Faculty insights on today's business topics

A pioneering study from researcher Matthew Baucum, published in Management Science, demonstrates that, when paired with data-driven reinforcement learning, wearable sensor data yields insights that could help physicians better treat their patients.

Researcher Colleen Harmeling declares in a video circulated by the American Marketing Association that our spending decisions “signal to ourselves and others our own moral self-understanding.” She adds in the video – “The Role of Consumer Morality in Driving Inclusive Growth” – that this concept has gone largely overlooked in marketing research.

So you love your job and want to take on another massive project?

Consider Professor Wayne Hochwarter’s recent findings published in Career Development International. Even those passionate about their jobs are destined for burnout, his study says, unless they have elevated ego resilience, which enables a worker to pause, reflect and adjust.

Brad Karl, State Farm Associate Professor of Risk Management and Insurance at the Florida State University College of Business, has spent the last half of a decade studying the economic cost of distracted driving, including how cell phone bans affect automobile insurance claims and costs, as well as refining estimates of the risk posed by distracted driving.

Associate professor Sergey Mityakov’s paper, “Unobserved Inputs in Household Production,” contends that almost all existing empirical studies of health, child development and job-training programs fail to account for “unobserved” actions that people commonly undertake – “rendering the conclusions of those studies incomplete and resulting in possibly misleading policy recommendations,” he says.

A new study from Aleksandra “Ally” Zimmerman, an accounting assistant professor and Dean's Emerging Scholar who specializes in auditing and taxation, finds that firms with greater gender and ethnic diversity retain more accountants and produce better audits. 

So here we are, in the most loathsome time of year, and we're not referring to the weather. We're talking about tax season. See? We made you wince. We offer five faculty members from Florida State University's College of Business to help ease the anxiety of the paperwork, personal allowances and, if you're late, penalties of filing your taxes.

Professor Charles Nyce is available to comment on Florida's crisis-ridden property-insurance market ahead of the state Legislature's second special session on the matter.

You own a small business, and you find yourself stressing about, among other things, staffing, payroll, supply chains, the economy and the latest strain of COVID-19. Sure, you're overwhelmed, and you see the stress as debilitating. You're probably doing it wrong, says Samantha Paustian-Underdahl.

The College of Business has two experts to discuss interest rates, investments and the economy: William Christiansen, an expert on macroeconomic policy and economic performance issues, and Steven Perfect, who can discuss the effects of rate increases on investments.