Students, teachers, and researchers have all distinguished themselves with valuable contributions to the further development of academia, the economy, and society.

WU is one of Europe’s leading business and economics universities. This is confirmed not only by WU’s triple accreditation awarded by EQUIS, AACSB, and AMBA but also by top placements in international rankings for WU programs and numerous awards and distinctions. The members of the WU community deliver excellence on a daily basis – in their teaching and research. Once a year, WU presents the WU Awards to turn the spotlight on the outstanding achievements of its students, teachers, and researchers. The award winners, many of them recipients of multiple awards, have distinguished themselves through their academic curiosity, their novel approaches to teaching and knowledge transfer, and their innovative research.

Award-winning teaching: The Excellent and Innovative Teaching Awards

For the Excellent Teaching Award, WU students nominate the teachers who have particularly inspired and motivated them with their enthusiasm for sharing their expertise during the previous academic year.

Recipients of the 2022 Excellent Teaching Award:

• Jesús Crespo Cuaresma: Economics

• Bettina Fuhrmann: Management

• Anna Hammerschmidt: Economics

• Markus Lampe: Socioeconomics

• Alice Lea Nikolay: Public Law and Tax Law

• Markus Patloch-Kofler: Finance, Accounting and Statistics

• Nigel Reynard: Foreign Language Business Communication

• Gerhard Speckbacher: Strategy and Innovation

• Julia Told: Private Law

• Nils Wlömert: Marketing

Particularly novel and creative course designs are recognized with the Innovative Teaching Award. This year’s awards focused on international teaching and learning.

Recipients of the 2022 Innovative Teaching Award:

• Anett Hermann: "Practice project" within the framework of SBWL Diversity Management [(In)Visisible Women in Social Sciences and Social Work]

• Barbara Sporn & Bernhard Böhm: Business Planning and Performance Management

• Lejla Atagan & Magdalena Berecki-Pernkopf: Intercultural competence: Communication in an intercultural environment

• Helmut Loukota & Belisa Ferreira Liotti: Simulated Tax Treaty Negotiations with Brazil

A spotlight on research excellence

WU Vienna makes outstanding contributions to help solve the economic, social, and ecological challenges of our time, on both regional and global levels. Over 250 research papers were selected to receive an award in recognition of their trailblazing methods and results.

Recipients of the Star Journals Award:

• Maria Chaderina, Patrick Weiß, Patrick, Josef Zechner, 2021: The Maturity Premium.

• Nils Friewald, Florian Nagler, Christian Wagner, 2021: Debt Refinancing and Equity Returns.

• Linus Mattauch, Damon Matthews, Richard Millar, Armon Rezai, Susan Solomon, Frank Venmans, 2020: Steering the Climate System: Comment.

• Jannis Bischof, Christian Laux, Christian Leuz, 2021: Accounting for Financial Stability: Bank Disclosure and Loss Recognition in the Financial Crisis.

• Pasquale Della Corte, Lucio Sarno, Maik Schmeling, Christian Wagner, 2021: Exchange Rates and Sovereign Risk.

• Alexander Brüggen, Isabella Grabner, Karen Sedatole, 2021: The folly of forecasting: The effects of a disaggregated demand forecasting system on sales forecast error, sales forecast positive bias, and inventory levels.

• Cliff Oswick, Claudia Biscaro, Elena Bruni, Joep Cornelissen, 2021: Reconceptualizing Conceptual Engineering.

• Oguz A. Acar, Darren Dahl, Christoph Fuchs, Martin Schreier, 2021: The Signal Value of Crowdfunded Products.

• Stefano Battiston, Irene Monasterolo, Irene, Keywan Riahi, Bas van Ruijven, 2021: Accounting for finance is key for climate mitigation pathways.

• Augustine Awuah Peprah, Claudio Giachetti, Marcus M. Larsen, Tazeeb S. Rajwani, 2021: How Business Models Evolve in Weak Institutional Environments: The Case of Jumia, the Amazon.Com of Africa.

