With never-ending election coverage and the barrage of news about policy and campaign promises, Americans are more interested than ever in all types of political activity. One type that’s garnering more and more interest is corporate political activity (CPA). CPA is a term for all of a firm’s actions or strategies in the political sphere, including shaping policymaking and regulation through lobbying their legislators and contributing to political candidates, also known as PAC giving. Academic researchers and the public have long shared an interest in whether and how CPA relates specifically to taxes and tax policy.

Associate Professor of Accountancy Jenny Brown is one of those academics. A former PhD student, Lauren Wellman, sparked her interest in CPA, which led her to research activity with Wellman, then with University of Arizona Professor Katherine Drake, and most recently with John Barrick, a professor at Brigham Young University in Utah, with whom she co-authored “Tax-Related Corporate Activity Research: A Literature Review.”

Brown and Barrick conducted a comprehensive review of tax-related CPA studies from the past four decades, looking for broad themes. The researchers framed their discussion around three main questions:

1. Which firms are likely to engage in tax-related CPA?
2. What do firms expect to gain from participating in politics?
3. How do firms achieve their political goals?

A crisis and a need for clarity compelled Alexander Bick and Adam Blandin to move forward.

Bick, an associate professor of economics, and Blandin, an assistant professor at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Business who earned his master’s degree and PhD in economics at ASU, have collaborated on the “Real Time Labor Market Estimates During the 2020 Coronavirus Outbreak,” an ongoing national survey designed to bolster public knowledge about fast-changing labor market trends during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Considering that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS’) employment numbers are published monthly, resulting in a three-week delay, both Bick and Blandin saw a void that needed to be filled. “We knew things were happening at a faster pace,” Bick says. “It’s hard to quantify with the government data with such a time-lapse.”

To understand how failure at one financial institution could cascade into distress at other institutions around the country, Assistant Professor of Finance Jessie Wang dug deep into the past. Not just to the 10 years since the Great Recession, but back to banking records from the time of the American Civil War.

Wang and co-authors from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the U.S. Treasury Department wanted to know if there was any historical precedent that could help assess the importance of banking network regulations to banks’ financial stability. They also hoped a precedent could help them understand how the interconnected networks of banks could contribute to risk systemwide.

The questions became important during the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 when the highly interconnected Lehman Brothers investment bank became financially distressed over its trading in derivatives based on subprime mortgages. Its losses and liquidity problems quickly turned into a bankruptcy filing that spread throughout its network and left trading partners and creditors in distress as well. The contagion sent the stock market reeling and contributed to the financial crisis and recession.

Chances are, cybercrime has touched your life in some way … or it will in the future. Gallup researchers found that nearly one in four Americans said they’d been victims of cybercrime in 2018, and that’s about the same number who said they’d been victimized in 2017.

The cost of this activity is staggering. In the U.S., the Council of Economic Advisers estimated losses from cybercrime to be as much as $109 billion in 2016. During 2015, IBM’s then CEO Ginni Rometty named cybercrime “the greatest threat to every profession, every industry, every company in the world.” And, according to the U.S. National Security Agency, it keeps growing every year.

Not surprisingly, corporations are ramping up efforts to thwart online criminals, and analytics is a key tool in this effort. The problem is those analytics require data — lots of data — and that’s been tough to come by in the Darknet.

To address this challenge, Assistant Professor of Information Systems Victor Benjamin has created the Darknet Identification, Collection, Evaluation with Ethics (DICE-E) framework. Appropriately pronounced “dicey,” Benjamin’s framework could help researchers understand and prevent cybercrime.

Have you ever wondered why sales signs are plastered with prices that end in “9” or “99”?

It’s because the marketing technique works (frighteningly well!) to convince consumers that the price is significantly lower than something just a penny or a dollar more.

It’s the result of a cognitive bias called the “level effect” and, within pricing, it’s fairly well established that 9-ending or below-threshold values can be particularly persuasive in getting consumers to be more likely to show interest, explains Associate Professor of Marketing Adriana Samper. The level effect argues that people tend to focus on the left digit in numerical processing. That’s why $199 seems significantly less expensive than $200 even though there’s only a $1 difference — and why a price like $193 doesn’t feel like that much less than $199.

Because of how our brains process information — from left to right — the level effect is relatively universal. So, argues Samper, regardless of whether you’re looking at money or calories, when we see 199 vs. 200, we tend to perceive 199 as a lot lower than 200.