Business & Entrepreneurship

Washington University in St. Louis administrators are urging Congress and the White House to reach a compromise to avoid wide-ranging, across-the-board federal spending cuts that would take effect March 1.

Olin Business School’s fourth annual Olin Sustainability Case Competition challenged students to propose plans for developing more than 10,000 vacant properties in St. Louis. From solar panels to community service projects, students came up with creative ideas to combat “Blight, Plight, and Urban-Flight: Stimulating the Sustainable Development of Vacant Land in the City of St. Louis.

The American Bar Association’s House of Delegates recently adopted a resolution recommending that the federal government expand its protections against conflicts of interest among government contractors. The resolution was based in part on a report Kathleen Clark, JD, ethics expert and professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis, wrote for the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS).“In recent decades, the federal government has greatly expanded its use of contractors to perform services, and spends hundreds of billions on services every year,” Clark writes. “While an extensive array of ethics statutes and rules regulate government employees to ensure that they make decisions in the interest of the government rather than a private interest, only a few of these restrictions apply to contractor personnel.”

In today’s global economy, finance professionals need specialized skills and expertise that go beyond the boundaries of traditional graduate education. The new Global Master of Finance dual degree program offered by Olin Business School and Lee Kong Chian School of Business at Singapore Management University is designed to prepare students for success in a wide variety of finance-related careers worldwide.

Lawyers recently have gained attention by seeking restitution from individuals convicted of viewing or downloading exploitative photos of children. “This ‘pay-per-view’ system further commodifies victims,” says Cortney Lollar, JD, clinical faculty at Washington University in St. Louis. She says that two key changes are in order: move from the current restitution system to the creation of a child pornography crime victims’ compensation fund, and devote more resources to preventing child sexual abuse.

Charlottesville, Va. recently became the first town in the U.S. to pass an anti-drone resolution, calling for a restriction on the use of the unmanned surveillance vehicles. “For drones, I think the problem is that they do have some legitimate law enforcement purposes, but they raise massive problems of invasion of privacy and government surveillance that we need to think through before we deploy drones in vast numbers in our skies,” says Neil Richards, professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis.

Washington University in St. Louis’ Olin Business School, in collaboration with the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) in Herzliya, Israel, and Onward Israel, is launching an Israel Summer Business Academy, aimed at providing students an opportunity to learn firsthand about business in Israel, one of the most vibrant hubs of entrepreneurship in the world.

If that headline doesn’t grab your attention, new research from Washington University in St. Louis’ Olin Business School on the “Psychological and Sexual Costs of Income Comparison in Marriage”should. The study, by Lamar Pierce, PhD, professor of strategy at Olin, shows that men married to women with higher incomes are more likely to use erectile dysfunction medication than their male breadwinner counterparts.

Three teams, including the first all-undergraduate team to place, earned a total of $140,000 during the annual Olin Cup commercial business plan competition finals Jan. 30 in Simon Hall.

Attorney and women’s rights activist Sandra Fluke, who last February testified before the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee on the need to provide access to contraception, will kick off the spring lecture series sponsored by the Danforth Center on Religion & Politics at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 12, in Simon Hall’s May Auditorium.