• Alfred Stiassny, Agnes Somosi, Krisztin Kolos, Luk Warlop, 2021: Customer defection due to service elimination and post-elimination customer behavior: An empirical investigation in telecommunications.

• Eddy Cardinaels, Christoph Feichter, 2021: Forced Rating Systems from Employee and Supervisor Perspectives.

• Isabel Eichinger, Martin Schreier, Stijn M.J van Osselaer, 2022: Connecting to Place, People, and Past: How Products Make Us Feel Grounded.

• Roland Kassemeier, Till Haumann, Baris Pascal Güntürkün, 2022: Whether, When, and Why Functional Company Characteristics Engender Customer Satisfaction and Customer-Company Identification: The Role of Self-Definitional Needs.

• Monika Malinova Mandelburger, Jan Mendling, 2021: Cognitive Diagram Understanding and Task Performance in Systems Analysis and Design.

• Peter Fiechter, Zoltán Novotny-Farkas, Annelies Renders, 2021: Are Level 3 Fair Value Remeasurements Useful? Evidence from ASC 820 Rollforward Disclosures.

• Jochen Hartmann, Mark Heitmann, Christina Schamp, Oded Netzer, 2021: The Power of Brand Selfies.

• Benedikt Schnurr, Christoph Fuchs, Elisa Maira, Stefano Puntoni, Martin Schreier, Stijn M. J. van Osselaer, 2022: Sales and Self: The Noneconomic Value of Selling the Fruits of One’s Labor.

Recipients of the 2022 Best Paper Award:

• Tobin Hanspal, Annika Weber, Johannes Wohlfahrt: Exposure to the COVID-19 Stock Market Crash and its Effect on Household Expectations. Review of Economics and Statistics.

• Isabella Grabner, Melissa Martin: The effect of horizontal pay dispersion on the effectiveness of performance-based incentives. Accounting, Organizations and Society, vol. 88, no. 1.

• MatthewCooper, Benjamin Müller, Carlo Cafiero, Juan Carlos Laso Bayas, Jesus Crespo Cuaresma, Homi Kharas: Monitoring and projecting global hunger: Are we on track? Global Food Security, vol. 30, pp. 100568.

• Monika Polzin: The Basic Structure Doctrine and its German and French Origins – A Tale about Migration, Integration and the Waters of Forgetfulness. Indian Law Review, pp. 45–61.

• Adam Brzezinski, Valentin Kecht, David van Dijcke, Austin L. Wright: Science skepticism reduced compliance with COVID-19 shelter-in-place policies in the United States. Nature Human Behavior, vol. 5, pp. 1.519–1.527.

Talenta: Our award for excellent theses by WU students

Together with the WU Anniversary Fund of the City of Vienna, WU presents the Talenta Awards to the authors of the year’s three best bachelor’s and master's theses. The promising theses written by our (young) researchers are highly socially relevant.

Award-winning master’s theses:

• Diyar Alagöz: The Effects of Election – Based Policy Uncertainty in Borrower Countries on the Pricing of Syndicated Loans

• Sophia Heyne: Social Capital of Afghan and Syrian Refugees in Austria: A Gender-Sensitive Analysis

• Matthias Hrinkow: What is “key”? The development of non-financial KPI of listed Austrian and German companies

• Benjamin Müller: Monitoring and Projecting Global Hunger: Evaluating the Predictive Power of Modeling Methods

• Alisa Madeleine Hirn: Trust over control? On the function and dimensions of trust in the context of vaccination readiness against Covid-19.

Award-winning bachelor’s theses:

• Rosanna Antonia Pottmann: When professional isolation reduces teleworkers’ willingness to go the extra mile: Does transformational leadership make difference?

• Marlena Niedl: The role of consumer education in Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) for textiles in the EU

• Caroline Lackinger: The use of Social Media from a VAT perspective

• Mario Michael Justen: Stay positive, stay successful? The influence of communicated executive sentiment on strategic outcomes in times of crisis

• Maximilian Rudorfer: Routing Matrix Mining in Rail Freight Transport