Washington University in St. Louis’ Xing Huang and published in the journal Management Science.

A new study involving two Olin Business School researchers finds that analysts disseminate earnings news by revising share-price targets or stating they expect firms to beat earnings estimates, often tempering such information — even suppressing positive news — to facilitate beatable projections.

A new study led in part by Olin Business School’s Todd Gormley finds that increasing numbers of passive investors is encouraging activism targeted at board makeup changes, proxy settlements and the sale of the business or its parts.

Schoolwide efforts are among the threads weaved into the fabric of an Olin Business School MBA program ranked No. 4 in the world for women, according to a Financial Times analysis — placing it behind only Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley among U.S. universities, and China’s Shanghai Jiao Tong, but just ahead of Harvard.