My tweet quickly went viral, attracting nearly 700,000 views and prompting coverage from the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs.

Now there’s another development.

The University of Oklahoma’s previously publicly accessible H-1B Labor Condition Application notices are now directing visitors to a university login portal.

The university’s official careers website still invites the public to review its current H-1B and E-3 filings. But when you click the link, instead of seeing the notices, you’re redirected to a login screen requesting an OU username and password.

This is now the fourth university to remove or restrict public access to its H-1B hiring notices following my reporting.

• Clemson University: After I exposed an H-1B Data Visualization Specialist position paying $68,340, Clemson removed its public H-1B notice page.

• New York University: After I posted their a Data Reference and Collections Librarian position paying $93,000, NYU’s public notices disappeared.

• University of Missouri: After I exposed an H-1B Strategic Communications Associate position paying $64,000, Mizzou’s public listings went from more than a dozen to zero. Missouri’s lieutenant governor subsequently called for a review of H-1B hiring.

  Chris Brunet

  Missouri Lieutenant Governor Launches H-1B Investigation Based on My Twitter Crusade

  If you have been following me on X, you know that for the past few years I have been obsessively tweeting out discriminatory Canada Research Chair postings…

  Read more

  6 months ago · 80 likes · 11 comments · Christopher Brunet

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I turned this breaking story into a Substack article because I believe it has the potential to become a national news story, especially given the White House’s new fraud task force. Please share it widely to help bring attention to it.

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Universities that rely on taxpayer funding should welcome public scrutiny of their hiring practices, not make it harder for the public to examine them. If these universities have nothing to hide, why are their hiring records becoming harder to access?

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UPDATE: the Inspector General chimes in:

I’m going to keep the family photos private, but we are overjoyed and both Mom and baby are healthy and happy. Fatherhood is already changing my priorities and, I suspect, will eventually change my writing. I can already feel myself becoming a little more grounded/mature/wiser. For those who have been subscribed to my Substack since I launched it 5 years ago, you have basically watched me grow up from unrooted, unhinged nomad to respectable family man.

Due to diaper duties I’ve gone from spending 10+ hours a day on the internet to barely 10 minutes some days, so please bear with me while I figure out how to be productive again.

That said, I haven’t stopped working. I have a few bigger investigations developing behind the scenes, and I expect to publish some major new scoops soon.

In the meantime, today’s article is a roundup of stories that caught my attention but didn’t quite warrant full articles of their own.

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#1: Former Journal of Marketing Editor Backs My Critique of Two Journal of Marketing Papers: “The Fatal Flaws in the Research Are Apparent”

My latest article is performing well, with 15k views on YouTube in the first week:

Today’s update: that investigation was turned into a LinkedIn newsletter by Professor Koen Pauwels, who has served as an Associate Editor at the Journal of Marketing.

That matters because, as you may recall, two of the papers I scrutinized were published in the Journal of Marketing and could now face retraction.

It is therefore a great boon to my argument that a scholar who served in an editorial role at that very journal is now publicly circulating my findings and describing the flaws in the research as “fatal.”

He concludes:

Several other professors chimed in in the comments section, e.g.:

#2: Department of War Orders Research Security Audits at 30 Academic Institutions

On August 17, the Department of War announced that it had ordered research-security audits at 30 American universities, including Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, Georgetown, Duke, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, NYU, and UCLA.

The audits are aimed at determining whether universities receiving federal defense funding are adequately protecting sensitive research from foreign interference (read: China), improper technology transfer (read: China), and other research-security risks (read: China).

#3: UT Austin quietly cuts ethnic, gender studies majors

Future students can no longer major in Women’s, Sexualities & Gender studies; Mexican American & Latina/o studies; African & African Diaspora studies as of fall 2027

#4: Revolt at GEB

Games and Economic Behavior is the top Game Theory journal in the world.

Last month Elsevier declined to renew the editor-in-chief’s contract.

All six other editors then resigned, followed by 58 of the 62 advisory editors.

Elsevier’s stated reason: “moving towards a closer alignment with Elsevier strategic priorities and publishing policies.”

If you know the inside story here, I feel like some details are missing, email me: chrisbrunet@protonmail.com

#5: EJMR Lawsuit

I found an old lawsuit that nobody else ever found.

502023ca002323xxxxmb 3 (1)

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The plaintiff was Dr. Douglas Cumming, then a professor at Florida Atlantic University and now at Stevens Institute of Technology. He sued several anonymous EJMR posters for libel and defamation after they accused him of corruption.

The problem was that he could not identify the Anonymous posters.

The case was eventually dismissed for that reason.

#6: Nathan Cofnas Takes a Victory Lap

Following my Arday/Cofnas coverage, Cofnas gave an absolutely hilarious and very autistic interview to Belgian state TV:

He then reached a deal with the Embassy to remain employed:

#7: Chile Goes Woke

The Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María (@usantamaria) is hiring a professor of Mathematics… “Women Applicants Only”:

“This position is part of a special recruitment initiative aimed at increasing the participation of women. Applications are therefore invited exclusively from women candidates.”

#8: Bill Ackman Creates $1 Million Prize

Bill Ackman has launched a $1 million prize for academic truth-telling: the Carob Trust Prize for Academic Courage.

This is a bit rich coming from Ackman. He is currently bankrolling Francesca Gino’s lawsuit against Data Colada, the researchers who documented data manipulation in her work and who, by his own criteria, look like stronger candidates for the prize.

#9: Francesca Gino tells her side of the story

Francesca Gino just gave her first major interview since Harvard revoked her tenure:

I confess I did not watch all 39 minutes, but the comments are overwhelmingly negative.

Her lawsuit is still ongoing.

The case is currently headed toward a trial scheduled for December.

#10: 1 in 12 Yale law grads get jobs as law professors

New law-school hiring data is out. 8.6% of Yale Law graduates became law professors. No other law school is even close. Stanford comes in second at just 2.6%, followed by Harvard at 2.0%, Chicago at 1.9%, and NYU at 1.5%.

In other words, a Yale Law graduate was more than three times as likely as a Stanford graduate and more than four times as likely as a Harvard graduate to end up in the legal academy.

Law School Docket

Which law schools produce the most law professors?

Professor Sarah Lawsky (Illinois) performs invaluable service to the legal academy by keeping track of law school hiring data, here. I thought I’d look at what schools produce the most law professors…

Read more

2 months ago · 4 likes · 1 comment · Derek T. Muller

#11: Journal Editorial Defending “Academic Freedom” Contains at Least Nine Fake References

In May, the coeditors of the Journal of Higher and Further Education, Anastasia Christou and Steve Lambert, along with deputy editor Rosalind Latiner Raby, published an editorial defending academic freedom and social-justice research.

There was just one problem: at least nine of the editorial’s 31 references are either nonexistent or contain false information, including fake articles, incorrect journal names, and scholars being credited with papers they never wrote.

• https://retractionwatch.com/2026/09/08/editors-of-higher-education-journal-coauthor-editorial-with-fake-references/

#12: Entire Editorial Board Quits After French Academic Journal Is Sold to China-Based Publisher

Another journal revolt.

All 15 editors of the French academic journal Revue de l’Organisation Responsable resigned after learning that its publishing and distribution rights had been transferred to CNBesting, an editing and publishing company with an address in Hangzhou, China.

The editors said they were informed only after CNBesting had already taken control of the journal.

Then came another surprise: the new publisher introduced a €1,350 publication fee. Previously, authors could publish in the journal for free.

The editors resigned en masse, saying they could no longer guarantee the journal’s “scientific and editorial integrity.”

• https://retractionwatch.com/2026/09/11/editors-of-french-journal-on-corporate-responsibility-resign-after-ownership-transfer/

#13: Harvard Is Selling AI Clones of Its Professors

The professors volunteered to be cloned, and Harvard worked with AI-avatar company HeyGen to create their digital counterparts.

#14: Vanderbilt Opens Campus in NYC

Weird. Vanderbilt is trying to change the idea of a university into something like an exclusive club with outposts around the world

And apparently this is only the beginning.

Vanderbilt is already planning another academic campus in San Francisco in 2027, pending regulatory approval.

#15: UChicago Is Becoming a Sausage Fest

This chart went viral last week:

The University of Chicago’s incoming classes have become dramatically more male. 58% of the Class of 2029 is male and just 42% is female, up from a nearly even 52–48 split only four years earlier.

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The paper examined data from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), a proprietary index that measures customer satisfaction with major U.S. companies, and asked whether changes in those scores could be used to predict stock returns.

ACSI itself had been created at the University of Michigan in 1994 by a research team led by Claes Fornell, the lead author of the 2006 paper. In other words, Fornell was not an outside researcher testing someone else’s dataset. He created the metric whose ability to beat the market he was now studying.

The paper claimed that a trading strategy based on ACSI customer-satisfaction data had outperformed the S&P 500 every year tested, by a substantial margin.

2006 Jm

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That is an extraordinary claim.

Persistent, market-beating returns with lower risk are essentially the holy grail of investing. If the researchers had really discovered a durable source of alpha, the obvious question was why they were publishing it in a marketing journal rather than raising money and trading on it.

As it turns out, that is eventually exactly what they did.

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There was just one problem: it didn’t replicate.

WATCH THIS INVESTIGATION ON YOUTUBE:

First Failed Replication

The first major challenge came in 2009, when Christopher Ittner of Wharton and David Larcker and Daniel Taylor of Stanford published a commentary in Marketing Science reexamining whether ACSI data could actually be used to earn abnormal stock returns.

I reached out to this research team, and Daniel Taylor—the Arthur Andersen Chaired Professor at the Wharton School and director of the Wharton Forensic Analytics Lab—provided me with a direct assessment.

I am sure you are aware of (A) Gelman’s “Garden of Forking Paths,” (B) Data Colada’s “False Positive Psychology,” and (C) the Problem of Overfitting. Fornell et al. didn’t run standard multifactor asset pricing tests; didn’t use standard t-tests; and didn’t conduct out of sample tests. When you do, there is nothing there.

I don’t expect someone who is monetizing ACSI for their benefit to be able to conduct an unbiased study on the predictive value of ACSI scores. This is not unique to ACSI. I’d have the same criticism for academic studies of ESG and CSR where the author has a significant ESG/CSR consulting practice. Occasionally academics use journal publications as marketing tools to boost their existing consulting practice. That’s fine. But we shouldn’t pretend the publication presents an unbiased view.

Strictly speaking, this was not a line-by-line replication of the original paper. It was arguably more damaging: a methodological reexamination showing that the headline result was highly sensitive to the unusual choices used to produce it.

Ittner Larker Ms 2009

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Using what they described as more conventional methods from the accounting and finance literature, they found that the market appeared to incorporate major changes in customer satisfaction relatively quickly.

They also took aim at the peculiar construction of Fornell’s original trading strategy: the 2006 paper went long companies whose ACSI scores were above their competitors and had increased by at least two points, while taking short positions in companies whose scores were below competitors and had declined by at least two points. Ittner and his coauthors noted that Fornell et al. never explained why they chose the “arbitrary two-point cutoff.” They also pointed out that the long-run investment strategy combined ACSI levels with this arbitrary threshold, while the paper’s own short-term event study used a different methodology altogether.

When Ittner, Larcker, and Taylor instead sorted firms using changes in ACSI and tested more standard equal- and value-weighted portfolios over roughly three-month, six-month, and one-year holding periods, the spectacular returns disappeared. Moreover, the portfolio containing companies with the largest increases in customer satisfaction did not significantly outperform the portfolio containing those with the largest declines.

The authors then brought up the allegation of “aggressive data mining” — if the 2006 paper experimented with enough variables, thresholds, and definitions, eventually some strategy may appear to beat the market simply by chance.

Their bottom line was unusually clear: They found “no evidence that ACSI information can be used to earn abnormal long-run returns” and also that “we find no evidence that ACSI levels are associated with short-term returns.”

Second Failed Replication

A second challenge arrived the same year. In 2009, Robert Jacobson and Columbia Business School professor Natalie Mizik published “The Financial Markets and Customer Satisfaction: Reexamining Possible Financial Market Mispricing of Customer Satisfaction” in Marketing Science.

Jacobson Mizik 2009 Ms

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When Jacobson and Mizik reexamined the relationship using alternative portfolio constructions and risk-adjustment methods, they found that the supposed ACSI anomaly was “not widespread across the market.”

Instead, the statistically significant results were concentrated in just ten computer and Internet companies—including Apple, Dell, Amazon, eBay, Google, Yahoo!, and Hewlett-Packard—which together accounted for only 8 percent of the sample observations. Once those firms were separated from the rest of the sample, there was no statistically significant relationship between customer satisfaction and future abnormal stock returns.

This distinction was crucial. The 2006 paper presented ACSI as evidence of a general market inefficiency. Jacobson and Mizik found something much narrower. The apparent anomaly was concentrated in a tiny group of technology and Internet stocks during the unusual 1995–2006 period encompassing the dot-com boom, bust, and aftermath.

Their conclusion was blunt: the alleged mispricing was “not widespread,” was “limited to firms in the computer and Internet sector,” and might “not be directly related to a customer-satisfaction based anomaly” at all. Instead, it could simply reflect the peculiar behavior of technology stocks during the dot-com era.

I reached out to Dr. Natalie Mizik, now a professor at the University of Washington, who gave me an extraordinary account of what happened behind the scenes.

Mizik said her team had gone considerably further than the version of their paper that was ultimately published. An earlier version, she told me, contained additional replication tests that “show[ed] step-by-step exactly why the early ACSI studies showed significant effects when there are none.” According to Mizik, that paper had already survived peer review, been accepted, and reached the page-proof stage when something unusual happened.

“From what I understand, Fornell (et al. ?) complained to the editor about our paper and the editor decided to reject this paper from the journal after it was accepted by [the] previous editor and was post-page proof stage and almost ready to be published.”

A substantially different version was eventually published.

