On April 24, 2024 at the House of Finance, a Memorandum of Understanding between Goethe University and the International Sustainabiliy Standards Board (ISSB), that was co-developed by Frau Prof. Dr. Anna Rohlfing-Bastian, has been signed. More Details can be found here: www.puk.uni-frankfurt.de/152654259/Nachhaltigkeitsstandards_auf_wissenschaftlicher_Basis

On April 19-20, 2024, the Annual Conference of the Standing Field Committee “Theory of the Firm” of the Verein für Socialpolitik was held at Goethe-University Frankfurt. Prof. Dr. Anna Rohlfing-Bastian organized the conference in cooperation with the current chair of the Standing Field Committee, Prof. Dr. Dirk Simons from the University of Mannheim.

On April 11-13, 2024, the Standing Field Committee “Accounting” of the Verein für Socialpolitik held its annual conference at the University of Paderborn. Prof. Dr. Katharina Hombach and Prof. Dr. Anna Rohlfing-Bastian participated in the conference and Prof. Hombach gave a presentation on her paper “The Economics of Firms‘ Public Disclosure: Theory and Evidence”.

From 20th to 23rd May 2023, the Doctoral Colloquium of the European Accounting Association (EAA) took place in Espoo (Finland). Lisa Knacker attended the Doctoral Colloquium and presented her joint project with Prof. Dr. Anna Rohlfing-Bastian entitled "Strategic Disclosure of ESG Information". Subsequently, the 45th Annual Congress of the EAA took place from 24th to 26th May. Lisa Knacker presented the project in a parallel session with discussants. The project was discussed by Dr. Hoa Ho (LMU Munich). The participation in the conference was financially supported by the "Vereinigung von Freunden und Förderern (VFF)" of the Goethe University.

Prof. Dr. Anna Rohlfing has been appointed as new member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Management Control. More information can be found here:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00187-023-00352-3?utm_source=toc&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=toc_187_34_1&utm_content=etoc_springer_20230506

For additional information about the journal see: https://www.springer.com/journal/187

On 05.09.2022, the award ceremony of the Foundation Award 2022 of the “Stiftung Wissenschaftsforum Wirtschaftsprüfung und Recht” took place in Frankfurt. Lisa Knacker from the Chair for Accounting, especially Management Accounting, participated in the Foundation Award. The participants were supposed to write a paper answering the following question: Is the sustainability taxonomy of the EU a suitable basis for corporate decisions and their control by the auditor and authorities? Before the award ceremony, a panel discussion with the participants of the competition and the mentoring professors took place. Prof. Dr. Anna Rohlfing-Bastian also took part in the panel discussion. Lisa Knacker reached the first place at the awards ceremony. She sincerely thanks the foundation for the award. Her paper will be published in the September issue of the journal “Der Konzern”.

From July 30 to August 3, 2022, the Conference on Teaching and Learning in Accounting (CTLA) and the Annual Meeting of the American Accounting Association took place in San Diego (USA). The Chair for Accounting was represented at both conferences. Julian Langenhagen presented current research on the BaccUp app in a 30-minute mini-teaching session at CTLA. His participation was financially supported by the Association of Friends and Sponsors of Goethe University (VFF). Lisa Knacker discussed the project of Ji Woo Ryou (West Virginia University) and Rolando Sanchez (The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley) entitled "CEO Empathy and Mergers and Acquisitions Activity" at the Annual Meeting.

From 06th to 08th January 2022, the Management Accounting Section Midyear Meeting of the American Accounting Association was held virtually. The meeting included a doctoral colloquium and the main research conference.

The Chair for Accounting, especially Management Accounting, was represented at the conference with a presentation in a concurrent session. Lisa Knacker presented her joint project with Prof. Dr. Anna Rohlfing-Bastian entitled "Strategic Use of Tone in Disclosures". The project is about the strategic use of tone in reporting. They received valuable feedback for the project from their discussant Prof. Matthew Bloomfield (Wharton University of Pennsylvania) and the conference participants.

Fortunately, all research assistants from our chair were also accepted for the doctoral colloquium, which took place one day before the main conference. At 5 pm German time, we started with small rounds of introductions in breakout rooms. Since there were more than 50 PhD students from all over the world participating in the colloquium, these small groups were a good opportunity to get to know each other a bit better. This was followed by a panel discussion on "Pitching Your Research,", where four professors presented, among other things, valuable tips on formulating compelling research questions and selecting interesting research topics. In the next session on "Embracing Failure and Adversity,", panelists provided insight into failures in their careers. Here, they emphasized that such failures happen to everyone and that it is important to realize that every failure holds potential for learning and development.

Afterwards, the Institute of Management Accountants introduced itself. Subsequently, we worked with Ties de Kok from the University of Washington in an interactive workshop on the basics of text analysis with Python and discussed possible use cases in accounting. At the end of the colloquium, open questions were clarified in a roundtable Q&A with all participants. The colloquium gave us exciting insights and helpful advice. We hope to be able to attend next year as well (hopefully in presence then).

Prof. Dr. Anna Rohlfing-Bastian received funding within the “Goethe-Corona-Fonds” by the Friedrich Flick Förderungsstiftung for her research on the costs of mobile air filters in classrooms.

