In 2024, the National Association of Realtors paid $418 million to settle an antitrust lawsuit. Part of the settlement gives homebuyers more leverage over their agents’ compensation, potentially lowering the cost of buying a home. But new research from Texas McCombs shows the settlement may not have gone far enough. John Hatfield, professor of finance, suggests more flexible compensation can benefit sellers as well as buyers. He finds that when properties offer lower commissions to buyer agents, those agents tend to steer their clients away from looking at them. 

This study investigates the impact of government procurement contracts on the trade credit strategies of Chinese listed firms from 2015 to 2022. Employing a two-way fixed effects model and a comprehensive set of robustness checks—including instrumental variable estimation, Heckman two-stage correction, propensity score matching, and placebo tests—the research demonstrates that securing government procurement contracts significantly increases firms’ provision of trade credit to customers. This effect is primarily driven by improved access to bank loans, increased government subsidies, and expanded production capacity, especially for contracts awarded by local or city governments. Furthermore, government procurement reduces customers’ demand for trade credit. By identifying government procurement as an “institutional signal” that operates through credit endorsement and scale economy channels, this study offers new insights into the determinants of trade credit and the broader economic influence of public sector contracting.

While exercise is great for both your mental and physical health, new research from Edith Cowan University (ECU) has found that exercise intensity could result in changes to the internal gut biome.

A joint study by the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and the University of Texas at Austin, published as the cover article in ACS Nano, revealed that water dramatically changes the structure of desalination membranes. Using advanced cryo-TEM tomography, the researchers showed that membranes expand by about 30% or more when hydrated—findings that challenge decades of research based only on dry membranes. This breakthrough provides new insights into reverse osmosis, the leading desalination technology, and is expected to improve the design and efficiency of membranes for clean water production. The study was led by Dr. Tamar Segal-Peretz, Dr. Guy Ramon, Prof. Manish Kumar, and Dr. Adi Ben-Zvi, with support from Israeli and U.S. funding bodies.

A research team has developed 3D-NOD, a spatiotemporal deep learning framework that leverages 3D point cloud data to identify new plant organs with exceptional precision.

A research team has developed a hybrid evaluation method that integrates a radiative transfer model with multidimensional imaging data, offering more precise monitoring of rice canopy traits linked to water stress.