Here are the two versions side by side:

Acsi Rejoin Mktgsci Jacobsonmizik

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Mksc

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The version that was eventually published in Mktg Sci with commentaries, including one by Ittner, Larcker, and Taylor, does not have the “Valuation of ACSI” (i.e., Value-relevance of ACSI) results, which I think are more important for mktg field (showing that any positive effects of improved customer satisfaction are fully incorporated into the current earnings and when you include current earnings surprised into the Return model, the ACSI metric itself does not have any incremental “value,” except in computer and internet sector, see p. 22 in .ppt). It only reports the “Mis-Valuation of ACSI” results, which is what you are interested in?

The reason(s) we didn’t find anything in the data were faulty estimation methods and data management (a handful of firms in the Internet sector driving sig results) in the early ACSI studies. And I have been puzzled and have no explanation as to why we were able to replicate the exact point-estimates, but got lower (and non-sig) T-stats compared to Aksoy et al. (2008) ACSI mispricing findings, see bottom of p. 815 and Footnote 2 in Jacobson and Mizik (MktgSci 2009). We followed their protocols for portfolio formation and had presumably the same data.

I have attached a .ppt I used for a presentation at NYU in 2007. It might be easier to follow to see how sig results are driven by a handful of Computer and Internet firms in the valuation and in the mis-pricing studies.

• VIEW: Powerpoint

This [article] from 2013 about bottom-ACSI firms outperforming might be answering your question of why ACSI ETF underperforms:

• https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-12-17/proof-that-it-pays-to-be-americas-most-hated-companies (current)

I do not know what the exact portfolio formation rules are for ACSI ETF and whether past errors in the methods can explain their underperformance. The ACSI website says it is based on top ACSI score in the sector (but there might be something else they are doing and not disclosing the (minor) details, e.g., how sectors are defined, etc.) If it is just the level of ACSI, you can see on .ppt page 23 that the top and bottom 25% portfolios based on lagged ACSI scores have sig positive returns in the computer and internet sector. These results are not in the Mktg Sci paper because we tested the Aksoy ACSI portfolios with joined high ACSI + top ACSI growth rules.

She then pointed me toward an extraordinary episode I had missed: in 2003, the Wall Street Journal reported that Fornell had personally traded on privileged, nonpublic ACSI data before the scores were released to the public.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1045523742738726663

“It’s inappropriate for a public university to hold important information from the public,” said Mercer Bullard, a former assistant chief counsel at the SEC.

The University responded to the incident by stating its intent to investigate the situation according to University policies.

Business School Dean Robert Dolan also issued a written directive:

“I have instructed anyone affiliated with the ACSI not to make personal use of the information gathered in the course of producing the quarterly index, prior to the index’s release to the general public.”

Fornell said he would comply. From that point forward, he would no longer trade stocks covered by the ACSI before the index results were publicly released.

Third Failed Replication

The third replication is arguably the most direct. In 2009, Don O’Sullivan, Mark Hutchinson, and Vincent O’Connell published “Empirical Evidence of the Stock Market’s (Mis)pricing of Customer Satisfaction” in the International Journal of Research in Marketing.

Empirical Evidence On The Stock Market's Mispricing Of Customer Satisfaction

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Unlike Jacobson and Mizik, they specifically went back and tested the actual trading strategy proposed by Fornell et al. (2006). They used the same February 1997–May 2003 sample period and essentially the same portfolio-construction rules, but subjected the strategy to standard asset-pricing tests that the original paper had not performed. They adjusted returns for market risk, size, value, and momentum and formally tested whether the portfolios generated statistically significant abnormal returns using Jensen’s alpha.

The result was devastating.

The original Fornell paper had reported that its high-ACSI portfolio beat both the market and other ACSI companies. But O’Sullivan and his coauthors found no statistically significant abnormal returns under the market model, Fama-French model, or four-factor model. Their comparison table is explicit: Fornell et al. found “evidence of abnormal returns”; but this replication found “no evidence of abnormal returns.”

Even worse, they found the opposite conclusion: when the researchers then extended the sample through May 2006, the relationship started running in the wrong direction. The portfolio containing the bottom 20% of companies by ACSI score produced the highest returns.

And that was before accounting for trading costs. O’Sullivan et al. noted that roughly 70% of the ACSI portfolio had to be rebalanced every year, meaning brokerage costs, bid-ask spreads, and market impact would make the strategy look even worse in the real world.

Fourth Failed Replication

And there’s an extraordinary punchline from Bell, Ledoit & Wolf’s 2014 replication, “A New Portfolio Formation Approach to Mispricing of Marketing Performance Indicators: an Application to Customer Satisfaction.”

Bell 2014 Customer Needs Solutions

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Since one of the main criticisms of Fornell et al. was that they didn't test their strategy out of sample, this group tested ACSI-based strategies over 156 out-of-sample months from 1996/1997 through 2009, using multiple definitions of customer satisfaction and both annual and quarterly portfolio rebalancing.

The result was another failure.

With annual rebalancing, none of the t-statistics even exceeded 1.0, and the best annualized Sharpe ratio was below 0.25. With quarterly rebalancing, performance improved somewhat, but the strongest t-statistic was only about 1.8 and the best Sharpe ratio about 0.47—still short of either statistical or economic significance.

Then Bell and his coauthors performed an especially brutal robustness check: they gave their trading strategy perfect foresight of future ACSI scores. In other words, the portfolio got to know in advance which companies’ customer-satisfaction scores were about to rise or fall—information that an actual investor could not legally or practically possess.

Even that didn’t work. Not a single return was statistically significant, and the highest Sharpe ratio was below 0.32. As the authors put it, if even an “insider” trading strategy using future ACSI scores could not generate profitable portfolios, it was difficult to argue that customer satisfaction was being systematically mispriced by the stock market.

Their final conclusion was unambiguous: “We fail to find any convincing evidence for mispricing of customer satisfaction” and “There is no evidence for mispricing based on either statistical or economic significance.”

Fornell Doubles Down

It is rare enough for an academic paper to make an extraordinary claim that later fails repeated replication attempts. Rarer still is for the same researchers to return a decade later, in the same journal, and publish an even more extraordinary version of the original claim.

In 2016, Claes Fornell and Forrest Morgeson, now joined by G. Tomas M. Hult, returned to the Journal of Marketing with a paper: “Stock Returns on Customer Satisfaction Do Beat the Market.”

2016 Jm

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The paper explicitly presented itself as an answer to the failed replications. Fornell and his coauthors argued that enough time had now passed to settle the dispute empirically. If the critics were right, they reasoned, the extraordinary returns associated with their customer-satisfaction strategy should have disappeared as more out-of-sample data accumulated.

Instead, they claimed that the opposite had happened.

This is where, in my view, the evidence begins to raise the possibility of outright fraud.

The authors claimed that their ACSI trading strategy resulted in 518% returns versus just 31% for the S&P 500 over 15 years.

A fantastical result. An unbelievable result.

Their trading strategy that supposedly produced these 518% returns had one extraordinary catch: it was secret.

The evidence came from an actual investment fund founded and owned by Fornell himself — who acknowledged that the fund “does not include formulaic trading rules,” meaning the crucial investment decisions were discretionary and undisclosed. Without knowing the rules for stock selection, position sizing, timing, turnover, risk controls, and other trading decisions, outside researchers cannot reconstruct the portfolio. And if they cannot reconstruct the portfolio, they cannot determine whether customer satisfaction actually generated the extraordinary returns.

Even That Didn’t Replicate! Three More Times!

Fornell’s 2016 victory lap — where he claimed to achieve 518% returns, vs. just 31% for the SP500 — c’mon — did not end the controversy.

In the very same issue of the Journal of Marketing, two separate teams published responses questioning whether his extraordinary returns could actually be attributed to customer satisfaction.

Sundar G. Bharadwaj and Debanjan Mitra, in “Satisfaction (Mis)pricing Revisited: Real? Really Big?”, argued that Fornell, Morgeson, and Hult had still not resolved the theoretical and empirical problems necessary to establish customer satisfaction as a genuine asset-pricing anomaly.

Jm 2016 Bhardwaj

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This paper identifies many “caveats that could affect the robustness of [Fornell’s] conclusion.”

1. The results critically depend on the manner in which industry is defined.

2. Because Fornell, Morgeson, and Hult use a proprietary trading strategy that has not been disclosed to the general public, the authors are unable to discern what fraction of their reported performance is due to customer satisfaction as opposed to other characteristics of the trading strategy.

3. Because the authors also find positive abnormal returns for the entire American Customer Satisfaction Index sample, at least some of the performance reported by Fornell, Morgeson, and Hult might be driven by sample characteristics unrelated to customer satisfaction.

4. Fornell, Morgeson, and Hult do not consider alternative theoretical bases of their mispricing results.

5. Fornell, Morgeson, and Hult combine satisfaction and change in satisfaction. They indicate that stocks were purchased both before and after the ACSI announcement.

6. Fornell, Morgeson, and Hult’s results are based on a small number of firms

   that are selected arguably not at random. Often it is not clear

   how ACSI chooses to include or exclude firms.

More damaging was the next paper, “Customer Satisfaction and Long-Term Stock Returns,” by Texas A&M professors Alina Sorescu and Sorin M. Sorescu.

2016 Sorescu Jm

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Their analysis could not reproduce Fornell’s spectacular fund performance because his “proprietary trading strategy had not been disclosed to the general public. Therefore, we are not able to discern what fraction of the performance reported by [Fornell] is due to customer satisfaction” as opposed to whatever else was hidden inside the secret trading strategy.

The failures did not stop there.

In 2020, Ashwin Malshe, Anatoli Colicev, and Vikas Mittal revisited Fornell’s results in How Main Street Drives Wall Street: Customer (Dis)satisfaction, Short Sellers, and Abnormal Returns.

Malshe Colicev Mittal 2020 How Main Street Drives Wall Street Customer (dis)satisfaction, Short Sellers, And Abnormal Returns (1)

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After reviewing the literature, the authors concluded that the relationship between customer satisfaction and abnormal returns was “not as well established as some may believe,” noting that prior studies had found positive, zero, and negative results.

Malshe and his coauthors went considerably further than a simple portfolio comparison. The econometric procedure was:

• They split the sample into firms for which ACSI scores were reported and firms for which they were not.

• They then re-estimated their full “main model” separately on each subsample.

• The estimator was a multiple-equation Conditional Mixed Process (CMP), a maximum-likelihood framework that jointly models their selection equation, short interest equation, and abnormal-return equation. The main paper says CMP accommodates correlated errors across equations, different dependent-variable types, selection correction, and multilevel effects.

• They used heteroskedasticity-corrected standard errors.

• They did not simply use raw levels. Their main specification transforms variables into “unexpected changes” using AR(1) models and uses the residual innovations in the econometric model.

• They also use control-function corrections for potential endogeneity, based on peer-of-peer instruments, plus a battery of controls.

The final result really is ugly for ACSI. In Table W19, for firms covered by ACSI, customer satisfaction has a coefficient of −0.0062 (SE .006) on short interest and customer dissatisfaction 0.0212 (SE .019)—neither statistically significant. More importantly, the direct coefficients on abnormal returns are also nonsignificant: customer satisfaction is 0.0034 (SE .060) and dissatisfaction is 0.0738 (SE .155).

The authors conclude:

“Importantly, the effect is nonsignificant for firms covered in the ACSI.”

That goes directly at the heart of Fornell’s claim. His 2006 and 2016 papers argued that customer satisfaction, measured using ACSI, could generate abnormal stock returns and beat the market. Yet, using newer data and more well-identified econometric methodology, Malshe and his coauthors found no statistically significant effect.

Their appendix is actually far more damaging to Fornell than the main paper. Rather than merely discussing the mixed replication literature, it directly asks the question that matters for Fornell’s investment thesis: does an ACSI-based strategy actually generate abnormal returns?

Jmr

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The answer is overwhelmingly negative.

The authors assemble 49 market-neutral estimates from eight studies. The average t-statistic is just 0.869, and only five of the 49 estimates are positive and statistically significant at the 5% level. Against that backdrop, Fornell, Morgeson, and Hult’s 2016 finding looks less like a representative result than a glaring outlier. They reported 0.9% alpha per month with p ≤ .001—and the appendix explicitly notes that this is by far the largest outlier reported anywhere in the literature.

The entire literature says the opposite of what Fornell et al. says.

Commercialization

Then the fatally flawed academic claim became a financial product.

The timing is remarkable:

• August 5, 2016: the ACSI ETF prospectus is filed with the SEC. It states that “Mr. Claes Fornell has a controlling interest in the Adviser and ACSI.”

• September 1, 2016: Fornell, Morgeson, and Hult publish “Stock Returns on Customer Satisfaction Do Beat the Market,” claiming that their trading strategy generated 518% returns.

• October 31, 2016: The ACSI ETF launches.

Fornell’s ACSI ETF charged a 0.65% annual management fee, compared with an average of 0.14% for other similar ETFs, making ACSI roughly 4.6 times more expensive than the industry average… meaning a claim that had not survived replication was now being marketed as an investment strategy, with investors paying a substantially inflated premium to access it.

Investors are paying through the nose for a financial product built on research that appears to be fraudulent junk science.

ACSI ETF Underperforms the S&P 500

Nearly ten years after its launch, we can now test the commercial version of the ACSI thesis against actual market performance.

The results look remarkably different from the academic claims.

Remember: in 2016, Fornell, Morgeson, and Hult reported that their customer-satisfaction trading strategy had generated 518% in cumulative returns, compared with just 31% for the S&P 500, with estimated annual alpha of roughly 8% to 11%.

Then the ACSI ETF launched.

According to the fund's own website, from its October 31, 2016 inception through July 31, 2026:

Rather than beating the S&P 500 by 8-11%per year, the actual ACSI ETF has lagged it by roughly 2.6% per year since inception. Thus, nearly a decade of live, out-of-sample performance shows that Fornell’s ACSI thesis has not held up: the financial product built around it underperformed the market, exactly as the replication literature predicted.

