Abstract

Current accounting research has pointed out how accounting has not only been a gendered but also an engendering practice. Starting at this point, this paper explores this idea by considering that the gender domination is based on an intersectional experience. Aiming at contributing to extend the knowledge about how accounting has historically created the gender dimension, we explore the historical roots of European male domination. The findings show that gender, social class and accounting helped to define a matrix of power at the beginning of the Early Modern Period. To do so, we develop a historical case study based on a feminine institution between the XVI and XVII centuries in Spain. An extraordinary debate about the obedience of those women (a monastery) to their male relatives shows us the constitutive dimension of accounting and its operational role in the configuration of the different situations inside this matrix. This allows us to better understand how accounting operates, even today, to better face the inequalities accounting promotes.

• Speaker: Dr. German Gamero Igea - Universidad de Burgos (Spain) 

Location: Seminar room (first floor - DEM)

 

• 1 July 2026 - 1.00 PM: Skilled Immigration and Firm Innovation: Evidence from H-1B Lottery Outcomes

Abstract

Do high-skilled visas stimulate corporate innovation? Using exogenous variation from the H-1B lottery, we identify the causal impact of skilled foreign workers on patenting. We find that innovation returns are highly heterogeneous: absent in the broader firm population, they emerge and grow substantially only for firms actively recruiting doctoral-level talent through the visa program. This return is strictly specific to firms with doctoral hires, and increasing with the firm's cumulative pool of PhD workers. These findings support knowledge-complementarity theories of idea production: high-skilled foreign workers stimulate innovation most where the baseline stock of frontier expertise is largest.

Speaker: Filippo Rebessi, California State University

Location: Seminar room (first floor - DEM)

 

• 18 June 2026 - 11 AM: Shaping prosociality: the case of resource scarcity and implications for new digital inequalities

Abstract

Fairness is a powerful motivator of human behaviour, yet responses to unfairness are far from consistent. In this talk, I will discuss how fairness perception and the reactions it triggers - punishment, compensation, cooperation - are context-dependent and shaped by cognitive heuristics, perspective, and attentional processes. Moving from individual to broader social factors that shape prosocial behaviour, I will then explore how resource scarcity influences cooperation and norm compliance, presenting both empirical evidence and a theoretical framework for their complex interaction. Finally, I will propose a novel idea whereby human contact itself is considered as a new scarce resource in an increasingly digital world, with potentially significant consequences for social inequality.

Speaker: Claudia Civai, University of London

Location: Seminar room (first floor - DEM)

 

• 26 May 2026 - 1 PM: Meet the editor: Q&A about publishing, reviewing and editing

Abstract

In this informal session I will share my experience as editor at two journals: Industrial and Corporate Change and Economic Geography. Next to providing details about these specific outlets, I will also reflect on some of the issues that I encounter in my daily editorial practices. These recent editorial positions have put my on the other side of the publishing process, after being a contributor and a reviewer. I will reflect on the opportunities and challenges of our publishing system and engage in conversations with early career researchers entering the system.

Speaker: Caterina Castaldi, Utrecht University

Location: Seminar room (first floor - DEM)

 

• 19 May 2026 - 1 PM: Statistical Inference for the Public Market Equivalent: A Block Bootstrap Approach

Abstract
We propose the first formal statistical inference framework for the Kaplan–Schoar Public Market Equivalent (KS-PME), the standard benchmark for evaluating private equity (PE) fund performance. By holding fund cash flows fixed and resampling the public market return path via the stationary block bootstrap, we construct counterfactual ranges and hypothesis tests for individual fund Public Market Equivalents (PMEs).
Of the 1,536 funds in our sample, 832 exhibit positive PME, but only 344 can reject the null of no outperformance at the 5% level. Excluding top performers, only 92 achieve statistical significance. We introduce a market path sensitivity score (MPSS) that quantifies, for each fund, how much its observed performance reflects the specific market conditions it operated in. Cross-sectional regressions show that nearly two-thirds of the variation in MPSS is explained by market environment variables and capital deployment speed, indicating that many funds benefited from, or were penalized by, concurrent market conditions. Our results are robust to alternative benchmarks, alternative performance metrics, cash flow timing perturbations, and a cash flow–adjusted bootstrap that accounts for the endogenous covariance between fund cash flows and market returns.
Keywords: Private equity, Public market equivalent, Direct Alpha, Risk-adjusted Alpha, Bootstrap, Statistical inference, Performance

