Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Dan Cohen @dancohen.bsky.social · 20m

Urban planning, Urban geography, Urban political science

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Dan Cohen @dancohen.bsky.social · 23h

Hah - I love this! So many grifts right now to explore

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Reposted by Dan Cohen

Desiree Fields @desireefields.bsky.social · 23h

Along with Will Payne and Jovan Lewis, I'm organizing an AAG session on the economic geography of scams for the 2026 conference in San Francisco. Please share widely! docs.google.com/document/d/1...

AAG 2026 CFP: Putting the ‘Con’ in Economic Geography

AAG 2026 CFP: Schemes, Scams, and Flim-flam: Putting the ‘Con’ in Economic Geography Will B. Payne, Rutgers University Desiree Fields, University of California, Berkeley Jovan Scott Lewis, University ...

docs.google.com

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Dan Cohen @dancohen.bsky.social · 1d

It's international - we use the same math in Canada (and hire the same consultants): qcaa.ca/2024/09/26/c...

Creative Accounting? QCAA’s Analysis of Queen’s’ Year-End Financial Statements

The Queen’s administration releases regular updates on projected budget deficits, but it’s the end-of-year audited financial statements that provide the clearest picture of the university&#82…

qcaa.ca

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Dan Cohen @dancohen.bsky.social · 1d

The parallels between ANU and Queen's (Canada) reveal the mobility and power of a consultant class spreading across Anglosphere unis. Both have 'Renew' programs led by Nous and both use creative accounting methods to turn surpluses into 'underlying' (ANU) or 'structural' (QU) and justify cuts.

Mark Rubin @markrubin.bsky.social · 2d

New analysis by The Australia Institute finds the Australian National University has a $90 million surplus, not a $142 million deficit!

The ANU’s hidden $90m budget surplus

New analysis by The Australia Institute reveals there is no financial crisis at the Australian National University.

australiainstitute.org.au

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Reposted by Dan Cohen

Dillon Mahmoudi @marxist.af · 6d

Our location on our phone is constructed using a variety of algorithms and data inputs about the built environment. This leads to various "views" on our location that conform into the needs of Google and Android.

Awesome collaboration with @dancohen.bsky.social and Tommy Cooke!!

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Dan Cohen @dancohen.bsky.social · 6d

Recruiting for a study on how Quantitative Easing policies impacted home buyer decisions in Canada from March 2020 to October 2021. If you know of anyone that bought a home during this time please forward the posting and/or this website: www.queensu.ca/quantitative...

A recruitment poster for the study. All information also available here: https://www.queensu.ca/quantitative-easing-study/

Dan Cohen @dancohen.bsky.social · 6d

Of course there's an academic article on just that line haha.

orbit.openlibhums.org/article/id/4...!

“On Deleuze and Guattari’s <i>Italian Wedding Fake Book</i>: Pynchon, Improvisation, Social Organisation, and Assemblage”

This article examines Pynchon’s literary invention of Deleuze and Guattari’s Italian Wedding Fake Book. Featured in his novel Vineland (1990), previous scholarship has either dismissed the reference a...

orbit.openlibhums.org

Dan Cohen @dancohen.bsky.social · 6d

Rereading Vineland before going to see One Battle After Another and found this gem of an easter egg. Opportunity here to turn this into an incredibly niche cookbook with recipes like 'A Thousand Antipastos'

Excerpt of Vineland that describes a book called 'Italian Wedding Fake Book' by Deleuze and Guattari

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Ben Williamson @benpatrickwill.bsky.social · 7d

If your institution requires you to use Blackboard for teaching (like me), be aware its parent company is broke and it's getting new private equity owners whose plans for the platform, and how they'll capitalize on it, remain unknown (bet it includes "AI") onedtech.philhillaa.com/p/anthology-...

What This Means for the LMS and EdTech Markets

For campus leaders: Blackboard will continue operating through the case, but the ownership and investment thesis behind the LMS are changing. This could affect long-term product direction and stability.