One replication in particular examined the ETF almost immediately after launch. In the 2020 Journal of Marketing Research appendix discussed above, Malshe, Colicev, and Mittal explicitly treated the ACSI ETF as a real-world test of Fornell, Morgeson, and Hult’s 2016 strategy. They contrasted the paper’s claimed 0.9% monthly alpha with the ETF’s actual performance and concluded that it had generated “0% abnormal return before fees.” After accounting for the fund’s expense ratio, they wrote that “the strategy is losing money.”

So, even six years ago, the failed ACSI ETF performance was already glaring.

Today, that early warning has hardened into a decade-long track record of failure.

Journal of Marketing Responds

According to multiple experts I spoke with, problems with this research have been known within academic marketing for years. But a decade ago, researchers were far less willing to openly discuss the possibility of serious research misconduct than they are today. Cases such as Francesca Gino at Harvard and Dan Ariely at Duke have fundamentally changed that conversation.

What makes the ACSI story especially serious is that the stakes extend far beyond the academic literature. If the underlying research is ultimately shown to involve serious misconduct, then potentially unreliable findings did not merely accumulate citations—they helped underpin a commercial investment strategy and a broader business built around the claim that customer satisfaction can predict superior stock returns. Today, more than $100 million is invested in an ETF whose intellectual foundation rests on those claims.

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Several marketing scholars I have spoken with privately believe the relevant papers warrant retraction or formal investigation. I have contacted the Journal of Marketing editorial board to initiate that process.

At minimum, the Journal of Marketing and the institutions involved should now conduct a formal review of the underlying data, methods, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Investors, researchers, and the public deserve to know whether a lucrative financial product was built on a fatally flawed academic claim—and whether its creators sold investors on that claim after serious doubts about its validity were already impossible to ignore.

I have heard that the new Editor, Jan-Benedict Steenkamp, is high on data accuracy and has set up several scholars to act. I contacted him with an advance copy of this article and asking if they would open an investigation or retract Fornell’s papers. He responded:

I also want to flag what seems like a direct conflict between the Journal of Marketing’s current standards and the Fornell et al. (2016) paper. In their March 25, 2026 editorial, “Cementing JM’s Impact on the Marketing Ecosystem: Empirical Execution,” they wrote:

That makes the 2016 paper particularly difficult to reconcile with the journal’s current standards—and, at minimum, provides a strong basis for a formal investigation into whether correction or retraction is warranted.

Fornell Responds

I sent Fornell this list of failed replications and asked a direct question:

He provided me with the following statement in response:

Fornell’s explanation offers a hypothesis for why the ETF’s live performance differs so dramatically from the returns reported in the academic research. It does not resolve the central question raised by this article: why the extraordinary abnormal returns reported in the original ACSI research repeatedly disappeared under independent examination, or how outside researchers can validate the 518% result when the trading strategy that produced it remains undisclosed.

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Chris Brunet

Cambridge Professor Found Dead After Rampant Plagiarism and Pattern of Deception

Just published a deep dive overview and analysis of the Jason Arday situation…

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2 months ago · 24 likes · 4 comments · Christopher Brunet

Just hours later, Nathan Cofnas, the postdoc who first brought Jason Arday’s plagiarism allegations to widespread public attention, announced that his own university was investigating him for allegedly discriminating against Arday.

Only a few hours later, Ghent University formally suspended him.

Cofnas said the university would “almost certainly fire me.”

The suspension letter objects that Cofnas called Arday “mentally disabled” and a “worthless scholar,” described his efforts as a “crusade,” and allegedly engaged in a “targeted campaign of professional elimination.”

“The manner in which you publicly presented your role in the allegations concerning the late professor Jason Arday has reinforced concerns among the university’s community that your public interventions seem to develop into targeted campaigns of professional elimination.”

“Furthermore, in several public interviews, you repeatedly referred to the late professor Jason Arday as being ‘mentally disabled’ and made various other disparaging remarks concerning him, including, among others, describing him as a ‘worthless scholar’.”

“By framing your interventions as a ‘crusade’ aimed at the systematic personal and professional destruction of colleagues, you have demonstrated that your actions extend beyond the permissible bounds of academic debate.”

Ghent does not accuse Cofnas of fabricating evidence, forging documents, or making false claims about Arday. Instead, the suspension letter focuses on his tone, motives, and the backlash his reporting provoked: student petitions, staff complaints, more than 100 emails, and claims of psychological distress.

That creates an obvious perverse incentive.

The more successfully activists can generate outrage around a controversial scholar, the stronger the administrative case becomes for removing him. It is a version of the heckler’s veto: enough people object to your presence, therefore your presence itself becomes the problem.

An internal email circulated by a tenured professor in Cofnas’s department makes the situation look even stranger. According to the email, Rector Petra De Sutter had explicitly solicited members of the university community to submit complaints. Classic. Encourage people to complain about an employee, then point to the number of complaints as proof that the employee must be removed.

Cofnas then turned his attention to De Sutter personally, accusing the rector of using AI-generated material containing fabricated quotations in a speech.

This allegation is undeniably true.

What I find amusing is Cofnas’s careful use of the pronoun “she.”

He’s apparently on a crusade for truth, but even while accusing his own rector of dishonesty, he is scrupulously respectful of “her” gender identity.

If we look closer, Petra De Sutter looks suspiciously like a man wearing a wig:

Before transitioning around age 40, Petra De Sutter published professionally as Paul De Sutter, a gynecologist.

De Sutter recounted his transition in the 2016 autobiography Over(leven): mijn strijd als transvrouw, arts & politica (“Surviving: My Struggle as a Trans Woman, Doctor & Politician”).

From a 2016 book review:

In a 2018 TEDx Brussels talk titled “Tele-Babies,” he portrayed gene editing and reproductive technology as a moral imperative, citing eugenicist Julian Savulescu and casting Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” as something to aspire to.

"In the world of Aldous Huxley, procreation is not something that is connected with sexuality or with relationship or family-building anymore. You just go to a clinic or a factory, if you wish, and you give your gametes. After so many months, you can pick up your child, which has been genetically enhanced and designed according to the features that you want."

Very creepy.

The backlash has now gone international.

Today, August 21, U.S. Ambassador to Belgium Bill White personally intervened, urging Ghent University to ensure that Cofnas remains employed. The U.S. Embassy denounced the university’s treatment of Cofnas as “scapegoating mob behavior,” and warned that the university’s access to U.S. funding could be at risk.

Good for the Trump administration. If America is going to project its values around the world, academic freedom is a pretty good place to start.

Whatever else you think of Trump, this is a concrete example of how differently his government is willing to use power. It is impossible to imagine a Kamala Harris administration going to the mat for Nathan Cofnas; if anything, the political incentives would have pointed in the opposite direction; they would be twisting the knife in his gut. Instead, the Trump State Department has put the weight of the U.S. government behind an academic whom almost every conventional political actor would regard as too radioactive to defend.

The ball is squarely in the Belgian government’s court.

Your move, Brussels.

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Watch the video I made about this:

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Last month, Political Analysis, the top field journal in political methodology, published a correction:

Dr. Aaron Kaufman, Associate Professor of Political Science, NYU Abu Dhabi, published a “joint class project” completed by two of his students as his own solo paper in this journal. The correction “acknowledges their foundational contribution to the development of the ideas and methods.”

The correction does not add either student as a coauthor. Nor does it explain how a joint student project became Kaufman’s solo-authored publication, or why it took approximately three years to correct.

#2: Cambridge Launches Probe Into My Investigation

Following this investigation into a paper mill at Elsevier:

I have now received word that Dr. Anna Du, one of the paper mill’s ringleaders, is under investigation by both her primary employer (Edinburgh Napier University) as well as by the University of Cambridge, whom she uses as her main and, in fact, only affiliation when trading manuscripts as an Elsevier editor:

Statement from a University of Cambridge spokesperson:

“We have undertaken enquiries in the University and we have not received this complaint before. Anna Min Du is not employed by the University of Cambridge. We are reviewing this matter.”

Statement from a Edinburgh Napier University spokesperson (he/him):

“Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We will look into it.”

#3: Debate Update

Not really academia-related, but results are in and I won this debate with 78% of the vote:

I am moving on to the next round, and the winner of the tournament gets $5,000.

#4: Northwestern Shuts Down African Studies

Northwestern is shutting down its flagship Program of African Studies, stripping it of its status as a university research center at the end of August.

This comes despite Northwestern being home to the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, the “largest Africana collection in existence.”

In other words, Northwestern spent nearly 80 years building the world’s premier institutions for African scholarship, only to now dismantle it to appease Trump.

#5: Administrator Bloodbath at Harvard FAS

My YouTube channel is still going strong, I have now published 12 videos and gotten this many views on each: 2k, 170k, 7k, 23k, 1k, 4k, 1k, 65k, 4k, 4k, 14k, 10k.

The average is 25k per video. I’m thrilled.

I published this video last week, “Harvard’s PhD Bloodbath”:

After publishing it, Harvard then announced that they were laying off more than 30% of administrators at their Faculty of Arts and Sciences:

#6: Claudine Gay set to Testify in Francesca Gino Trial

Claudine Gay has been ordered to sit for a two-hour deposition in Francesca Gino’s lawsuit:

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At its peak, EJMR really was the beating heart of the economics profession. Beneath the trolling, cruelty, and rampant mental illness, was an extraordinarily useful venue for anonymous discussion of the job market, department politics, hiring rumors, academic scandals, and research misconduct. Important stories routinely surfaced there long before they reached the rest of the profession.

But the site had been dying for years.

According to Google Trends, interest in the site peaked in 2022, the same year ChatGPT was released. Since then, it has become unusable. There were still occasional nuggets of genuinely valuable information, but almost every thread was buried beneath repetitive trolling, automated posts, and obvious LLM-generated spam. Finding anything worthwhile meant digging through pages of garbage. By the time it died, much of what made EJMR useful was already gone. All of the economists who actually wanted to talk about economics had already been driven away by the spam.

Careers were made—and destroyed—on EJMR, mine included. Most famously, it was an EJMR user who emailed me the plagiarism allegations that ultimately helped bring down Harvard president Claudine Gay. Another writer who came up on the forum was Noahpinion, who spent years hanging around EJMR before becoming one of the most successful economics writers in the world.

For all its ugliness, the forum allowed information to escape institutions that had every incentive to keep it contained. Graduate students could talk about abusive advisers. Junior faculty could discuss department politics. Researchers could flag suspicious papers. Job candidates could compare notes about hiring. People who would never attach their names to an accusation against someone at Harvard, MIT, Stanford, or Chicago could at least put the information somewhere public.

Now much of that information simply won’t come out. Without an anonymous public forum, uncomfortable allegations and embarrassing facts are far more likely to remain private, controlled by the very people and institutions with the strongest incentives to suppress them.

There will almost certainly never be another EJMR.

The American Economic Association famously spent hundreds of thousands of dollars building EconSpark, an official attempt to usurp EJMR. It went nowhere. Nobody used it, in large part because it was tightly moderated and institutionally sanitized. The AEA had every incentive to protect the profession’s reputation, not to host the kind of anonymous, adversarial discussion that might expose its dysfunction, scandals, or corruption.

The people on /r/academiceconomics seem convinced that some cleaner, friendlier, better-moderated replacement will reign on Reddit. It won’t. The thing that made EJMR valuable was also the thing that made it hated: radical anonymity combined with extremely permissive speech rules. A forum where graduate students can anonymously accuse powerful professors of misconduct will inevitably also contain lies, grudges, trolling, and offensive garbage.

Reddit is structurally hostile to that model. Between sitewide rules, moderators, voting, account bans, and reputational incentives, genuinely controversial, novel, or explosive claims (and especially anything even remotely right-wing) are deleted instantly. Reddit, a tightly sanitized liberal echo chamber, owned by Condé Nast, hates free speech.

EJMR took the opposite approach: let people speak. That was EJMR’s uncomfortable bargain: protecting the freedom to say important things also meant protecting the freedom to say awful and stupid ones.

And in the end, the thing that may have killed EJMR was not censorship but the opposite problem: too much speech that was no longer human. LLMs made it nearly costless to flood an anonymous forum with endless garbage. The old EJMR could survive trolls because trolls at least had to spend time trolling. Once anyone could generate thousands of posts at effectively zero marginal cost, the signal-to-noise ratio collapsed.

The internet is now approaching an impossible tradeoff. Moderate aggressively enough, and you create sterile platforms where the most controversial speech is filtered out before anyone can judge its value. Moderate too little, and bots, spam, and AI-generated sludge make genuine human conversation impossible to find.

That messiness is the price of genuine free speech. Free speech matters precisely because nobody gets to decide in advance which speech will turn out to matter.

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So today, I turned it into a YouTube video to finally do the story justice and get it the eyeballs it deserves.

I have finally learned how to maintain eye contact with the camera—the teleprompter helps a lot—and I now have an official theme song, which makes its debut at 1:02.

• WATCH THIS VIDEO ON YOUTUBE

  

I am gradually moving away from distributing every YouTube video through Substack. I published several videos last week without emailing them to subscribers. But I am making an exception for this one because this story deserved a much larger audience the first time around.

If you enjoy the video, liking it or leaving a comment on YouTube helps tell the algorithm to push it to a wider audience.

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• chrisbrunet@protonmail.com

Please never email me from your employer’s device or network, and if you require more confidentiality, ask for my Signal.

When I put out that plea, I got a few responses.

This was one of the most interesting documents I received: a preserved copy of confidential referee records that was briefly posted and then promptly scrubbed from the internet:

Schwert Full List Of Jfe Reviewers

648KB ∙ PDF file

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The person who sent it to me was anonymous, but the original provenance is Dr. Bill Schwert, a professor at the University of Rochester who served as Managing Editor of the Journal of Financial Economics, one of the top 3 finance journals in the world, from 1996 through 2021—about 25 years. Through that tenure, he became arguably the single most powerful gatekeeper in academic finance, wielding enormous influence over which research was published, which ideas gained legitimacy, and which scholars’ careers advanced.

