News for Employers

When Blake Phillips began his doctorate in finance in 2009, he was asked to declare a focus. With previous degrees in biology and forestry and an interest in conservation, he zeroed in on sustainable finance.   

His supervisor balked, steering Phillips away from what was then considered a niche segment. Warned that there would be no jobs in that sector, Phillips was advised to commit to one or the other: sustainability or finance. Today, Phillips is the director of a new program at the University of Waterloo that aims to cultivate precisely the kind of finance professional that Phillips always wanted to be: comfortable in the languages of both finance and sustainability.  

Wenqian Hu’s paper Trust Versus Rewards: Revisiting Managerial Discretion in Incomplete Contracts was awarded the Lazaridis Institute Prize for the best paper on accounting issues relevant to technology firms. The paper finds that an algorithm-generated bonus allocation scheme improves employee productivity, compared with human managers’ bonus allocation. It also finds that compared with human managers’ bonus allocation, the algorithm-based one removes managers’ responsibility and improves employees’ trust in the reward system.