For EdTech executives: This is a textbook example of distressed-debt control in our sector. It shows how private equity cycles, first driving aggressive expansion, now dictating asset sales, reshape vendor landscapes.

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Reposted by Dan Cohen

JW Mason @jwmason.bsky.social · 7d

Coming this spring. press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

Against Money

A powerful deconstruction of humanity’s most influential invention, from the acclaimed economists J. W. Mason and Arjun Jayadev. Money is unavoidably fundamental to our daily lives. It lurks behind ...

press.uchicago.edu

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Reposted by Dan Cohen

Jim Kane @kanejim.bsky.social · 8d

Green window dressing in mutual funds doi.org/10.1111/jofi...

ESG fund managers are assigned two conflicting objectives: to deliver performance and to invest responsibly. While investors monitor how fund managers fare along the first dimension daily and from unbiased performance metrics, they tend to evaluate funds' responsibility through sustainability ratings. These ratings are based on granular portfolio holdings that must be publicly disclosed four times a year. However, portfolio disclosure is informative only to the extent that managers disclose portfolio holdings that are representative. If managers move into and out of responsible portfolios to time regulatory filings, sustainability ratings might be uninformative.

In this paper, we establish that money managers engage in “green window dressing.” We document that funds move in and out of ESG stocks around disclosure to inflate sustainability ratings. We support this claim using three separate sets of analyses. First, we analyze how daily fund returns load on ESG indexes around portfolio disclosure. Although exposure to ESG is constant when placebo disclosure dates are allocated randomly, we find a sharp increase shortly before funds report their holdings, and a decrease shortly afterwards. Second, we compare realized fund returns with returns on disclosed portfolios, establishing that the former are higher—but have a lower loading on ESG—than the latter. Third, we document that ESG stocks outperform in the days before disclosure. This pattern is completely reversed after disclosure, validating an explanation based on price pressure from investors' timing of the regulatory filings. Overall, each of our empirical tests has distinct strengths and weakness but all indicate that funds engage in green window dressing.

In the second part of the paper, we explore the economic rationale for timing ESG trades. We find that expensive funds, as well as star and laggard funds, are more likely to engage in green window dressing. In addition, we document that increases in pre-discl…

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Mike McCarthy @itsmccarthy.bsky.social · 8d

Excellent reporting from at @inthesetimes.com that draws from some of my work. The labor movement still hasn’t got its head around the way the institutions of capitalism have changed between the 1930s and today. If the workplace needed democracy then, today pooled assets do as well.

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Micah @rincewind.run · 9d

this business model should be flatly illegal

taking on a bunch of debt to buy a company and then burning the company to the ground to service that debt while paying yourselves huge fees is a purely destructive practice that has never once had a positive outcome

ban it completely

Jason Schreier @jasonschreier.bsky.social · 9d

It’s official: EA is going private.

The leveraged buyout will be financed by a staggering $20 billion of debt, which likely means some *aggressive* cost cutting is ahead for EA in the coming months and years.

www.businesswire.com/news/home/20...

www.businesswire.com

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Dan Cohen @dancohen.bsky.social · 8d

Thanks Ruben!

Dan Cohen @dancohen.bsky.social · 9d

This was a fun methodological project. We built new software that outputted different data streams: the raw data and how that data was algorithmically remodeled by Google. This allowed us to see how these models produced locations that fit the needs of data gathering for surveillance and profit.

“Intellectually, [urban location data] is a great challenging problem. But what about commercially—is this important? The answer is a resounding Yes!”
Dr. Frank van Diggelen (2021), Principal Engineer at Google

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Dan Cohen @dancohen.bsky.social · 9d

In which surveillance study scholars, computer scientists, digital geographers, and a random economic geographer (me) collaborate to unpack the black box of how/why cell phone companies model your location in cities. There's more ambiguity than you'd think!

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Article abstract for Navigating digital geographies: Black boxes, geospatial narratives, and the art of constructing location data. Click link to read abstract

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Reposted by Dan Cohen

Brendan Greeley @bhgreeley.bsky.social · 13d

During office hours I showed an undergraduate how commercial banks make brand-new deposits when they issue loans and he said "I can't believe they're just allowed to do that" and I thought "I know, my dude. I know."