When he retired from the profession, he dropped this bombshell list of all 1,941 referees for the JFE from 1994-2020, the number of acceptances, rejections and the total reports they wrote, the acceptance rate, and the average turnaround time in days.

He named each referee by name.

This is remarkable data, and caused an enormous uproar because the referees were furious that their recommendation records had been made public.

The confidential data remained available on SSRN for just 22 days before the paper was quietly revised and the entire section was removed. But I have the original version, and now you have it too, because someone downloaded and preserved it during that short window it was online.

After he posted it, the team of editors replacing him at the JFE put out a statement denouncing the breach of confidential information, writing:

The editors of the JF, RFS, and the incoming editor of the JFE hereby affirm our commitment to never publicly disclose data that could reveal individual referees’ confidential recommendations, or any other confidential information about the editorial process.

The editors of the JF, RFS, and the incoming editor of the JFE further believe that editors are bound by the AFA Code of Professional Conduct and Ethics, sections 6.(d)(5) and 6.(f), as well as the rules for human subjects research, to not publicly disclose such confidential information

Of course, if you are retiring, the “AFA Code of Professional Conduct and Ethics” is completely toothless: it has no power over you whatsoever, and there are no meaningful repercussions for violating it. So, hilariously, Schwert could burn it all down and expose decades of other people’s confidential referee records on his way out the door, while the profession he had dominated for 25 years was left with little recourse beyond issuing an indignant statement and quietly deleting the evidence.

Schwert’s motivations remain unknown.

To read the breakdown of the data, including the 8 most hostile reviewers in finance (and my exchange with the professor who went 0-for-61), upgrade to a paid subscription.

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Basic Findings

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Yes, it is a funny inside joke, but this is not merely a story about one absurd regression variable. This episode has become shorthand for corruption and exemplifies much of what is wrong with academic prestige, data misconduct, and the incentives at play in the finance job market: who is scrutinized, who is protected, and how serious errors can disappear if your advisor has a Nobel Prize.

What makes it so striking is the gap between the error and the status of the scholar involved. At best, using log(NAICS) was an elementary econometric mistake. At worst, it’s outright fraud. Either way, the person at the center of this scandal now teaches econometrics at Harvard.

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I just released a new investigation, and I’d love your support once again. Please give it a watch, and consider liking or commenting to juice the algorithm:

I’m still learning how to make videos, and there is plenty of room to improve. I need a professional camera, better lighting, and eventually a proper set. But the massive success of the first video proved that the concept works.

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• https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txnd.411922/gov.uscourts.txnd.411922.1.0.pdf

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Wang’s undergrad degree is from Duke, and he earned Masters degrees from NYU and South Florida, and a PhD from Cornell.

His lawsuit is 18 pages long.

It begins on page 1 by asserting that SMU has a systemic problem with race discrimination and retaliation that violates the Civil Rights Act, and then spends the next 17 pages building that argument.

I reached out to SMU for comment, but did not receive a response.

Clearing the Bar for Tenure

At its core, this case is simple: Sean Wang was denied tenure in 2024.

In April 2025, Wang filed a complaint to the President appealing the tenure decision and claiming discrimination, and in May 2025, the President denied the appeal.

SMU’s own standards are not ambiguous. The Cox School’s Promotion and Tenure Manual sets a clear benchmark: “at least four top-tier publications.”

Wang obliterated that standard… this was not a borderline case.

SMU is a respectable but not elite institution, ranked #88 nationally, and its tenure bar is clearly defined. By those standards, Wang’s record is exceptional. Far from a marginal candidate, his output more closely resembles that of a full professor at a significantly higher-ranked school.

By the time of his tenure review, he had published ten articles in top-tier journals (e.g. Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Journal of Accounting Research, The Accounting Review, and Management Science)—more than double the output of any other faculty member in the department at the time of their tenure decision.

His publications garnered nearly 2,000 citations, exceeding the citation count of all three Indian professors granted tenure in the Accounting department.

• https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=fUc4WKwAAAAJ&hl=en

Nevertheless, SMU denied him tenure due to “bad fit” and repeatedly said that he needed “more citations” and “more visibility.” Between the 2023 and 2024 annual reviews, Dr. Wang was called a "bad fit" at least thirteen times by his Chair and Dean. SMU’s Associate Provost, Dr. Paige Ware, acknowledges in the lawsuit that “one of the cautionary alarm bells for anyone who’s looking at DEI is the word fit… that elusive word ‘fit’ that spits in the face of data.”

The “bad fit” contrast becomes sharper when Wang’s case is compared to his colleague, Sorabh Tomar (Indian). At the time of his third-year review, Tomar had ZERO publications, yet received a positive mid-career evaluation from the department chair (Indian). No concerns about “fit” were raised—even though his work, like Wang’s, involved behavioral research using experimental methods and collaboration with the same co-authors.

On its Faculty Permission to Hire Form, SMU recorded Dr. Wang as “White” in its HR and EEO records, erasing his self-identified minority status and treating him as a white man so that they may more easily discriminate against him.

Testimony From 4 SMU Professors

Testimony from the lawsuit:

1. Prof. Robin Pinkley (Janet & Craig Duchossois Endowed Professor of Management & Organizations, SMU)—a 35-year veteran of Cox who has served on numerous P&T committees—wrote to Dean Myers that the Department’s reliance on “fit” is “self-serving” and “does not stand up when compared to the empirical evidence provided by top-tier publications, citation counts, and invitations to speak at Harvard, London Business School, Kellogg, Berkeley, and Carnegie Mellon.” Prof. Pinkley concluded that “Sean Wang’s case was not treated in an unbiased manner consistent with the P&T document and our commitment to equity,” and warned that the current leadership’s pattern of bias “should not be tolerated.”

2. Prof. Pab Jotikashtira (Full Professor of Finance, SMU; member, Provost’s Advisory Committee on Tenure & Promotion) compared Dr. Wang’s record with the two Indian professors most recently tenured in Accounting. Prof. Jotikashtira found that Dr. Wang is “very significantly more productive than Gauri Bhat” and has “a comparable record to Neil Bhattacharya, who is ten years his senior,” adding that “any reasonable person would deem Sean’s citation count as more than sufficient for tenure.” Prof. Jotikashtira dismissed the Department’s quality and “fit” objections as “personal taste” and “absurd,” noting that the career success of ten top-tier publications “cannot be due to luck” given the less than ten percent acceptance rates in those journals.

3. Prof. Jeff Hales (Charles T. Zlatkovich Centennial Professor of Accounting, University of Texas at Austin) described Dr. Wang as “an outstanding researcher with few comparable peers.” Benchmarking against recent promotions at top-twenty business schools, Prof. Hales wrote that Dr. Wang’s 11 peer-reviewed articles (10 Financial Times Top 50 Journals) and nearly 2,000 citations would already match the average full-professor dossier, and that Dr. Wang has “more citations than I had at a similar point in my career.” He concluded that SMU hired Dr. Wang “to do exactly this kind of research—and he delivered.”

4. Prof. David Wood (Glenn D. Ardis Professor of Accounting, Brigham Young University) noted that SMU’s claim that Dr. Wang did not meet the research standards as “ludicrous” and that Dr. Wang met the research bar for full even for top 20 schools.

Discrimination by Desai

On November 19, 2024, Dr. Hemang Desai, Chair of the Accounting Department, informed Dr. Wang of a negative departmental vote (3–1). All three Indian faculty members voted against tenure, citing a failure to achieve “outstanding” performance, while the sole non-Indian faculty member voted in favor.

Wang’s complaint repeatedly alleges that, from the start of his employment, Desai held him to different and more demanding standards than his Indian colleagues.

Since at least 2006, when Hemang Desai (an Indian-Origin faculty member) became a full professor in SMU’s Cox School of Business, the Accounting Department granted tenure to 100 percent of Indian-origin candidates (two of two) who met the published “four top-tier publications” standard, while denying tenure to 100 percent of non-Indian candidates (zero of five) who met the same standard … This pattern is consistent with an ancestry-based preference for Indian-origin candidates and disfavor toward non-Indian candidates. … Dr. Wang’s research productivity significantly exceeds that of his tenured Indian colleagues in the department when they received tenure.”

The filing also includes a more unusual claim: in Spring 2024, when offices were reassigned in the department’s new building, Wang alleges they were “segregated” along ethnic lines— Indian faculty were handed prime offices with nice views, while East Asian faculty were assigned to a Chinese ghetto down the hall.

When I googled Desai’s name, this was the first review that popped up:

Notably, Desai’s son graduated from SMU in 2024 with a degree in business, and was recommended (I wonder by who?) by the school to receive Poets and Quants’ “Best and Brightest Business Major” award.

In that interview, his son described yet another award from SMU: “The achievement I’m most proud of is being selected as a Don Jackson Fellow for the Alternative Asset Management Center Program here at SMU.”

Gee, I wonder how his son got picked to Don Jackson Fellows for the Alternative Asset Management Center Program at SMU Cox... And how he got such a glowing recommendation from Jim Bryan, the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Programs at SMU Cox...

Jim Bryan: “The best students in every school are the ones who don’t just succeed in the classroom, but who strive to make the school better when they leave. Mohan Desai is one of the best examples of this concept I’ve ever seen... I can’t think of anyone better to mentor our new students than Mohan. No matter where he goes after graduation, I want Mohan wearing SMU Cox gear—there can be no greater advertisement for SMU Cox’s student body than Mohan Desai.”

While every father is proud of his son, the optics of the Department Chair's child sweeping competitive internal awards while the department's most productive professor is labeled a 'bad fit' are, at best, a conflict of interest.

My point isn’t to attack Desai’s son, it’s to highlight a pattern the lawsuit alleges: nepotism. A fish must swim; a beaver must build dams; a bird must fly; a fresh-off-the-boat Indian must hire and promote their own caste. Indians are famously one of the most nepotistic ethnic group in America, it’s just what they do, it is clearly how their culture operates, as documented in thousands of other lawsuits and articles, e.g.:

• Across India, Nepotism as a Way of Life (New York Times, 2012)

• Tech giant accused of hiring bias in favor of Indian workers (World of Labour, 2017)

• The US says Oracle is encouraging Indians to hire other Indians—and it’s killing diversity (Quartz, 2022)

• ‘Indian students preferred’: Discriminatory rental ads have people shying away from applying (CBC, 2020)

• Punjab Health Foundation’s hiring scandal exposes systemic nepotism epidemic (Samaa, 2023)

• Insiders Tel How IT Giant was intentionally discriminating against non-Indian workers (Bloomberg, 2024)

• The Public Timeline Of The Cisco Caste Discrimination Case (2024)

• ‘Nepotism never fails’: Indian-origin FedEx CEO Raj Subramaniam draws flak over H-1B hiring (Times of India, 2025)

• Nepotism: The Silent Killer of Merit in India’s Legal Landscape (Hindu College Gazette, 2025)

• ‘This is why Indians are being hated’, US techies claim Indians taking high-paying jobs, ‘it’s nepotism’ (Financial Express, 2025)

• A White Man in the Indian-Dominated Tech Sector (American Renaissance, 2025)

• Indian nepotism in the software industry explained by an insider, parts I-III (Reddit, 2025)

SMU’s Response

The university’s response filing is sparse, offering little substantive detail or point-by-point rebuttal. SMU denies the allegations in full and asserts that Dr. Wang is not entitled to any relief.

• https://assets2.pacermonitor.com/filings/Wang_v_Southern_Methodist_University/Wang_v_Southern_Methodist_University__txndce-25-03129__0014.0.pdf

Trial is scheduled to begin on February 1, 2027.

Wang is seeking preliminary and permanent injunctive relief requiring SMU to:

1. Grant Dr. Wang tenure and promotion to Associate Professor;

2. Grant Dr. Wang an expedited, conflict-free review for promotion to Full Professor with appropriate retroactive compensation adjustments if the fact-finder determines Dr. Wang's qualifications warranted such promotion at the time tenure was denied;

3. Cease discriminatory practices in tenure and promotion decisions;

4. Implement and enforce written policies prohibiting the use of subjective “fit” criteria in tenure decisions.

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I bought the book solely because it mentions me, so I was curious, and felt obligated to point out the lies and propaganda she is spreading.

You can buy it here:

• https://www.amazon.com/Poisoned-Ivies-Academic-Americas-Universities/dp/1668087537

  

The first thing I noticed is that, ironically, Stefanik plagiarized the title:

• Poisoned Ivy (1981): A Student Witnesses The Origin of the “Woke Mind Virus”

• Poison Ivy (2022): How Elite Colleges Divide Us

• Poisoned Ivies (2026): Moral Rot at America’s Elite Universities

Before I even read page 1, I noticed a groan-worthy, blatant lie in the first line of the book jacket where Stefanik claims that the Claudine Gay hearing was "the most-watched congressional hearing in history."

She doesn’t make an attempt to quantify or prove this claim, because there is zero chance it’s true. For example, 85% of American households saw at least part of the Watergate hearings… do you really think even 5% of of American households saw the Claudine Gay hearing?

The rest of the book was much of the same.

Introduction

Typical slop about how society-is-losing-trust in universities because of DEI and wokeness, mixed with plenty of bragging about how historic her hearing was.

• “the world heard [me]”

• “it would become a historic earthquake that instantly reshaped the debate on higher education overnight”

• “the hearing changed the trajectory of higher education”

• “as a result of [my question], elite campuses are in the midst of a generational upheaval”

• “nothing is the same”

• “our hearing reset the course of American higher education”

Readers quickly learn that the entire purpose of the book is to brag about, promote, and re-live this 1-minute long clip:

She re-plays this clip hundreds of times in the book.

Except, Stefanik is histrionically overstating what she actually means.

When she refers to “calls for genocide,” she is actually just referring to students chanting “from the river to the sea,” a slogan that featured prominently in the DOJ’s antisemitism lawsuit against Harvard.