The concentration of aerosols in rooms is a fundamental factor for the infection risk with Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. Scientific studies have shown that the installation of mobile air cleaners in classrooms can contribute to a significant reduction of aerosol concentrations and the resulting risk of infection with SARS-CoV-2. However, there is still a lack of clarity regarding the costs of installing and follow-up costs of operating mobile air cleaners. For schools and employers that cannot rely on home office, these costs are a highly relevant factor regarding their decision whether to invest in mobile air cleaners or not.

Within the funded project, the life-cycle costs of installing and operating different mobile air cleaners will be estimated. Besides the one-time cost of installation, yearly fixed costs (e.g., for maintenance) and variable operating costs (e.g., energy, filters, etc.) are considered in the calculation. Moreover, the noise exposure by the air cleaners installed in a room should be held below a threshold. The basic input data for the calculation will be collected through a survey that is sent out to manufacturers of mobile air cleaners in Europe.

In an optimization model, the cost-efficient configuration of air cleaners in a particular room will be calculated that provides compliance with a threshold for the relative risk of infection with SARS-CoV-2 compared to a reference room. The optimization will be presented in a web interface for users. After inserting some key data (size and number of persons in a room, possibilities of aeration, activities in the room, planned useful life of the air cleaners, etc.), the user will get information about the cost-efficient configuration with air cleaners of the room and information about the resulting total costs, costs per year, and costs per person per year. The results provide an individual recommendation for the installation of a particular fleet of air cleaners based on input parameters and increase the transparency of the costs associated with installing and operating this fleet (for schools e.g. expressed in Euros per pupil per year) which makes them useful for decision-makers.

More information: www.airfiltercalculator.com

On January 16-17, 2020 the annual Workshop of the "Doctoral Program in Accounting, Reporting, and Taxation" (DART, doctoral-program-accounting.uni-graz.at/de/dart/) of the University of Graz was held at Goethe University. A couple of years ago, a formal contract has been established between the University of Graz and Goethe-University to cooperate in the education of doctoral students in accounting. Besides co-supervising doctoral theses and presentations in research seminars, this includes the regular participation of Goethe doctoral students at the DART-Workshop. This year, Georgii Aleksandrov (Chair of Prof. Dr. Bormann) presented a paper and Christopher Oehler (Chair of Prof. Dr. Nienhaus) as well as Leah Matzner (Chair of Prof. Dr. Rohlfing-Bastian) discussed a paper during the workshop. Moreover, the workshop was held for the first time at Goethe-University with Prof. Dr. Anna Rohlfing-Bastian as local organizer.

Teamwork is commonplace in today’s working environment – however, how large should a team be and how does the decision about team size depend on the compensation structure of the team members? This question is answered by Prof. Dr. Anna Rohlfing-Bastian and her co-authors Dr. Markus Nisch (Uni Frankfurt) and Prof. Dr. Oliver Dürr (Hochschule Esslingen) in an actual publication in the “Review of Accounting Studies”. In a formal model they show that moral hazard and uncertain productivity are limiting factors for team size. Moreover, the analysis sheds light on the optimal compensation structure in teams and the pay differential between workers and managers. You can find the article here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11142-019-09529-5

Prof. Dr. Anna Rohlfing-Bastian wins the Reviewer Award of the “Review of Accounting Studies” for the year 2019. The prize is awarded based on several factors such as the number of on-time reviews in the period from July 1, 2018 to June 30, 2019.

From 19th - 20th September 2019 the XX. Symposium on the Economic Analysis of the Enterprise of the GEABA e.V.  took place under the direction of Prof. Dr. Anna Rohlfing-Bastian at the WHU in Vallendar. The core theme of this year's symposium was "The Importance of Microeconomic Methods in Management", at which two panel discussions took place at the conference. Leah Matzner and Julian Langenhagen were also represented at the conference by the Chair of Accounting, particularly Management Accounting. Please see more information at www.geaba.de.

Why do not all companies use their possibilities of legal tax planning for tax-cutting purposes? This question goes to Prof. Dr. med. Anna Rohlfing-Bastian together with her co-authors Prof. Dr. Martin Jacob (WHU - Otto Beisheim School of Management) and Prof. Dr. Kai Sandner (Catholic University Eichstätt-Ingolstadt) in a recent publication in the journal Review of Managerial Science, in which she examines a model for tax planning in the company. Their findings show that internal moral hazard issues in work relationships between a company's owners and the CEO or the tax manager have an impact on tax incentives. This helps to explain why empirically substantial differences in the exploitation of corporate tax planning are observed. The article can be found here: link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11846-019-00346-3under www.geaba.de.

The German Research Foundation (DFG) has approved the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) "Accounting for Transparency" with a funding volume of approximately 12 million euros and launch in July 2019 for the next four years. The University of Paderborn, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the University of Mannheim jointly applied for the SFB as a so-called Transregio. The Goethe University with Prof. Dr. Anna Rohlfing-Bastian as Principal Investigator is involved in one of the 23 projects of the SFB. For more information please visit the following website https://accounting-for-transparency.de/.

From now on, the learning app BaccUp developped by our chair is available in the App Stores (iOS and Android) and as a web version (baccup.uni-frankfurt.de). The app serves as support for the event Accounting 1 (BACC). Additional information can be found here.

As from 1st January 2019 Prof. Dr. Rohlfing-Bastian took over the chairmanship of the GEABA e.V. You will find more information here.

As of 1st January 2019 Prof. Dr. Rohlfing-Bastian took over the Chair of the GEABA e.V. You can find more information here.