News

With the fall term fast approaching, the School of Accounting and Finance (SAF) is excited to welcome the incoming Class of 2028. There is a lot of preparation involved as students get ready for their first year of university. To help with this transition, a team of faculty members at SAF have created a series of modules to get students familiar with the technology requirements for SAF, as well as basic accounting and finance concepts.

Based on the emerging technology, this paper proposes a new method to measure the expected duration of competitive advantage for average adopters. This method is based on public data, such as google searches, press releases, book titles, and companies’ disclosures with respect to the technology. The method is very easy to implement.

The School of Accounting and Finance (SAF) is pleased to share that Jillian Adams has been awarded the Warren Ober Award for Outstanding Teaching by a Graduate Student. This award is given to a University of Waterloo graduate student in the Faculty of Arts who has made significant contributions to teaching.

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.   

More than 30 nominations submitted for the 2023 Arts Awards for Excellence in Service, Teaching, and Research posed an especially tough challenge for members of the Arts Honours and Awards (AHA) committee this spring. So many outstanding members of the Arts community inspired their chairs, supervisors, and colleagues to put names forward as nominees to recognize their contributions and achievements. Today, Dean Sheila Ager and the AHA committee are happy to share the results.

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.

In fast-paced and often rapidly changing work environments, employers continue to seek new and improved ways to recognize employees in the workplace. However, new research from the University of Waterloo suggests that public peer recognition may backfire by enabling comparisons among employees, and these comparisons may make some employees feel unfairly treated.

From becoming the first member of her family to graduate from university, Ranjini Jha now educates other students as a professor of finance at the University of Waterloo.