Stefanik was part of a concerted effort by the Israel lobby and to characterize the phrase as an explicit call for genocide. For example:

• Combat Antisemitism Movement: “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free is a violent call to genocide that should be banned from the social media platform.”

• Senator John Kennedy: “The phrase ‘from the river to the sea’ is a call for genocide against Jewish people. It’s a call to annihilate Israel.”

• Senate Resolution 497: “This resolution expresses the sense that the slogan from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free and its derivations are anti-Semitic and a call for genocide and destruction of the Jewish state.”

What makes the charge of genocide especially strange is that this slogan has deep roots in Revisionist Zionism itself. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of the Revisionist Zionist movement, wrote a 1929 song titled “The East Bank of the Jordan,” which became one of Betar’s (an Israeli terrorist movement) best-known anthems:

“The Jordan has two banks; this one is ours, and the other one too.”

The Likud Party’s 1977 platform then stated:

“Between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”

So, if “from the river to the sea” is treated as inherently genocidal when Palestinians use it, then the same standard has to be applied consistently. Either the phrase is not genocidal, or Israel is founded on the same calls for genocide.

During her book tour, she was brutally exposed by Jake Tapper for this hypocrisy:

Chapter 1: The Hearing Heard Around the World

This chapter begins by tediously whining about Hamas and Hitler for several pages, then whines about Hamas and Hitler for several more pages, then whines about university students having the nerve to sign petitions and open letters.

Stefanik then name-drops several of her colleagues and profusely praises each one. The prose is as sloppy as it is sycophantic:

“A dear friend and mentor, Dr. Virginia Foxx has a spine of steel and a heart of pure gold. Virginia Foxx is a no-nonsense, legendary member of Congress not just among Republicans, but across the aisle. Sh’e just a bull, and she just charges in every day, non-stop, from sun up until way after the sun goes down. At age 82, Virginia put many fellow members of Congress to shame with her dogged work ethic and determination. She keeps a packed schedule that would tire out even the spriteliest Gen-Z movers and shakers.

Stefanik then spends a few pages describing how she prepared for the hearing:

• “I stayed up late working through reams of research”

• “I pre-drafted several rounds of questions “

• “I thought to myself, how can I ask this in a very moral way, that will force them to answer YES?”

What’s fraudulent about this narrative is that she conspicuously omits any mention of Shabbos Kestenbaum and “a small gathering of Jewish students” working “behind the scenes” to “help write” her now-infamous genocide question, also writing her follow-up questions:

Kestenbaum is only mentioned briefly in Stefanik's book, where she says he was threatened by a man waving a machete:

The line about a Harvard employee waving a machete at Kestenbaum leaves out that the "machete" was a toy.

The video with the toy machete is about the false exoneration of Jeffrey Epstein’s close friend, Alan Dershowitz, not even about Kestenbaum. You be the judge:

In April 2026, Stefanik then goes on Kestenbaum's show to promote her book, and neither mentions it to their audience that he was actually the one who wrote her “question heard around the world”:

I watched the entire 22 minutes.

There is 1 minute worth clipping:

To start the clip, Shabbos lies about not knowing that her not-a-trick question was coming:

Of course, he was the one that wrote it, and specifically wrote it to not be a trick question:

She then makes a hilarious slip up, almost saying that he was there to write it for her, before catching and correcting herself:

She then repeats several times how she came up with the question herself, and how she wrote follow up questions:

Of course, a year earlier, Shabbos framed it as HE WAS THE ONE who was writing the question and follow up questions:

Chapter 2: Harvard

This chapter is dedicated to explaining that Elise Stefanik is a humble, hardworking genius because she got into Harvard. She wants you to know that she thrived around other geniuses, because she is a genius, and she enjoyed her time as an undergrad. She was very popular and used her time there to become friends with many famous, powerful people.

Did I mention that she’s a hardworking genius, and very popular?

Chapter 3: Harvard Exposed

Complaining about Harvard going woke interspersed with complaining about Hamas and Hitler. Then complaining length about how Claudine Gay was insufficiently loyal to Israel. Then complaining about Qatar.

Then bragging about how she was featured on Saturday Night Live.

Chapter 4: University of Pennsylvania

Complained about anti-semitism at UPenn for 12 pages.

Chapter 5: Columbia

Complained about anti-semitism at Columbia for 26 pages.

Chapter 6: Other Ivies and Beyond

Complained about anti-semitism at other schools for 39 pages, including screeching about several obviously staged, fake, false-flag hate crimes, such as a Yale student who blatantly lied about a Palestine flag hitting her eye which she described as being “stabbed.”

Chapter 7: What Went Wrong?

Complaining about DEI, Hamas, Qatar, and the communist infiltration of the Chinese Communist party, and concludes that to counter China’s influence on American campuses, TikTok must be sold to a Zionist.

Chapter 8: How We Fix It

She talks about what role the government can play in reforming American higher education. Her primary solution is to arrest, suspend, and expel all anti-Israel “agitators” on campus.

Another solution is to pass laws IHRA laws, including two pieces of legislation called “Combatting Anti-Semitism” and “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism” to direct federal agencies to use “all available and appropriate legal tools to prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful anti-Semitic harassment and violence.”

Visas should be revoked.

Oh, and please support Bari Weiss’ University of Austin, and support Peter Thiel.

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Many of these result in comments from billionaires like Elon Musk, Chamath, or Paul Graham:

Many, like my most recent one about Memorial University, result in international mainstream news coverage:

This has been a terrific way to go viral and farm engagement and outrage, but has been disheartening since nothing in Canada ever changes.

Canada is simply not going to abolish affirmative action. In fact, Affirmative Action is enshrined in Section 15(2) of the Canadian Constitution:

More recently, since immigrating to America — I have taken to referring to myself as a first-generation immigrant — I have switched to tweeting out H-1B job postings, e.g.:

After tweeting out dozens of these, my most recent one about Missouri University was finally picked up by the DOJ Civil Rights Division:

And then it was picked up by the Lt. Governor of Missouri, who said “I am going to check into this”:

Today, a spokesperson for Missouri University confirmed the school is “conducting a review of its H-1B program.” Wasinger said “he had spoken with the school’s president, Mun Choi, about the issue shortly after he posted on X.”

Wasinger also confirmed “he has spoken with the principal deputy assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, about potential investigations into visa fraud in the state.”

My sources tell me that the Missouri legislature is now looking at introducing legislation prohibiting H-1Bs from being hired by any government entity, including State universities. This legislation is hinted at in a tweet tonight by the Missouri GOP:

Let this be a tale of autistic determination and the power of citizen journalism.

We are seeing a real-time shift where social media exposure is no longer just about farming clicks; it is becoming a mechanism for oversight. For years, universities have hidden behind bureaucratic language, HR euphemisms, and a compliant media class that treats every discriminatory hiring scheme as morally self-evident. But the internet has changed the incentive structure. A job posting that once would have disappeared into an institutional careers page can now be seen by millions of people, scrutinized by lawyers, amplified by lawmakers, and placed directly in front of federal investigators.

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RIBAF’s previous Editor-in-Chief, John Goodell—a Professor of Finance at the University of Akron—was not due to have his term expire until 2027.

So, what happened?

I reached out to Goodell and Elsevier for comment, but did not receive a reply.

According to my sources, Goodell’s departure is directly due to the citation cartel I exposed 2 months ago that resulted in Elsevier firing of 2 other finance professors, Brian Lucey and Samuel Vigne—both are co-authors of Goodell.

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Goodell has been a professor since 2008.

For the first decade, his publication output was steady and within the normal range: 2, 2, 6, 7, 8, 13, 11, 4, 3, 3, 3, 6 papers per year.

Then something changed.

From 2021 to 2025, his annual output exploded: 16, 34, 53, 58, and 32 papers.

How did he accomplish this amazing feat?

Simple: he was gifted 100+ papers by the now-fired Brian Lucey and Sam Vigne.

Lucey, as I described in my earlier articles, was fired as an editor or editor-in-chief at 5 journals: International Review of Financial Analysis, the International Review of Economics & Finance, Finance Research Letters, Financial Management, & Energy Finance.

Samuel Vigne was fired as the editor-in-chief of International Review of Financial Analysis and Finance Research Letters.

John Goodell published:

• 47 papers in International Review of Financial Analysis

• 12 papers in International Review of Economics & Finance

• 66 papers in Finance Research Letters alone

For a total of 125 papers in their corrupt journals!

If each of these 125 papers contains a modest 50 references, this generates roughly 6,250 citations to spread around his cronies. This obviously isn’t legitimate research; it is a citation-farming operation—a practice that has already prompted Elsevier to retract dozens of his cronies’ papers for “citation stacking.”

These hundreds of fraudulent publications have resulted in an explosion of Goodell’s citations, now at 15,663. In 2025 alone, he earned 4,203 citations, resulting in his citation profile exhibiting an exponential “J-curve”, a hallmark of citation rings.

According to an analysis published at PubPeer mapping the 500 top Finance Professors in the Elsevier ecosystem, the biggest blue dot in the middle of this graph of influence (below) is John Goodell. Despite working at a terrible school and producing terrible research, through corruption, he has made himself the single most influential researcher at the biggest academic publisher in the world.

He is the gatekeeper through whom the entire network must pass.

According to my sources, Goodell was widely-known to be running a gift-authorship and citation cartel with RIBAF for years in which he makes junior scholars work for him and he adds his name — “you add me on your paper - I get you a few guaranteed RIBAFs” deal, which is a retraction reason at Elsevier.

Elsevier’s guidelines are clear: if an editor receives a manuscript from a co-author and no independent editor is available at the journal, the paper is supposed to be transferred to another journal.

Because John Goodell handled some hundreds of such papers at his journal, Elsevier seems more interested in containing the scandal than confronting it directly. A full mea culpa would likely require retracting a vast number of articles, which would turn this into a major and deeply embarrassing story.

In an honest world, this journal should be shut down altogether, not reformed.

In RIBAF’s case, we are talking about hundreds of compromised papers. By my rough estimate, the number is around 200 retractable papers if you count active co-authors alone, and well above 350 if former collaborators are included.

Please share my article widely to hold Elsevier to account:

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Here is a straightforward example of how this paper trading scheme could work.

In January 2025 and March 2025, Emmanuel Abakah, Senior Lecturer in Finance at the University of Ghana, published two papers at Goodell’s RIBAF:

While these papers was under review by John Goodell, Emmanuel Abakah added Goodell as a co-author to 2 publication in Brian Lucey’s other journal, where Goodell was credited with “Supervision” co-author credits.

This pattern repeats hundreds of times:

1. Goodell receives a submission for review at RIBAF

2. Goodell is added as a co-author to that submitter’s paper at a different journal

3. The submitter’s RIBAF submission is accepted

Perhaps the most prolific example in this scheme is Dr. Anna Min Du, a Professor of Finance at Edinburgh Napier University and a fellow at both the University of Cambridge and Peking University.

She is an editor at 6 Elsevier journals:

She published at least 22 RIBAFs (!!) in 2024-2025:

- 4 in Volume 70, Part B, June 2024, 102386
- 3 in Volume 71, August 2024, 102436
- 2 in Volume 72, Part B, October 2024, 102544
- 6 in Volume 73, Part A, January 2025, 102541
- 2 in Volume 75, March 2025, 102755
- 2 in Volume 76, April 2025, 102819
- 2 in Volume 77, Part A, May 2025, 102886
- 1 in Volume 79, July 2025, 103029

1. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2024.102386

2. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2024.102394

3. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2024.102405

4. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2024.102406

5. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2024.102436

6. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2024.102459

7. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2024.102475

8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2024.102544

9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2024.102545

10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2024.102541

11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2024.102557

12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2024.102624

13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2024.102633

14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2024.102634

15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2024.102585

16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2025.102755

17. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2025.102764

18. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2025.102819

19. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2025.102878

20. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2025.102886

21. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2025.103029

22. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2025.102912

While Du painstakingly lists all of her other publications on her personal website, she conspicuously omits any mention of RIBAF:

She allegedly had all her RIBAFs listed on her Google Scholar at one point, but then removed them all. When I checked, they were not there.

Sadly, I made the amateur mistake of not archiving it, so I can’t prove it.

I emailed her to ask about these papers scrubbed from her Google Scholar.

She denied ever removing them:

Thank you for your email. My Google Scholar remains the same. I didn’t scrub any of my publications or add them back. I didn’t check messages on LinkedIn either. I believe you can tell whether messages were read or not on LinkedIn. You might want to check it carefully.

Then, after emailing her, when I checked her Google Scholar again, most of them magically reappeared. However, these 4 are still not listed on her Google Scholar:

• https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2024.102624

• https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2025.102755

• https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2025.102878

• https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ribaf.2025.102886

But then when I emailed her again to press her on how she published at least 22 papers in 2024-2025 all in one journal, she stopped responding.

Sure, she could just be a really productive and well-connected author who submitted 22 papers to this journal that year.