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david i. backer @schooldaves.bsky.social · 13d

Our back to school finance training was popular, so we’re having a follow up next week! debtcollective.org/event/school...

School Finance School

So many educational justice problems come down to money. Why is the district closing schools? Firing teachers and paras and staff? Shuttering programs? Budget shortfalls, fiscal crises…

debtcollective.org

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Reposted by Dan Cohen

Tim McLellan @timmclellan.bsky.social · 21d

Private consultants are taking control of how public universities are evaluated and run.

My submission to the Senate university governance inquiry raises concerns about the impact of Nous Group and their dodgy UniForum data on our universities.

www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStor...

A thread

Image shows a screenshot of the conclusion of the linked Senate inquiry submission. This text can be found on page 10.

The text is too long for alt text, but here is the first three quarters of the text:

Conclusion

Over the past decade, Nous Group’s UniForum data has quietly taken on the status of authoritative benchmark for the quality of a range of professional and academic services performed by public universities in Australia and across the world. This authoritative status is performed through scientific-looking graphs and scientific-sounding jargon designed to imply UniForum data is generated through rigorous methods and backed by expert consensus. This performance of authority is significant: it lends UniForum data an air of credibility and facticity that makes acting upon its results irresistible.

When one begins to open the black box and examine how UniForum data is actually produced, however, it becomes difficult to justify the degree to which Australian university executives are relying upon it in their decision-making. My analysis is based on a review of publicly available documents, and it is therefore possible that Nous or its clients would point to things not in the public domain that address some of the conceptual and methodological flaws that I have highlighted in UniForum. But the fact that the underlying UniForum data and methodology is not in the public domain is itself one of the key causes for concerns. When the stakes are so high, it cannot be acceptable for Nous Group and its clients to simply tell university staff and governing councils, ‘trust us, these numbers are based on rigorous methods and analysis.’ The lack of rigor, external scrutiny, and transparency in UniForum’s underlying data and methodology would be a cause for concern in any public institution, but it is especially concerning in the context of universities where rigorous, transparent, and accountable knowledge production is a core part of what we do. ...

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Prof. Amanda Wise @amandawise.bsky.social · 18d

12/ discussion on university finances and accounting models michaelwest.com.au/uni-finances...

Uni finances. ANU and the commercialisation of higher ed - Michael West

Australian universities are more focused on financial performance and investments rather than their primary function of higher education.

michaelwest.com.au

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Dan Cohen @dancohen.bsky.social · 19d

As Ontario universities are being pushed by the Province and Australian consultants to empower Boards and disempower faculty, the Australian Senate releases a scathing report on consultant spending and a lack of transparency from Boards who don't understand the sector: www.afr.com/policy/healt...

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Dan Cohen @dancohen.bsky.social · 19d

In a sane world this should cause some sort of pause on behalf of administrators because Australia is years ahead on the path they've chosen and the results sure look bad. It's literally the same people promoting the ideas. The full report can be found here: www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentar...

Quality of governance at Australian higher education providers

Interim report

www.aph.gov.au

Dan Cohen @dancohen.bsky.social · 19d

As Ontario universities are being pushed by the Province and Australian consultants to empower Boards and disempower faculty, the Australian Senate releases a scathing report on consultant spending and a lack of transparency from Boards who don't understand the sector: www.afr.com/policy/healt...

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Reposted by Dan Cohen

Jon Piccini @jonpiccini.bsky.social · 19d

Australia's universities are blighted by a "culture of consequence-free, rotten failure", according to the former chair of a senate inquiry examining governance at public universities. ... "There's no other sector in the country where failure is rewarded so handsomely and with so little scrutiny."

'Rotten' Australian university culture lashed in long-running senate inquiry

Australia's universities are blighted by a "culture of consequence-free, rotten failure", a senate inquiry has found.

www.abc.net.au

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