Speaker: Corrado Botta, Scuola IMT Alti Studi Lucca and SDA Bocconi

Location: Seminar room (first floor - DEM)

 

• 13 May 2026 - 1 PM: Australia’s Sustainability Reporting Landscape: The Role of the AASB, the ASRS & Recent Developments

The Australian Accounting Standards Board (AASB) is responsible for developing and issuing mandatory Australian Sustainability Reporting Standards (ASRS) to ensure consistent, comparable, and reliable climate-related financial disclosures. The AASB aligns these standards with international IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) sustainability standards to meet government mandatory reporting requirements, supporting the transition to high-quality, transparent reporting.
The introduction of the ASRS marks a significant evolution in corporate reporting. This presentation explores the implications of mandatory climate-related reporting, the structure and scope of the Australian Standards AASB S1 (general requirements) and S2 (climate-related disclosures), with a focus on S2 specifically, and the strategic and operational challenges organizations face in aligning with these standards. It also considers the future trajectory of sustainability reporting in Australia, including biodiversity disclosures and the broader implications for governance, risk management, and transparency.

Speaker: Dean Hanlon, RMIT University - Australia

Location: Seminar room (first floor - DEM)

 

• 6 May 2026 - 10. 45 AM: Creating stewards: Using tourism as a tool to foster environmental ambassadors

Maintaining the environmental and cultural assets that underpin tourism is no longer considered sufficient, given accelerating ecological change and increasing pressures on communities by tourism. It is now commonly thought that tourism must not simply maintain, but rather contribute to the regeneration and protection of the places it depends upon. This requires a shift from minimising harm to creating net positive outcomes, where visitors are not simply managed and the industry is not simply maintained. Rather they are meaningfully engaged in giving back to destinations.
Within this context, stewards are understood as visitors who develop a sense of responsibility and care for a place, demonstrated through informed, pro-environmental behaviours during and beyond their visit. Ambassadors extend this role by actively advocating for that place, such as shaping attitudes, influencing others, and amplifying messages across their networks. Using the case study of Antarctica, this presentation will first examine how tourists can be transformed into stewards and ambassadors. The challenges of this will also be discussed. The presentation will then explore how destination management organisations can play a role in stewardship, to ensure that the industry contributes to both environmental and community flourishing.
The presentation argues that stewardship and ambassadorship is not an incidental outcome of tourism experiences and industry management, but rather it can be designed as a deliberate intervention. By aligning operator practices, destination management, and visitor engagement with stewardship and ambassador frameworks, the presentation will explore how destinations can leverage tourism as a force for environmental and socio-cultural advocacy, beyond the point of visitation.

Speaker: Anne Hardy, Southern Cross University

Location: Room 2E, Department of Economics and Management

 

• 21 April 2026 - 1 PM: The (hi)story of the LSE Behavioural Lab, and Q&A

Abstract

In this informal roundtable, I will start with an overview of the LSE Behavioural Lab (BL), now a cornerstone of the LSE experimental research community and behavioural community globally, which I founded in 2010 as a small flagship project for a new department that needed to “gel” and work together. Fifteen years on, the BL has now state-of-the-art technologies and facilities, and over 50 affiliates across 7 LSE departments and institutes, leading and contributing to 6 contemporary research themes: Applying Behavioural Economics Experiments to the Real World; Behavioural Science and AI; Behavioural Science for the Environment; Behavioural Science for Health, Pandemic Responses, and Global Crises; Decisions under the Behavioural Microscope; Redesigning the Future of Work through Behavioural Science.
After the overview, we will have an open discussion on how the BL can inspire your future at DEM. If time allows, I can present some of my current projects as part of the “Decisions” theme, which I lead.

Speaker: Barbara Fasolo, London school of Economics

Location: Seminar room (second floor - DEM)

 

• 24 February 2026 - 1 PM: The long-term electoral costs of public health responses to COVID