Or……. it’s possible that John Goodell gifted her 20+ RIBAF publications in one year, and she returned the favor by adding his name to 14 of her papers at other journals that same year:

1. Artificial intelligence as a catalyst for sustainable tourism growth and economic cycles AB Siddik, MS Forid, L Yong, AM Du, JW Goodell - Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2025

2. Internal business process governance and external regulation: How does AI technology empower financial performance? X Cheng, AM Du, C Yan, JW Goodell - International Review of Financial Analysis, 2025

3. Ecological risk and corporate sustainability: Examining ESG performance, risk management, and productivity Q Du, Z Sun, JW Goodell, AM Du, T Yang - International Review of Financial Analysis, 2024

4. Ecological risk management: Effects of carbon risk on firm innovation investment F Li, JW Goodell, AM Du, T Yang - International Review of Financial Analysis, 2024

5. Modeling climate policy uncertainty into cryptocurrency volatilities S Ding, X Wu, T Cui, JW Goodell, AM Du - International Review of Financial Analysis, 2025

6. Vulnerability of energy firms to climate risk: Does fintech development help?

   K Abbasi, A Alam, JW Goodell, AM Du, NA Brohi - Energy Economics, 2025

7. Carbon emission trading policies and energy transition: Perspective from natural gas consumption in China L Cai, AM Du, Q Du, JW Goodell, Z Li - Energy Economics, 2025

8. Exploring AI-driven digital banking platforms: Implications for Business model innovation and sustainability in the financial sector AB Siddik, L Yong, AM Du, JW Goodell - IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, 2025

9. Digital credit and insurance: Improving economic well-being for rural households J Zhang, S Chen, JW Goodell, AM Du - International Review of Economics & Finance, 2025

10. Disentangling and hedging global warming risk: A machine learning approach S Ding, T Cui, AM Du, JW Goodell, N Du - Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 2025

11. Innovating towards a sustainable future: decarbonization strategies and energy economics in lesser-developed economies JW Goodell, AM Du - Energy Economics, 2024

12. Impact of bank-affiliation on liquidity seeking of foreign mutual funds during adverse shocks: Evidence from China J Zhang, R Mao, JW Goodell, AM Du, Y Xu - International Review of Financial Analysis, 2024

13. Impact of Chinese foreign direct investment on energy demand and stability: The Belt-Road Initiative as conditioner R Shinwari, AM Du, JW Goodell - Journal of Environmental Management, 2025

14. Internal business process governance and external regulation: How does AI technology empower financial performance? JW Goodell, X Cheng, AM Du, C Yan International Review of Financial Analysis 99, 1

This is blatantly a reciprocal exchange where Goodell provides the platform (RIBAF) and Du provides the co-authorship credits to boost Goodell’s H-index.

Also, it’s worth noting 6 of these 14 publications were in the International Review of Financial Analysis, a journal ran by the now-fired Brian Lucey and Samuel Vigne.

Again, this pattern repeats hundreds of times, with hundreds of authors.

In the extensive sample of his 100+ papers I analyzed, I found a perfect correlation between co-authorship on Goodell’s CV and subsequent publication in his journal, RIBAF. This is not a series of coincidences; it is a blatant, industrial-scale quid pro quo. Goodell has effectively turned the peer-review process into a private brokerage.

Elsevier has replaced the man, but they haven’t addressed the rot. If hundreds of authors participated in this scheme, why are their papers still standing? Someone is still protecting the house. The only question left is: Who, and why?

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Last month I wrote a story about Brian Lucey getting 13 papers retracted:

Chris Brunet

Elsevier Shuts Down Its Finance Journal Citation Cartel

On Christmas Eve, 9 “peer-reviewed” economics papers were quietly retracted by Elsevier, the world’s largest academic publisher…

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8 months ago · 82 likes · 6 comments · Christopher Brunet

My article hit #1 on Hacker News:

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47119530

Today’s update involves professor Samuel Vigne, Lucey’s protégé, and former PhD student, who has now had yet another paper retracted:

• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1059056023001764

The stated reason for this new retraction is fraudulent citations:

The journal, with guidance from an impartial field expert acting in the role of an independent Publishing Ethics Advisor, found that 22 citations were added to this paper at the article revision stage without justification to the handling editor. Additional 8 citations were added to this paper at author proof stage without the approval of the Editor. The new citations were inserted generically without being thoughtfully integrated into the paper’s narrative, thus lacking direct relevance to the specific points being made. The new citations mainly benefit the authors Muhammad A. Naeem and Sitara Karim.

#2: MIT Fraud Update

Another popular article I wrote was about a PhD student at MIT named Aidan Toner-Rodgers, who was kicked out of school for fabulously fabricating data.

Chris Brunet

MIT Econ PhD Student Kicked Out for Massive Fraud

This is undoubtedly the most blatant and brazen econ fraud of 2025…

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a year ago · 156 likes · 4 comments · Christopher Brunet

Another paper by Aidan Toner-Rogers (MIT) was just retracted a few days ago, this time in the top journal in the world for Development Economics:

• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304387826000714

  

The stated reason for this new retraction is because his co-author requested it:

This article has been retracted at the request of the corresponding author (FLF).

The corresponding author has indicated that key results in the paper cannot be independently verified and that the reliability of the underlying analyses cannot be confirmed. In light of these concerns, the Editors have concluded that the findings cannot be relied upon and have therefore retracted the article. This retraction is issued to maintain the integrity of the scientific record.

#3: Florian Ederer Update

Long-time readers will remember that I gave a seminar at Stanford University in 2023 about a hacked economics forum:

Here we are 3 years later, and the resulting paper from the hacked data is still not published, stuck in R&R limbo. Last week, I asked the authors for an update:

I am guessing it is held up due to legal issues.

#4: Faculty Leaks

This week I came across , an “anonymous dispatch from inside higher education”. It’s a brand-new account—just launched this week—and they’ve already published their first 2 pieces. I’m always glad to support new writers, and this one looks promising. If you’re interested in academia, this Substack is worth checking out and subscribing to.

Faculty Leaks

The Last Dinosaurs: Why Academia Keeps Protecting Its Worst Senior Faculty

Faculty Leak is an anonymous dispatch from inside higher education. Some details have been changed. The dysfunction has not…

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7 months ago · 3 likes · 1 comment · Faculty Leaks

Faculty Leaks

The Academic Conference Grift: How Professors Turn a Two-Sentence Abstract Into a Paid Vacation in Greece

Faculty Leaks is an anonymous dispatch from inside higher education. Some details have been changed. The dysfunction has not…

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6 months ago · 1 like · Faculty Leaks

#5: Plagiarized Poison Ivy

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#1: 10,000 graduate jobs for 900,000 graduates in the UK

Bloomberg put out a report last week concluding that there are only 10,000 new graduate jobs each year in the UK, and, well, the math isn’t great.

#2: 38% of Stanford students are disabled

The Atlantic recently published an article with some amazing statistics:

• At Brown and Harvard, more than 20% of undergraduates are registered as disabled

• At Amherst: more than 30 percent

• At Stanford: nearly 40 percent

• At the University of Chicago, the number has more than tripled over the past eight years; at UC Berkeley, it has nearly quintupled over the past 15 years.

Much of this rise in “disabilities” stems from students strategically seeking accommodations—particularly extra time on exams—because of how universities currently define and incentivize disability status.

At Berkeley, psychological/emotional distress is now the top reason for an accommodation. Second is ADD/ADHD.

Professor Eric Kaufman has measured which kinds of university student have high anxiety… the answer may not surprise you:

#3: UC San Diego Students Can’t Do basic Math

This was a big story a couple of months ago when it broke:

Steve Sailer

UCSD Admissions Fiasco Like Subprime Mortgage Crash

Jelani Nelson is the chairman of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at UC Berkeley. He is half Ethiopian, half African-American, and grew up in the Virgin Islands…

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a year ago · 37 likes · 38 comments · Steve Sailer

UCSD’s “Math 2” course teaches grade-school math (grades 1–8) to freshmen.

From page 49 of the university’s new report:

• 25% of students got 7 + 2 = ___ + 6 wrong
• 61% of students, a large majority, couldn’t round 374,518 to the nearest hundred
• 37% of students couldn't subtract fractions

Hilariously, there are 5 mathematics students at USCD who have to take this remedial math class, 15 electrical & aerospace university students, and 14 Computer Science Students:

UCSD is ranked as the nation’s 5th best public university.

#4: Mega-journal Heliyon retracts hundreds of papers after internal audit

• https://retractionwatch.com/2026/02/03/mega-journal-heliyon-retracts-hundreds-of-papers-after-internal-audit/

Heliyon has published fewer papers and ramped up its retractions since a major indexing service put the journal on hold and the publisher launched an audit of all papers published in the journal since its launch in 2016.

…

Heliyon published over 11,000 papers in 2023 and more than 17,000 in 2024, issuing around two dozen retractions in each year. Last year, the journal published 3,168 articles and retracted 392 others.

So far this year, 37 papers have been retracted, and 144 have been published. The retraction notices cite reference issues, citation stacking, suspicious affiliations and areas of research, authorship changes, ethical approval, among others.

#5: Indiana University just posted a notice of intent to hire two H1B employees

No Americans were qualified for these jobs.

This follows an announcement 2 days ago from Ron DeSantis that all Florida public Universities will pause hiring new H-1B workers.

#6: Oklahoma Professor alleges his work was plagiarized

#7: Harvard is allegedly hiring 2 conservative professors

After I wrote this article about Harvard:

Chris Brunet

Harvard's PhD Bloodbath

Just after midnight last night, the Harvard Crimson quietly published a bombshell. Citing “financial pressure,” the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) announced drastic cuts to dozens of Harvard’s doctoral programs — a restructuring so deep that many graduate programs will effectively cease to exist…

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a year ago · 183 likes · 3 comments · Christopher Brunet

I was contacted by a Harvard-connected source who told me that Harvard is now trying to hire at least two Conservative/Republicans/Trumpists, meaning two tenured professors who will make the Trump Administration more likely to be lenient in the final deal. The problem, I am told, is that the faculty are making it difficult to do so.

My evidence starts with Harvard’s job openings for faculty positions:

• academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/search

Harvard, as reported, has a hiring freeze because of all the financial pressure. So, how does it have 150 openings? The vast majority are post-doc positions which are already funded and so don’t “count” against the freeze. Let’s restrict the search to job postings mentioning “tenure”:

• academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=tenure

Now, there are just 6 jobs, which is much more reasonable, given the hiring freeze. One of these is actually for a non-tenured role in housing, and so doesn’t count. Three others are in SEAS (school of engineering and applied sciences) which might have special funding. But, in all of FAS (faculty of arts and sciences), there are exactly two job postings:

• https://academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/15390

• https://academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/15389

Why are these two FAS positions hiring, given the FAS hiring freeze?

Both of these postings look dramatically different from any other Harvard faculty job posting I have ever seen. A normal posting looks like this one, for Applied Math:

• https://academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/15608

In particular, it requires the following:

Totally standard stuff: teaching statements, research statements, service statements: The two FAS positions, in contrast, only require a CV, despte being tenured posts:

I have never seen this sparse requirement—only a CV—to apply for a tenured Harvard job posting, or indeed, the job posting for any senior academic position. Of course, if you are President Garber, you want to make this search as quick and easy as possible.

Another weirdness is that, in the typical Harvard posting, you see what we see in the Math posting, that is, the contact information is just some secretary. They do not release the head (or any members) of the search committee, nor does that person want to be bothered by direct enquiries.

However, for the two FAS positions, the contact info is for two senior faculty members, almost surely the ones in charge of the search. Note that, while neither is “conservative,” both are old and white and male, and exactly who you would pick, if you were Garber, if you needed to hire a couple of conservatives.

However, I have heard --- this is very much second hand --- that the problem is that the faculty committees on these searches are not playing ball. They are refusing to hire someone right wing enough, at least by Garber’s lights, so he keeps telling them to keep searching.

#8: Plagiarizing Harvard professor of the practice

Last year, I wrote an article about Harvard professor of the practice Ricardo Hausmann and his serial plagiarism.

Chris Brunet

Professor at Toulouse School of Economics Writes Open Letter Accusing Harvard Professor of Plagiarism

Today's Substack is not by me. Instead, I reprinted this open letter from X with permission from the author, César Hidalgo of the Toulouse School of Economics…

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2 years ago · 56 likes · 12 comments · Christopher Brunet

Someone who read that article sent me this:

There’s another case of a Harvard professor of the practice whose intro stats textbook (co-authored with an undergrad) is a rip-off of several previously written textbooks. He and his student co-author copy dozens of derivations, proofs, problems, solutions, illustrations etc. with some lazy paraphrasing and trivial notation changes. They never explicitly credit the original textbooks or include them in the bibliography. This professor published nothing else over the past ten years, so plagiarism aside, he didn’t meet the criteria for re-appointment.

A professor at another university sent a document showing side-by-side comparisons to Harvard officials months ago. As has been par for the course, Harvard continues to sit on complaints and evidence for months or years on end, and the plagiarists keep stealing with impunity. Unlike Claudine Gay, who submitted a bunch of corrections In January this year, he wasn’t even asked to request corrections crediting the original textbooks.

I’m attaching the document in case you want to publish it on your substack.

Here is that document:

Hfas Complaint

18.5MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

I sent this PDF to the authors, the plagiarizee, Harvard, and the textbook publishing company with polite questions about whether they ever looked into it, but nobody responded.

It seems fairly damning: 74 examples of blatantly copy-pasting questions.

That said, I’m not entirely sure how unusual it is for instructors to recycle introductory statistics problems. There are only so many ways to rephrase a word problem about rolling dice, coin flips, or sports betting odds.

The author of the allegedly plagiarized textbook, Joe Blitzstein, has this as his pinned tweet:

And he seems to have made quiet a bit of profit from it, since it has 137 reviews on Amazon:

#9: Indiana Econ Professor Arrested for Child Solicitation; UGA Math professor exposed

#10: Econ Profession Death Spiral Confirmed by MSM

5 months ago, I wrote this article:

Chris Brunet

The Collapse of the Econ PhD Job Market

For decades, a doctorate in economics was a golden ticket. It promised a path to tenure, or at worst, a lucrative role at a central bank, think tank, or tech firm…

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a year ago · 104 likes · 23 comments · Christopher Brunet

Initially, it was paywalled (sorry!), but it gained so much momentum that I unpaywalled it, and it became one of my more popular articles with 45k reads:

The Tiktok I turned it into went viral too, wasting 283 hours of society’s valuable time:

The article was generally well-received, but Chris Blattman, an econ professor at UChicago, took issue with my Microsoft Paint projections:

Well, Chris, now that 2025 is over, and we have the final data, we can see my early projections were perfect.

This was the worst job market ever for economists:

Last month, the Wall Street Journal wrote almost the exact same article as mine, except much worse:

Two weeks ago, had a nice write-up on the economics profession discrediting itself.

