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In This
Edition
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Accounting Practicum Receives Governor’s
Volunteer Award
- Kinney to
U.S. Treasury: Loss of Auditing Research
Hurts Profession
-
Media: Kumar on Perils of Investing Too
Close to Home
-
Sager Earns Award for Research on 2007-08
Credit Crunch
-
Design Symposium Brings Together Business
and Engineering
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Executive Education Hosts Gulf States
Toyota, ESADE Business School
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Brandl: Will High Oil Prices Sink the U.S.
Economy?
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McCombs School Job Postings
Note: This is the June edition of McCombs
Weekly, which publishes monthly in
summer.
Accounting Practicum Receives Governor’s
Volunteer Award
The Accounting Practicum course, Federal
Taxation of Low Income Filers: Socio-Economic
Forces, has received the OneStar Foundation
Governor’s Volunteer Award. Since the course was
created in 2005, more than 400 students have
prepared income tax forms for thousands of
working poor families through Foundation
Communities’ Community Tax Centers programs. The
work of these 400 student volunteers has
expanded the program’s capacity by more than
20,000 hours of free tax preparation to low to
moderate income families. Above, Professor
Stephen Limberg
accepts the award
from Texas State Comptroller Susan Combs
on behalf of the accounting department.
More on the award.
Kinney to U.S. Treasury: Loss of Auditing
Research Hurts Profession
 William
R. Kinney, Jr., professor in the
Department of Accounting, lent his expertise to
a U.S. Treasury Department committee on the
auditing profession June 3 in Washington D.C.
Kinney unfortunately brought bad news regarding
the current state of independent audit
scholarship at the university level.
"The decline of scholarly studies of
auditing on campuses is almost complete," Kinney
said. "This is true at The University of Texas
at Austin as well. When I was [young]
practitioners were anxious to get the latest
thinking on campus to try to get new ways of
solving emerging practice problems, whether it
involved statistics or behavioral science,
because humans don't process information nearly
as well as we think we do."
Read more.
Media: Kumar on Perils of Investing Too Close to
Home
The New York Times, June 15, 2008
 There’s
no place like home, but staying too close to
home can have unintended consequences for
investors. Americans tend to put a
disproportionate share of their money into
shares of companies based in their own states,
new research has shown, and that bias that can
be exploited by sophisticated traders. These
insights come from "Long Georgia, Short
Colorado? The Geography of Return
Predictability," a study co-authored by
Alok Kumar, assistant professor of
finance at McCombs.
Read the story.
Sager Earns Award for Research on 2007-08 Credit
Crunch
 Thomas
Sager, IROM professor, and his
co-author won the Geneva
Association/International Insurance Society Shin
Research Award for Excellence for the paper,
"Mortgage Backed Securities and Capital of Life
Insurers: Was the Industry prepared for the
Credit Crunch of 2007-08?" The paper’s findings
indicate that life insurers were unprepared for
problems with mortgage-backed securities. In
particular, it demonstrates that insurers
reduced capital as they accumulated
mortgage-backed securities, as though acquiring
the securities raised the quality of their
investment portfolios. Sager will receive the
award in Taipei, Taiwan, July 13-16.
Design Symposium Brings Together Business and
Engineering
On
May 14-15, three research centers from The
University of Texas at Austin, including two
from McCombs, came together to explore new ways
for creating cross-functional, integrated design
processes through the lens of sustainability.
Titled
"Achieving Customer Impact by Balancing
Environmental Intelligence, Supply Chain
Optimization and Product Design,"
 the
conference provided an opportunity for
marketers, supply chain experts and
manufacturing executives to trade ideas and
examine best practices for holistic product
design, beginning with the consumer and moving
backward to raw material acquisition. The
participants also explored how to achieve the
optimum balance of aesthetics and functionality,
low cost and consumer happiness. The conference
was co-hosted by the
Supply Chain Management Center of Excellence
and the
Center for Customer Insight and Marketing
Solutions at McCombs and the Cockrell School
of Engineering’s
Advanced Manufacturing Center.
Read a recap of the symposium.
Executive Education Hosts Gulf States Toyota,
ESADE
 Executive
MBA students from ESADE Business School in
Madrid, Spain spent June 2-6 at McCombs,
participating in
Texas Executive Education's "Leading in a
Changing Environment" program.
The 42 executives, representing leading Spanish
and international companies, visited Dell and
National Instruments in Austin, and HEB/Central
Market in San Antonio.
On June 10, Longhorns football coach
Mack Brown was the keynote speaker at
the opening dinner for the "Champions of Change"
program for Gulf States Toyota. The program will
evolve over two-day monthly sessions focusing on
leadership, talent management, service quality,
high performance teams and change management. It
was designed for Toyota and Scion dealers from
Gulf States Toyota’s l46 dealerships across the
southern United States.
Brandl: Will High
Oil Prices Sink the U.S. Economy?
 The
economic pundits are filling the airways with
stories of how high energy prices are going
spell doom for the U.S. economy. In Washington
and across the country politicians seem to
tripping over themselves trying to find "someone
to blame" for raising gasoline prices.
In his latest video
Macro Update, senior finance lecturer
Michael Brandl explains that,
as usual, the pundits and politicians are not
getting the story quite right.
Watch the video.
McCombs School Job Postings
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