NEWS & INSIGHT
CLIMATE CONSEQUENCES
WIDENING THE REACH OF NON-PHD STUDENT RESEARCH COUNTRY: Australia SCHOOL: Monash Business School Monash Business School, together with Warwick University, has launched a new platform for disseminating the research of emerging economists. The Warwick Monash Economics Student Papers (WM-ESP) platform will publish the best dissertations from master’s and undergraduate students in economics at the two institutions. Vinod Mishra, Associate Professor and Director of Education at Monash Business School’s Department of Economics, described it as a, ‘much-needed platform for communicating our non-PhD research to the academic community’. ‘Students put a lot of effort into writing their research; however, most of the student research papers do not make it beyond their supervisors and [the] academics involved in grading them. We hope to reach out to potential employers and future students through this initiative and give them a glimpse of our programmes’ student research quality and rigour,’ Mishra added. Papers are to be selected based on their quality and originality and then submitted to the platform by invitation only from the WM-ESP Editorial Board, which is made up of representatives from the two institutions. ‘Gender and Disadvantage in the Evolution of Test Score Gaps’ is one example of a paper already published on the platform, looking at the ‘interrelationship between socioeconomic gaps, based on early-life household income and parental education, and the gender gap in numeracy,’ to demonstrate the, ‘importance of early interventions to address gender and socioeconomic gaps.’ Its author is Molly Paterson, who completed a bachelor’s with-honours degree at Monash in 2020 and is now a Graduate Consultant with KPMG Australia. Paterson said that the publication has sparked conversations with current work colleagues about her research and policy interest. ‘In future, I envision it helping in displaying to future employers my research capability and policy interests,’ she added in a news story for Monash Business School. / TBD
COUNTRY: UK SCHOOL: Imperial College Business School
Imperial College Business School has found a direct link between temperature increases and a decrease in company sales in the US, signalling the negative impact of climate change on business. The report – The Economic Impact of Climate Change by Cláudia Custódio, Associate Professor in Finance at Imperial College Business School, together with colleagues from Imperial College London as well as Nova School of Business in Lisbon and the University of Zurich – drew on 12,000 transactions in the US between 2000 and 2015. The researchers focused in on how firms’ suppliers were able to carry out operations when temperatures rose, which allowed them to isolate the impact of temperature on suppliers while also looking at any effects on the demand side. The results showed that a local rise in the daily temperature of a single degree led to a reduction in company sales of around 2%. The reason? The report postulates that heat can negatively impact staff productivity, with higher temperatures making working conditions more difficult and workers being more likely to take time off, especially in industries which are directly impacted by temperature, such as manufacturing. ‘It is widely accepted that the global mean temperature is increasing. Businesses will be hurt by a hotter planet, but with global rises in temperatures of up to two degrees celsius on the horizon, we need to know who will suffer and by how much. If we know in advance which countries and which parts of the economy will be hit hardest, policymakers can act to mitigate the damage,’ Custódio said. The recent World Meteorological Organisation report, State of the Global Climate 2021 , has suggested that 2021 would be between the fifth and seventh warmest year on record, and that the years 2015 to 2021 will be the seven warmest years on record. With temperatures set to continue rising, businesses will have to take account of the potential impact this could have on sales. / EB
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