Lorenzo from Oz

Why we should stop listening to economists on immigration

If economists were intellectually serious about immigration, they would analyse it like they do monetary policy. Monetary policy can be done well; it can be done badly; it can be done disastrously…

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9 months ago · 75 likes · 26 comments · Lorenzo Warby

#11: MIT Sloan quietly shelves AI ransomware study after researcher calls BS

7 Months ago I reported on an MIT PhD student kicked out of school for falsifying an AI paper:

Chris Brunet

MIT Econ PhD Student Kicked Out for Massive Fraud

This is undoubtedly the most blatant and brazen econ fraud of 2025…

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a year ago · 156 likes · 4 comments · Christopher Brunet

Now, MIT has a second AI paper retraction.

• https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/03/mit_sloan_updates_ai_ransomware_paper/

Do 80 percent of ransomware attacks really come from AI? MIT Sloan has now withdrawn a working paper that made that eyebrow-raising claim after criticism from security researcher Kevin Beaumont.

The withdrawn paper [PDF], co-authored by researchers from MIT Sloan and Safe Security, claimed, “Our recent analysis of over 2800 ransomware incidents has revealed an alarming trend: AI plays an increasingly significant role in these attacks. In 2024, 80.83 percent of recorded ransomware events were attributed to threat actors utilizing AI.”

Completed in April, the paper was cited in an MIT Sloan blog post last month titled “80 percent of ransomware attacks now use artificial intelligence.” It has since been echoed elsewhere.

“The paper is absolutely ridiculous,” Beaumont wrote in a Mastodon thread last week. “It describes almost every major ransomware group as using AI – without any evidence (it’s also not true, I monitor many of them). It even talks about Emotet (which hasn’t existed for many years) as being AI driven.”

#12: Brett Matsumoto to head Bureau of Labor Statistics

Following EJ Antoni’s failure last year to secure the support required for confirmation as head of the BLS:

Robert Reich

Trump’s political hack nominee for the Bureau of Labor Statistics is already monkeying with the data.

Friends…

Read more

a year ago · 2042 likes · 320 comments · Robert Reich

Last month, Trump nominated Brett Matsumoto to that role, a much more boring, less partisan, more technocratic pick. Whereas Antoni had no research record to speak of (his PhD was from “Norhtern Illionis University, an objectively terrible school, and his thesis on Austrian economics looked like an undergrad thesis riddled with errors), Brett’s PhD in economics is from UNC Chapel Hill and his research is on serious economic measurement.

Brett is a beloved folk hero in the economics profession (more specifically, in the EJMR community) because he is best known for bravely standing up to fight against research misconduct in the “Family Ruptures” scandal.

Brett is a much better choice in every dimension than EJ Antoni.

#13: College for Sale

Since Green Mountain College in rural Vermont went bankrupt in 2019, its 155-acre campus has been sitting empty.

If anyone here has a spare few million dollars in your pocket, they are now fielding proposals to revive it in some capacity.

#14: Canada Establishes Inuit-led University

#15: Climate Change Economics Paper Retracted

Last year, the Review of Financial Studies (the #2 academic finance journal in the world) issued an “expression of concern” for a 2022 paper about the impact of climate change on the mortgage industry.

Now, the paper has been retracted:

This retraction followed a response by M. LaCour-Little, A. Pavlov and S. Wachter, published in the Review of Financial Studies, which identified two main issues with the original article: the use of incorrect Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) conforming loan limits and the misclassification of loans due to rounding of loan amounts around this limit.

The committee subsequently concluded that correcting the issues would invalidate the main results reported in Table 2 of the original article; rectifying the coding error of the publicly available conforming loan limits alone would invalidate the results reported. Moreover, in the process of examining the results, the committee determined that the methodology described in the original paper does not generate the results reported. The editorial team are retracting this article because the original findings cannot be replicated given these issues.

#16: University of Alberta becomes first Canadian University to Abandon Affirmative Action

• https://nationalpost.com/opinion/university-of-alberta-to-become-first-to-abandon-race-centric-hiring https://nationalpost.com/opinion/university-of-alberta-to-become-first-to-abandon-race-centric-hiring

#17: Shanghai University of Finance and Economics: A Playground for Academic Corruption

I was blown away by the investigation because I didn’t really think that investigative journalism / blogging / whistleblowing could exist in China:

• https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/hVosUoiIoWFJvqUByzOh9w

Shortly after it was posted, it was deleted from Chinese social media:

But I have archived it here on the Western internet:

• https://archive.is/DaoAi

Professor Yao Yang is currently trending:

“In over 40 years, I have never fallen in love with Beijing.”

So, we are very curious—what could Professor Yao Yang possibly fall in love with?

The answer is revealed: Professor Yao Yang voted with his feet, leaving Beijing for Shanghai.

It turns out that the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics’ Dishui Lake Advanced Institute of Finance (DIIJF) is actually a playground for a group of academic corruption and collusion!

Despite this, Professor Yao Yang still tries to maintain appearances and shout slogans:

“DIIJF, standing tall and upright!”

Unfortunately, beneath this facade, there is already a stain.

Yao Yang: Dishui Lake DIIJF aims to be “standing tall and upright,” cultivating scholars who can solve real-world problems.

DIIJF has never been a place to cultivate scholars who can solve China’s real-world problems. On the contrary, it is only good at dealing with “people” rather than “problems”—any scholar who dares to speak the truth and refuses to conform will be treated as a “problem” to be solved.

Despite this, we urge Dean Yao Yang to investigate how many charlatans he has under his command.

We are providing a list for Dean Yao Yang to verify; these professors are all involved in multiple publications of the same paper.

Bao Xiaohua: https://dafi.sufe.edu.cn/2f/86/c12600a208774/page.htm

Cao Dongbo: https://dafi.sufe.edu.cn/2f/a8/c12600a208808/page.htm

Ding Xiaoqin: https://dafi.sufe.edu.cn/2f/9a/c12600a208794/page.htm

Jin Qinglu: https://dafi.sufe.edu.cn/ 2f/84/c12600a208772/page.htm

Jin Yuying: https://dafi.sufe.edu.cn/2f/84/c12600a208772/page.htm

Liu Zhiyang: https://dafi.sufe.edu.cn/2f/75/c12600a208757/page.htm

Luo Yuding: https://dafi.sufe.edu.cn/90/be/c12600a233662/page.htm

Wang Fang: https://dafi.sufe.edu.cn/2f/a2/c12600a208802/page.htm

Yan Hongzhong: https://dafi.sufe.edu.cn/2f/7d/c12600a208765/page.htm

Zhu Xiaoneng: https://dafi.sufe.edu.cn/2f/7f/c12600a208767/page.htm

#18: Canadian Mathematician Goes Missing

, one of the best journalists in Canada, has published a detailed write-up on a mathematician and outspoken critic of the Iranian regime who warned that the regime had infiltrated a Canadian university engineering program at Simon Fraser University.

He went missing earlier this month under suspicious circumstances.

The Bureau

Mathematician Who Warned of Regime Infiltration of Canadian University Engineering Program Missing in Suspicious Disappearance

VANCOUVER – An outspoken Iranian dissident who publicly warned Canadian authorities in 2021 about alleged Iranian regime infiltration of engineering programs at Simon Fraser University has disappeared under suspicious circumstances, prompting an investigation by the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team…

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9 months ago · 106 likes · 7 comments

The RCMP’s Integrated Homicide Investigation Team (IHIT) is still investigating.

#19: Rachael Meager is now officially Rafe Meager

If you are active on EconTwitter, you will know that one of the most popular accounts is Rachel Meager, she is one of the cool kids. Previously she was an assistant professor at LSE Department of Economics, but has recently returned home to be a professor in Australia.

She is also on Substack:

The Universal and the Vacuous Events

Either rotten or good, or both rotten and good

By Rafe Meager

Breaking news: Rachael is now going by “Rafe,” and says she is a man.

This is very very sad. You can see the pain and confusion in her tortured eyes.

#20: Marco Di Maggio update

Do Kwon has now pled guilty in a New York court to two U.S. fraud charges, conspiracy to defraud and wire fraud, under a plea deal that requires him to forfeit over $19 million but carries a maximum prison sentence of 25 years.

• https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/do-kwon-pleads-guilty-us-fraud-charges-40-billion-crypto-collapse-2025-08-12/

Kwon was a software engineer who built Terra, which wiped out investors worldwide when it imploded in 2022.

Kwon has nothing to do with economics or academia directly—but his chief economic consultant at the time was Marco Di Maggio, then a finance professor at Harvard Business School.

I wrote about Marco Di Maggio three years ago, in one of my first articles:

Chris Brunet

Marco Di Maggio: Putting the BS in HBS

If you even tangentially follow the crypto markets, you have heard of Terra/Luna…

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4 years ago · 13 likes · 2 comments · Christopher Brunet

How central was Di Maggio to Terra’s $40 billion Ponzi? Just look at the foundational whitepapers—the core documents outlining the system. His name is on all of them. Marco promised this Ponzi scheme was safe, and he put the Harvard name brand on it, but it was a fatally flawed scam.

When I initially covered this, I noted that Di Maggio had walked away from the wreckage untouched, despite questions about how many millions he might have personally pocketed while retail investors were left holding the bag.

Now for the update: Di Maggio has since quietly left Harvard, and has now resurfaced in the UK at Imperial College Business School.

• https://www.marcodimaggio.net/

Imperial is a good school, but British academia is much worse than American academia, and even in the pecking order of British academia, it is 2nd rate, sitting a tier below the big four: Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, and UCL.

Harvard to Imperial is a pretty major downgrade, but still a comfy landing spot for a man who did so much damage to the global economy.

#21: Adrien Matray Update

Since we’re catching up with old friends, let’s check in on Adrien.

When I first reported on his scandal, it was huge news — one of the very few papers ever retracted by the best econ journal in the world due to two egregious coding “errors” followed by the classic excuse: the dog ate my laptop.

Chris Brunet

BREAKING: American Economic Review retracts Princeton economics professor's paper due to "coding error"

Following this Harvard bombshell from 2 days ago…

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3 years ago · 27 likes · 2 comments · Christopher Brunet

“The data and the code for the analysis are stored on remote, external servers that were inaccessible to the authors for prolonged periods of time during the publication process, so it is unfortunately not possible to recover past versions to isolate the error’s origin.”

— Adrien Matray

After getting caught in this fraud, he was bounced off the tenure track at Princeton and shuffled into temporary VAP roles at Stanford and Harvard. Hardly the academic wilderness, but still a sharp demotion — from a tenure-track golden boy to one-year contracts.

He has not updated his Linkedin since that, for a good reason: he has now left academia and joined the Atlanta Fed. A promising elite academic career derailed by research misconduct, but still a safe cushion too land on.

#22: Times of India Covers Affirmative Action in Canadian Universities

If you follow me on X you know that I am in the habit of tweeting out discriminatory job postings from Canadian schools, e.g.:

My last one about University of Toronto was tweeted by Elon Musk, and The Times of India (13.9 millions followers on X) has written an article about it:

#23: University of Adelaide builds “squat toilets”

Presented without comment:

#24: Last month Supreme Court signals it will defy Trump to keep Lisa Cook on Federal Reserve

This happened over a month ago, but given that I’ve written a dozen articles on Lisa Cook, it is worth covering the newest update:

• https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/21/politics/takeaways-supreme-court-federal-reserve-lisa-cook-trump-power

The Supreme Court signaled deep skepticism Wednesday that President Donald Trump had the authority to remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve, with several conservative justices joining their liberal colleagues in posing pointed questions of the lawyer defending the president.

By the end of the two-hour argument, many of the justices appeared to be more interested in how the court would side with Cook — not whether it would do so — and how quickly it would resolve her underlying litigation.

…

Given the tenor of the arguments, and the fact that the case was at the Supreme Court on an emergency basis, it’s possible that the justices will hand down a decision far more quickly than it normally might in an argued case. Usually, the court will resolve its most important cases before the end of June.

#25: TAMU Abolishes Women’s Studies Program

#26: University of Nebraska Abolishes Statistics Department

Much more worrying than getting rid of gender studies:

Meanwhile Nebraska is happily funding gender studies, dance, and theater departments. In what world do you eliminate the statistics department before their Bachelor of Arts in Dance?

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This was her third attempt at taking the SAT.

The first time she got 1100, the second time, 1050, the third time 1070.

A 1070 SAT score is genuinely bad. It sits around the 59th percentile, which is bad enough that if you score at this level you probably aren’t smart enough to go to college, and especially embarrassing given that Alice had every possible advantage: a private tutor, elite schooling, and access to unlimited billions of dollars.

For reference, these are the best schools you could realistically expect to get into with a 1070 SAT score:

1. Montclair State University (NJ) — 930–1200

2. University of Nevada, Reno (NV) — 1070–1230

3. University of South Alabama (AL) — 990–1180

4. University of New Mexico (NM) — 900–1160

5. University of Toledo (OH) — 1040–1260

This is exactly why people are angry. If Alice de Rothschild had been born in a trailer park, her academic profile would have made her a fit for a school like University of Toledo, which has a roughly 95 percent acceptance rate.

Instead, because of her blue blood, she was admitted to New York University, which admits only about 7 percent of applicants. Jeffrey Epstein even tried to get her into Columbia University, but failed. NYU was the fallback.

The New York Times reports:

[Epstein] asked Richard Axel — a Nobel laureate and a powerful scientific figure on Columbia’s campus with whom he had a long relationship — to lobby the admissions office on Alice de Rothschild’s behalf.

“I have spoken with Columbia admissions and she is good but not strongest candidate. I am pushing,” Dr. Axel wrote to Mr. Epstein on Nov. 16, 2016.

“Alice de Rothschild’s university admissions in the United States, as well as her rejections, are entirely due to her grades,” the Rothschild family said in a statement. “Alice cannot be held responsible for Jeffrey Epstein’s unilateral actions.”

