Presentation of this year's Bachelor's and Master's thesis awards by RSM Ebner Stolz and Deloitte
2024-12-13 This week, the best bachelor's and master's theses supervised in 2024 at the Professorship of Business Administration, esp. Accounting, Auditing & Governance, were honoured.
On 10 December 2024, the three best master's theses were honoured by Prof. Dr. Probst from Deloitte and Prof. Velte in an awards ceremony followed by a get-together at the Deloitte office in Hamburg. All three master's theses took an empirical-quantitative approach to the phenomenon of CSR decoupling, i.e. the divergence of sustainability reporting and sustainability performance, in the European capital market. Elio Llane (3rd place) had looked at the influence of audit committees on the extent of CSR decoupling and the moderating influence of sustainability committees. The Master's thesis by Bruce Unkhoff (2nd place) focused on the influence of CSR decoupling on a company's cost of capital. Finally, Finn Bongert (1st place) examined the influence of sustainable executive compensation on the extent of CSR decoupling, taking into account country-specific attention from stakeholder groups. In the latter two papers, the CSR decoupling variable was determined using automated text analysis and AI (Python).
Furthermore, on 13 December, the two best bachelor theses were honoured by Florian Riedl from RSM Ebner Stolz and Prof. Velte in an award ceremony followed by a get-together at the Hamburg office. The empirical-quantitative bachelor thesis by Maja Engelke (2nd place) examined the influence of gender and cultural diversity on the board of directors on biodiversity reporting in the European capital market. Niklas Janßen (1st place) took an empirical-qualitative approach to reporting on sustainability-related internal control and risk management systems at DAX40 companies.
Prof. Velte expressed his thanks for the funding of the bachelor's and master's theses and warmly congratulated the prizewinners.