Business & Entrepreneurship

No ad goes unnoticed: MBA students at the Olin School of Business evaluate Super Bowl XL commercials starting at 3 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 5, with pre-game lectures by local advertising professionals.

When managers realize that their corporate earnings per share are in jeopardy of falling short of analysts’ quarterly forecasts, they usually look for a way to avoid that fate. While there has been plenty of research that looks at how companies beat analysts forecast by manipulating their earnings, the effects of stock repurchases has remained unexamined. A new study by a business professor at Washington University in St. Louis, finds that under the right circumstances, repurchasing stock in an attempt to increase earnings per share does not completely fool the market, although it is an effective way to avoid being throttled when earnings per share falls short of market expectations.

You hear about them often in the news — longtime managers who survive corporate mergers with a golden parachute and a backpack full of fabulous perks. They must have done a great job in helping the company grow, right? Not necessarily, according to research done by a professor at the Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis. In a series of studies Litov conducted, he found that, longtime, or entrenched, managers tend to avoid risky investments and projects, which results in saddling their firms with higher debt levels and slowing the firm’s growth.

Two teams of entrepreneurs have won Washington University’s 2005 Olin Cup. Somark Innovations, Inc. and iMobile Access Technologies, or iMAT, will receive a total of $70,000 in seed funding for their enterprises. An additional $5,000 grant for student projects will be split between two winners: HomeWUrk and Suzanne Shenkman Designs. The awards were announced Dec. 1 at a ceremony featuring Robert J. Skandalaris, founder and chairman of Noble International.

The winners of the 2005 Olin Cup Competition will be announced Thursday, December 1. Six finalists are in the running to receive a total of $70,000 in seed investments. Additionally, a $5,000 grant will be awarded to the best student-owned venture. The Olin Cup Competition is an annual business formation contest organized by The Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

The Financial Times has ranked the professors at the Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis tenth in the world in terms of research productivity. The tenth-place designation was announced as part of the Financial Times‘ Executive-MBA rankings in October of 2005.

The Olin School of Business’ non-degree executive education programs ranked tops globally in a survey conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit, a branch of The Economist Group which also publishes the Economist magazine. Olin’s open programs tied for second place internationally (first-place tie nationally) and its customized programs tied for first place among similar programs worldwide.

Allison Miller discusses jocotes with a man in southern Honduras.Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis report that farmers and families in Central America have saved genetic variation in the jocote (ho-CO-tay), (Spondias purpurea), a small tree that bears fruit similar to a tiny mango. And they’ve done this by taking the plants out of the forest, their wild habitat, and growing them close to home for family and local consumption Allison Miller, Ph.D., a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Colorado, and former graduate student in Arts & Sciences at Washington University, and Spencer T. Olin Professor of Biology Barbara Schaal, Ph.D., from Washington University, in conjunction with Peter Raven, Ph.D. Engelmann Professor of Botany at Washington University and Director of the Missouri Botanical Garden, have shown multiple domestications of the jocote in Central America in the midst of large-scale deforestation, a practice that endangers genetic diversity .

Storing hydrogen is problematic. A WUSTL chemist and his colleagues are exploring different approaches to help make hydrogen fuel more practical.A chemist at Washington University in St. Louis hopes to find the right stuff to put the element hydrogen in a sticky situation. Lev Gelb is exploring several different ways to store hydrogen and prepares theoretical models of molecules that could enable storage and transport of hydrogen gas. One process would involve materials that hydrogen would stick to.

Tales of corporate scandal and political misdeeds have made spectacular headlines in recent years — just the mention of Enron or Bill Clinton conjure up memories of those offenses. But on a day-to-day basis most people don’t deal with such large-scale scandals. Instead, they are confronted with relatively innocuous mistakes — the kinds of mistakes that eventually break down trust and possibly even derail a career. There’s a reason that a simple apology doesn’t always re-establish the trust that colleagues once enjoyed, according to new work by Kurt Dirks, associate professor of organizational behavior at the Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis. People’s reactions to apologies vary widely depending on the nature of the transgression.