College of Arts and Sciences

KU Professors Win Best Paper Award at the Academy of International Business 2020 Conference

March 16, 2020

Dr. Glenn Muschert, Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences, and Dr. Dimitrios Reppas, Assistant Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences, received Best Paper Award for their paper “Mobile Money Systems as Avant-Garde in the Digital Transition of Financial Relations.”

The award was presented at the Academy of International Business (AIB) 2020, which was held from 6–9 January 2020 in Nairobi, Kenya. The event was a joint conference of AIB Africa Chapter and Northeast USA Chapter hosted by the Chandaria School of Business at the United States International University – Africa (USIU-A).

In their paper, Dr. Muschert and Dr. Reppas discussed Mobile Money, an electronic form of currency that has become popular, particularly in developing countries over the last decade. They summarized the main findings from empirical literature regarding the positive economic and social impacts of deploying Mobile Money platforms.

Positive economic and social impacts  from Mobile Money platforms include the potential to reconfigure and transform pre-existing financial practices, include the unbanked segments of the populations into formal economic relations, and provide self-reliance and security to local communities.

In their winning paper, Dr. Muschert and Dr. Reppas clarified the types of data required to conduct more reliable empirical research and therefore enhance cooperation among the parties involved in deploying and studying the effects of Mobile Money systems, including the academic community, policy makers/regulators, central banks, telecommunication companies, and entrepreneurs.

Ara Cruz
News Writer
16 March 2020