Publications and Projects

Organizational design, which has been undergoing substantial changes in the recent past, is an important factor for firm transparency. We explore the consequences of organizational innovations on transparency for different stakeholders of the firm, where transparency corresponds to the availability of decision-relevant information. First, the project analyzes the role of social preferences for the adoption of self-managed teamwork and the ensuing effects on within-firm transparency. Second, it considers the informativeness of KPIs reflecting a firm’s workplace conditions for different types of decisions taken by a heterogeneous group of stakeholders. This project focuses on the usefulness and effects of the standardization of such KPIs and firms’ incentives to strategically misreport this type of information.

Project team members (at AccSus): 

• Anna Rohlfing-Bastian (Principal Investigator)
• Erika Bognar
• Leah Matzner
• Doron Reichmann

How do firms learn about making effective reporting decisions when facing novel regulatory requirements and stakeholder information demands? In this project, we are answering these questions together with researchers from the universities of Cologne and Munich. Doing so, we aim to improve our understanding of the determinants of transparency, especially of the ambiguity that firms face in assessing the payoffs from reporting under new requirements and to non-traditional users. This ambiguity represents an important friction that can impair transparency by preventing firms from adapting (optimally) to changes in requirements and stakeholder information demand, thereby imposing substantial costs on firms, their stakeholders, and society at large. Empirical evidence on the sources of and variation in firms’ learning costs can help policymakers design cost-effective requirements that target firms with competitive learning advantages and positive spillovers.

An important element of this project is our Sustainability Reporting Navigator - an open science platform for (learning about) sustainability reporting.

Project team members (at AccSus):

• Sara Bormann (Principal Investigator)
• Katharina Hombach (Principal Investigator)
• Keno Buss
• Jan-Florian Kawalla
• Inga Meringdal
• Lazaros Papadopoulos

We investigate the quality and usefulness of accounting information for investment decisions. The project investigates how levelized cost as a life-cycle metric affects transparency and enables internal stakeholders to make better decisions. Therefore it applies the concept to different types of investment decisions and management control problems, illustrating its decision relevance and potential transparency effects. Building on these insights, we then focus on external stakeholders and analyze how the corporate reporting of environmental metrics (such as carbon dioxide emissions) affect environmental transparency and how transparency in turn affects investment decisions that will reduce emissions in the future.

Project team members (at AccSus):

• Anna Rohlfing-Bastian (Principal Investigator)

The Sustainability Reporting Navigator (SRN) is an evolving open-science platform, established by researchers from the universities of Cologne, Frankfurt, and Munich. We seek to enable companies, users, and researchers of sustainability information to easily

• navigate and compare requirements across European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS), IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards (IFRS SDS) and GRI Standards,
• access and benchmark companies’ sustainability reporting practices, as well as
• learn about stakeholders’ preferences and new developments regarding corporate sustainability reporting.

If you want to learn more about sustainability reporting, visit us at https://www.sustainabilityreportingnavigator.com!

Project team members (at AccSus):

• Katharina Hombach (Principal Investigator)
• Inga Meringdal

In this research project, we analyze the impact of personality traits on (i.) the self-selection of people into specific working environments and (ii.) on the relationship between elements of organizational design, in particular task complexity, monetary incentives, and feedback. We perceive personality traits to be an omitted variable in many prior studies on individual behavior. Accordingly, this project serves as a prelude to what we view as a broader and promising research agenda at the intersection of accounting and economics.

In Part A of the project, we focus on how personality traits influence the self-selection of employees into different job designs, and how individuals respond to incentives conditional on their self-selection. Employee selection is a crucial factor for firms as employees with a “good fit” are more satisfied with their jobs and perform better (Andersson et al. 2017, Farroqui and Nagendra 2014).

Part B of the project examines how personality traits influence responses to incentives, particularly in relation to task complexity. Prior research indicates that incentives affect not only the level of effort exerted but also how individuals approach tasks and direct their efforts (e.g., Hannan et al., 2013; Christ et al., 2016; Lotze et al., 2019). In complex task environments, these variations in task approach become more pronounced and are closely linked to individual traits. Importantly, incentives may lead individuals to adopt suboptimal strategies—especially when there is a misalignment between personal goals and the goals embedded in the incentive structure.

Project team members (at AccSus):

• Sara Bormann (Principal Investigator)
• Anna Rohlfing-Bastian (Principal Investigator)
• Erika Bognar
• Evelyn Intan

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.