She was not admitted. Dr. Axel wrote to Mr. Epstein in February 2017, breaking the news. She ultimately enrolled at N.Y.U., where she studied biology.

This struck a chord because thousands of people who scored far higher than Alice but were shut out of elite schools recognized it immediately for what it was: a rigged system. The “elites” who rule over us are frauds. They deserve scorn and ridicule not because they are exceptional, but because they achieve nothing. They are simply born into power and placed there. They fail upwards.

One of the funnier replies to my tweet sarcastically suggested that the Rothschilds would have to write an admissions essay about how someone was racist to them once and it makes them sad….

… which is ironic, because in the emails, I found that Ariane Rothschild frequently complained to Epstein about all the “anti-rothschild” racism she had to endure and how that makes her sad.

Another common talking point in the replies was that this mediocrity is the result of generations of inbreeding. Which is surprisingly true. For centuries, the Rothschilds almost exclusively married their cousins, which is something they openly admit.

In response to this inbreeding talking point, hundreds of people argued the opposite: that Rothschild blood has been so diluted by recent intermixing with shiksahs, that no wonder Alice Rothschild is dumb.

The most unhinged of all responses came from , who began bizarrely white-knighting for Epstein and the Rothschilds, claiming that me violating the Rothschild’s privacy is “more of a violation of a teenager” than “anything that’s come out in the entire Epstein files” which he referred to as a “moral panic.”

This is what the Epstein files actually show. Everyone looks for the sex tapes and the blackmail, but the day-to-day reality is much more pathetic. Epstein was a fixer for the Zionist mafia. If a billionaire’s kid is too “slow” or “dim” to get into a real school, Epstein was the guy who called in a favor to a Nobel Laureate to fix it.

This story blew up because it’s a middle finger to every smart, poor kid who actually studied. While ordinary people grind for a percentile that might determine the trajectory of their entire lives, the ruling class treats the Ivy League like a private club with a side entrance for their inbred failspawn.

More soon on the Epstein–Rothschild correspondence.

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This includes 7 papers in the International Review of Financial Analysis (a good journal—it has an 18% acceptance rate):

• RETRACTED: The role of feature importance in predicting corporate financial distress in pre and post COVID periods: Evidence from China

• RETRACTED: The impacts of climate policy uncertainty on stock markets: Comparison between China and the US

• RETRACTED: Financing Irish high-tech SMEs: The analysis of capital structure

• RETRACTED: Extreme spillovers across Asian-Pacific currencies: A quantile-based analysis

• RETRACTED: Identifying the multiscale financial contagion in precious metal markets

• RETRACTED: Is Bitcoin a better safe-haven investment than gold and commodities?

• RETRACTED: Cryptocurrencies as a financial asset: A systematic analysis

Plus two more retractions in Finance Research Letters (29% acceptance rate):

• RETRACTED: Datestamping the Bitcoin and Ethereum bubbles

• RETRACTED: Trading volume and the predictability of return and volatility in the cryptocurrency market

Two days later, three more papers were retracted at the International Review of Economics & Finance (30% acceptance rate):

• RETRACTED: Oil price shocks and yield curve dynamics in emerging markets

• RETRACTED: Volatility forecasting on China’s oil futures: New evidence from interpretable ensemble boosting trees

• RETRACTED: ESG disclosure and internal pay gap: Empirical evidence from China

Combined, these 12 papers have 5,104 citations.

All 12 papers had one thing in common: Brian M Lucey, Professor of International Finance and Commodities, Trinity College Dublin — the #1 ranked economics and business school in Ireland — as a co-author.

Lucey published 56 papers in 2025, one paper every 6.5 days. Lmao.

Lucey has published 44 papers in Finance Research Letters alone, an Elsevier journal he edited.

I emailed Lucey for comment, but he did not respond.

Brian Lucey… where have I heard that name before?

Oh yeah, he bullied me on Twitter in 2023.

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The stated reason for the retractions was that: “review of this submission was overseen, and the final decision was made, by the Editor Brian Lucey, despite his role as a co-author of the manuscript. This compromised the editorial process and breached the journal’s policies.”

In plain terms, Lucey was serving as editor while approving his own papers. The result was a complete bypass of peer review—an abuse of editorial authority that functioned as a citation-cartel scheme.

Apparently this was an open secret in the profession for many years, with EJMR comments going back 5+ years explicitly calling him out as a cheater:

Along with the 12 retractions, Lucey was removed as an editor at 5 journals: International Review of Financial Analysis, the International Review of Economics & Finance, Finance Research Letters, Financial Management, & Energy Finance.

Lucey remains as editor-in-chief at Wiley’s Journal of Economic Surveys.

I emailed Wiley, and they provided me with this statement:

We are aware of these concerns and have investigated Prof. Lucey’s activity on Journal of Economic Surveys. Our research integrity team did not find any concerns regarding conflict of interest or mishandling of papers, nor has Prof. Lucey published any papers in the journal since he joined the editorial team as a co-editor in 2024. We expect full commitment and adherence to our editorial practices and standards, and we will be monitoring the situation to ensure that there is no improper handling of papers at the journal.

In response to Wiley’s statement, one EMJR user wrote: “I am baffled how they could possibly still have confidence in him, given his serious and systematic ethical lapses in editorial positions. Sounds somewhat naive to expect ‘full adherence to our editorial practices and standards’!”

Until being purged from the leadership of these 5 journals, Lucey played a central role in coordinating Elsevier’s Finance Journals Ecosystem, which allows “participating journals to suggest transferring a rejected manuscript to another journal in the system without the need for resubmission and the associated cost."

That system, and the editors involved, “came under fire last year when a preprint suggested it might facilitate citation stacking as a way to boost journal impact factors. The analysis in the preprint also suggested a citation ring involving Elsevier editors could be at work.”

I emailed the anonymous “Theophilos Nomos” who wrote this paper, but they did not respond to my email.

That pre-print names Samuel Vigne, a finance professor at Luiss Business School, former PhD student of Lucey, and prolific Lucey co-author (they have published at least 33 papers together) as a core node of Lucey’s citation cartel.

Multiple publications by Vigne and Lucey are flagged on PubPeer.

• https://pubpeer.com/search?q=samuel+vigne (21 results)

• https://pubpeer.com/search?q=brian+lucey (55 results)

This example neatly illustrates how their co-authorship trading scheme operated:

• https://pubpeer.com/publications/59EAFFA126CD44D742AAF1386F45FC

It describes a draft uploaded to SSRN with three authors:

After submitting that draft to the Elsevier finance ecosystem, that draft was scrubbed from SSRN, and in the final published version, an additional author (Samuel Vigne) was added as a new author, with an “equal contribution” statement. The two versions are otherwise identical, containing the same figures, sections, and text.

Co-authorship trading is only one part of the operation. The other is citation stacking. In this model, a small, tightly linked group funnels an enormous volume of papers into the same handful of journals, then systematically stuffs those papers with citations to one another. The result is a rapid, artificial explosion in citation counts that makes them look like influential geniuses.

Take John Gooddell, a professor at the University of Akron and a Lucey co-author. Gooddell has published 68 papers in Finance Research Letters alone, a journal edited by Lucey. If each paper contains even a modest 50 references, that amounts to roughly 3,400 citations recycled through a single outlet. In 2024 alone, Gooddell published 61 papers. He’s not doing research. He’s farming citations.

Following Lucey’s retractions, Samuel Vigne was removed as the editor-in-chief of International Review of Financial Analysis and Finance Research Letters.

In addition to that anonymous pre-print, there is also a 2025 paper written by actual professors with sophisticated econometric analysis & graph theory which describes the citation cartel in much more detail. The conclusion of that paper is: ”Elsevier ecosystem journals benefited from the creation of the ecosystem … Elsevier journals in the ecosystem have overlapping editors and Elsevier appoints these editors in coordination with a single academic [Brian Lucey] that manages the fleet of ecosystem journals.”

Brian Lucey posted a reply to this paper, which was extremely weak and does not contain any tables or figures. It mostly ignores the data and structural model of the citation ring and instead leans on Lucey’s “lived experience” as an editor (“we have experience shepherding…”), while also nitpicking semantics and phrasing, such as Lucey complaining that they called him a “professor of finance” instead of his full honorific, “professor of international finance and commodities.”

The Elsevier ecosystem web page went live on 4 November 2020 , according to Lucey’s rebuttal. Below is a visualization of the network before and after this transition date, which shows a clear distortion of the citation network. During 2021-2025, the Ecosystem citations per article is 103 % higher.

2016-2020: (Before)

2021-2025: (After)

2020 is also the year where Brian Lucey’s citation profile exhibits an exponential “J-curve”, a Hallmark of citation rings. Did he suddenly become a well-respected genius in 2020? Or did he figure out how to cheat the system?

In a comment to Retraction Watch, Lucey further argued that citation cartels are not a crime, because everyone does it.

”Because here’s the thing: Elsevier are aware of [editors publishing in their own journals] as a pretty common practice in finance and economics. We’ve given them evidence of hundreds of instances of this. And nothing has happened, which does raise the question, you know, maybe they’re going to go back and go look at all these. Presumably, they will treat everything the same.” Lucey shared his list of such instances. It includes 240 articles, 133 of which are in Science of the Total Environment, which was delisted from Clarivate’s Web of Science in November.

(N.B.: As several commenters have noted, the list linked above includes citations to editorials and special issue introductions, which are typically penned by editors-in-chief. The disclaimer at the top of the document Lucey provided reads, “In no way is this meant to suggest any ethical or other breaches. It is a list of persons who occupied a EiC or similar role in the Journal mentioned at the same time as a paper in which they were an author or coautho[r].”)

Dr. Thorsten Beck, in a blog post, confirmed that no, not everyone does it, and yes, it is a crime.

This incident raises an important question: is this common practice across academic journals? And are there rules for editors publishing in ‘their’ journals? As I was editor across three journals for a total of 11 years, I can certainly speak to this (and clearly say NO).

…

I don’t have formal confirmation but I have been told by several independent sources that ultimately even Elsevier realised that this editor was seriously damaging the reputation of the journal, appointing a second editor and then easing out the ‘doubtful’ editor from his responsibilities.

The fallout from the Lucey–Vigne era extends far beyond a handful of retracted PDFs. What it exposes is a structural weakness in how academic “excellence” is manufactured, measured, and monetized. By presiding over a coordinated cluster of journals, a small group of editors effectively gained the ability to print their own academic currency.

However, blaming Lucey and Vigne alone ignores the hand that fed them. Elsevier did not just “allow” this to happen; they engineered the environment for it to flourish, because of incentives: Elsevier’s internal metrics (Impact Factors) directly benefitted from this behavior. It was a symbiotic corruption: the editors received a fast-track to academic stardom, and Elsevier received a high-margin, high-volume production line of citable content.

This is the “paper mill” reimagined for the elite: not a basement operation in a third-world nation, but a polished, corporate-mandated factory within the halls o the world’s most powerful publisher. This is the natural result of a corporate mandate to maximize profits by bundling journals into monopoly-priced packages, forcing universities to pay for the very “prestige” that Elsevier’s own staff helped to dilute. As one EJMR commenter noted, “The tragedy isn’t that they cheated; it’s that the system was designed to let them thrive for a decade before anyone bothered to look at the data.”

The question now is whether Trinity College Dublin will fire Lucey.

They did not respond to my inquiry.

What Investigators Should Look For

An editor of a psychology journal was offered $1,500 per accepted paper.

, a professor of economics at the University of Sussex, wrote that he was offered $5,000 per paper.

Muhammad Ali Nasir, a professor of Macroeconomics at Leeds University, wrote about how common selling papers is in European finance journals: “I had been made such offers from anonymous emails but I choose not to engage and in one case forwarded the email to EiC. I will be surprised if any editor is not approached by these people.”

This raises a multi-million-euro question: given their documented corruption, are the various “educational consultancies” and special-purpose vehicles operated by Brian Lucey and Samuel Vigne used to circulate ecosystem funds, conference fees, or “consultancy” payouts from authors seeking a shortcut to publication?

One anonymous economist says:

Here is a hypothetical outline of how such a cash-flow scheme could function.

“Hello [unknown, distant institutions], we offer consulting services: €€€ for excellent advice on how to publish in top-tier finance journals. Our advice yields results.”

Money flows into companies.

Papers flow into journals.

Another anonymous economist says:

I’m not going to provide details on how to corruptly have a paper published. I’m just going to speculate on what could be going on in a situation like this. It could be based on “consultancy fees” for advice on publishing that you or your institution pay to one of those companies. They give some advice, including what papers to cite, etc, and if you follow their advice you are likely to be published in one of their journals. This could be attractive for researchers and institutions in, e.g., China and the Middle East.

Another anonymous economics professor I spoke to told me:

Universities in East and West Asia pay cash bonuses for publications. Some authors hire a broker (many advertise openly on Facebook), other authors contact the editor directly. The cash bonus is shared between the author, broker, and editor.

Besides selling papers, they also sell special issues, which allow the guest editors to do what they want.

And they sell positions on the editorial board, which are important for promotion to the next academic rank.

Some payments are in cash, others in kind.

Finally, they organize conferences. Registration fees more than cover the costs of putting on a conference. The conference name suggests it is organized by a society, but it really is Lucey who pockets the profits.

Brian Lucey and Samuel Vigne operate four private companies in Ireland and the UK classified under “other education,” likely functioning as consultancies or special-purpose vehicles for academic or policy work.

• PIQUE ASSOCIATES LIMITED

• INTERNATIONAL CLIMATE FINANCE VENTURES COMPANY LIMITED BY GUARANTEE

• HIPPOPOTAMUS LIMITED

• FUTURE FINANCE AND ECONOMICS ASSOCIATION LIMITED

The existence of these consultancies warrants investigation into potential conflicts of interest and financial misconduct.

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At the time, a lone commenter on EJMR accused him of being “corrupt to the bone” and ‘‘publishing his buddies.’’

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