Abstract

The extent to which different countries adopted measures of control and containment in response to the first wave of COVID depended on their history of paternalism. Countries that, prior to 2020, had a more intensive tradition of paternalism responded faster and with more stringent measures. This also translated into better health outcomes by the end of the first wave (Carmignani, 2022). A few years later, most of the parties that led governments at that time find themselves in opposition, with a significantly smaller share of electoral support. Is there a link between post-COVID electoral misfortunes and the decisions taken by governments during the pandemic? Using a sample of 104 parliamentary and presidential elections over the period 2022–2025, this paper provides evidence that the more stringent the measures adopted in 2020, the lower the chances of the ruling party remaining in office in subsequent elections and the smaller its electoral share. While the magnitude of the effect is not quantitatively large—suggesting that other factors likely carry greater weight in the electoral misfortunes of parties in government in 2020—it is statistically significant and robust to the inclusion of public health outcomes (as well as other controls) in the regression model. There are, however, several conditioning and moderating effects. In particular, the negative effect of COVID responses is evident in legislative elections but not in presidential elections, and it is stronger the more democratic the country is. The effect also strengthens over time. While several explanations for this time profile are possible, one that may deserve further attention concerns voters’ memory loss or, less dramatically, their evolving perception of the COVID pandemic.

Speaker: Fabrizio Carmignani, University of Southern Queensland

Location: Seminar room (first floor - DEM)

 

• 24 February 2026 - 1 PM: The long-term electoral costs of public health responses to COVID

The extent to which different countries adopted measures of control and containment in response to the first wave of COVID depended on their history of paternalism. Countries that, prior to 2020, had a more intensive tradition of paternalism responded faster and with more stringent measures. This also translated into better health outcomes by the end of the
first wave (Carmignani, 2022). A few years later, most of the parties that led governments at that time find themselves in opposition, with a significantly smaller share of electoral support.
Is there a link between post-COVID electoral misfortunes and the decisions taken by governments during the pandemic? Using a sample of 104 parliamentary and presidential elections over the period 2022–2025, this paper provides evidence that the more stringent the measures adopted in 2020, the lower the chances of the ruling party remaining in office in subsequent elections and the smaller its electoral share. While the magnitude of the effect is not quantitatively large—suggesting that other factors likely carry greater weight in the electoral misfortunes of parties in government in 2020—it is statistically significant and robust to the inclusion of public health outcomes (as well as other controls) in the regression model. There are, however, several conditioning and moderating effects. In particular, the negative effect of COVID responses is evident in legislative elections but not in presidential elections, and it is stronger the more democratic the country is. The effect also strengthens over time. While several explanations for this time profile are possible, one that may deserve further attention concerns voters’ memory loss or, less dramatically, their evolving perception of the COVID pandemic.

Speaker: Fabrizio Carmignani, University of Southern Queensland

Location: Seminar room, 1st floor, Department of Economics and Management

 

• 5 February 2026 - 1 PM: AI (LLMs) and management practice, theory and education: what’s new?

The diffusion of AI has recently led to the emergence of the concept of algorithmic management as a new managerial approach. In this presentation, I revisit what AI or more precisely LLMs can currently do and how their use relates to Taylor’s scientific management. I derive some recommendations for universities’ role in both (management) research and education as well as for scholarly associations.

Speaker: Xavier Castaner,  Faculty of Business & Economics (HEC), University of Lausanne

Location: Seminar room (second floor - DEM)

 

• 4 February 2026 - 1 PM: How does ICT affect school efficiency in Europe? Evidence from OECD PISA 2022

The paper investigates how Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) affect school efficiency, drawing on data from the OECD PISA 2022 survey for 5,360 schools across 21 EU countries. While prior literature has examined the relationship between ICT and student performance, limited attention has been given to its impact on school efficiency, defined as the capacity to transform inputs (resources) into educational outcomes (test scores). To address this gap, we adopt a combined methodological approach. First, we estimate school-level efficiency scores using a robust nonparametric order-m model under a meta-frontier framework, distinguishing between local (within-country) and global (cross-country) benchmarks. Our results show a higher average local efficiency (0.87) compared to global efficiency (0.69), with significant variation across countries. 

We also run a robust conditional efficiency model in which exogenous variables are indicators of ICT availability and use, showing how ICT affects the production model increasing the average efficiency up to 0.85. Furthermore, to enrich the descriptive analysis on the role of ICT, we employ a multilevel random forest model to explore which ICT-related variables best explain efficiency scores. Findings highlight that cognitively engaging digital activities such as student-led research, data analysis, and the use of digital learning games are positively associated with efficiency, especially when used in moderation (i.e., avoiding its excessive use). ICT availability, while necessary, plays a lesser role. These results suggest that the pedagogically-driven integration of ICT, rather than its mere presence, is key to enhancing school efficiency.

Speaker: Tommaso Agasisti, Politecnico di Milano, School of Management

Location: Seminar room (first floor, DEM)