Laurence van Lent
Professor of Accounting and Economics
Frankfurt School of Finance and Management
My research asks how measurement shapes economic life, both inside organizations and across capital markets. One program develops computational linguistics methods to measure firm-level exposure to political risk, climate change, and other large-scale shocks from the language of earnings conference calls, revealing that these exposures are overwhelmingly idiosyncratic and consequential for investment, hiring, and asset prices. A second program investigates how organizations design performance measures, incentive contracts, and authority structures to direct managerial effort under information asymmetry. Both converge on a core insight: unresolved measurement problems, that is the persistent gap between economic reality and its formal representation, are a first-order determinant of how resources flow through the economy. Read more →
News
- March 2026 Joining Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien as Professor of Accounting (part-time) in October 2026, for a three-year term
- February 2026 "Metering problems and resource allocation" accepted for publication at The Accounting Review
- November 2025 Frankfurt School Impactful Research Award 2025 for climate change exposure papers
- September 2025 Visiting University of Melbourne and Nanyang Technological University, Fall 2025
Recent Publications
- , 2026. Metering problems and resource allocation. The Accounting Review. (forthcoming)
- , 2025. Text as data in economic analysis. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 39(3), 193-220.
- , 2024. Firm-level political risk and credit markets. Journal of Accounting and Economics, 77(2-3), 101642.
- , 2024. The global impact of Brexit uncertainty. The Journal of Finance, 79(1), 413-458.
Working Papers
- , 2026. Technology shocks and the portability of organizational design.
- , 2026. Unpacking social exposure.
- , 2025. Quantifying standard-setting deliberations.
- , 2025. Values discovery.