There's no crystal ball, but this researcher from Rice University is trying to see if some metrics work for economic forecasting. Photo via Getty Images

Research by Rice Business Professor K. Ramesh shows that the Fed appears to harvest qualitative information from the accounting disclosures that all public companies must file with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

These SEC filings are typically used by creditors, investors and others to make firm-level investing and financing decisions; and while they include business leaders’ sense of economic trends, they are never intended to guide macro-level policy decisions. But in a recent paper (“Externalities of Accounting Disclosures: Evidence from the Federal Reserve”), Ramesh and his colleagues provide persuasive evidence that the Fed nonetheless uses the qualitative information in SEC filings to help forecast the growth of macroeconomic variables like GDP and unemployment.

According to Ramesh, the study was made possible thanks to a decision the SEC made several years ago. The commission stores the reports submitted by public companies in an online database called EDGAR and records the IP address of any party that accesses them. More than a decade ago, the SEC began making partially anonymized forms of those IP addresses available to the public. But researchers eventually figured out how to deanonymize the addresses, which is precisely what Ramesh and his colleagues did in this study.

"We were able to reverse engineer and identify those IP addresses that belonged to Federal Reserve staff," Ramesh says.

The team ultimately assembled a data set containing more than 169,000 filings accessed by Fed staff between 2005 and 2015. They quickly realized that the Fed was interested only in filings submitted by a select group of industry leaders and financial institutions.

But if Ramesh and his colleagues now had a better idea of precisely which bellwether firms the Fed focused on, they still had no way of knowing exactly what Fed staffers had gleaned from the material they accessed. So the team decided to employ a measure called "tone" that captures the overall sentiment of a piece of text – whether positive, negative, or neutral.

Building on previous research that had identified a set of words with negatively toned financial reports, Ramesh and his colleagues examined the tone of all the SEC filings accessed by Fed staff between one meeting of the Federal Open Markets Committee (FOMC) and the next. The FOMC sets interest rates and guides monetary policy, and its meetings provide an opportunity for Fed officials to discuss growth forecasts and announce policy decisions.

The researchers then examined the Fed's growth forecasts to see if there was a relationship between the tone of the documents that Fed staff examined in the period between FOMC meetings and the forecasts they produced in advance of those meetings.

The team found close correlations between the tone of the reports accessed by the Fed and the agency’s forecasts of GDP, unemployment, housing starts and industrial production. The more negative the filings accessed prior to an FOMC meeting, for example, the gloomier the GDP forecast; the more positive the filings, the brighter the unemployment forecast.

Ramesh and his colleagues also compared the Fed's forecasts with those of the Society of Professional Forecasters (SPF), whose members span academia and industry. Intriguingly, the researchers found that while the errors in the SPF's forecasts could be attributed to the absence of the tonal information culled from the SEC filings, the errors in the Fed’s forecasts could not. This suggests both that the Fed was collecting qualitative information that the SPF was not—and that the agency was making remarkably efficient use of it.

"They weren’t leaving anything on the table," Ramesh says.

Having solved one mystery, Ramesh would like to focus on another; namely, how does the Fed identify bellwether firms in the first place?

Unfortunately, the SEC no longer makes IP address data publicly available, which means that Ramesh and his colleagues can no longer study which companies the Fed is most interested in. Nonetheless, Ramesh hopes to use the data they have already collected to build a model that can accurately predict which firms the Fed is most likely to follow. That would allow the team to continue studying the same companies that the Fed does, and, he says, “maybe come up with a way to track those firms in order to understand how the economy is going to move.”

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This article originally ran on Rice Business Wisdom and was based on research from K. Ramesh is Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Accounting at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

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Greentown Labs names Lawson Gow as its new Houston leader

head of hou

Greentown Labs has named Lawson Gow as its Head of Houston.

Gow is the founder of The Cannon, a coworking space with seven locations in the Houston area, with additional partner spaces. He also recently served as managing partner at Houston-based investment and advisory firm Helium Capital. Gow is the son of David Gow, founder of Energy Capital's parent company, Gow Media.

According to Greentown, Gow will "enhance the founder experience, cultivate strategic partnerships, and accelerate climatetech solutions" in his new role.

“I couldn’t be more excited to join Greentown at this critical moment for the energy transition,” Gow said in a news release. “Greentown has a fantastic track record of supporting entrepreneurs in Houston, Boston, and beyond, and I am eager to keep advancing our mission in the energy transition capital of the world.”

Gow has also held analyst, strategy and advising roles since graduating from Rice University.

“We are thrilled to welcome Lawson to our leadership team,” Georgina Campbell Flatter, CEO of Greentown Labs, added in the release. “Lawson has spent his career building community and championing entrepreneurs, and we look forward to him deepening Greentown’s support of climate and energy startups as our Head of Houston.”

Gow is the latest addition to a series of new hires at Greentown Labs following a leadership shakeup.

Flatter was named as the organization's new CEO in February, replacing Kevin Dutt, Greentown’s interim CEO, who replaced Kevin Knobloch after he announced that he would step down in July 2024 after less than a year in the role.

Greentown also named Naheed Malik its new CFO in January.

Timmeko Moore Love was named the first Houston general manager and senior vice president of Greentown Labs. According to LinkedIn, she left the role in January.

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This article originally appeared on our sister site, EnergyCapitalHTX.com.

Houston foundation grants $27M to support Texas chemistry research

fresh funding

Houston-based The Welch Foundation has doled out $27 million in its latest round of grants for chemical research, equipment and postdoctoral fellowships.

According to a June announcement, $25.5 million was allocated for the foundation's longstanding research grants, which provide $100,000 per year in funding for three years to full-time, regular tenure or tenure-track faculty members in Texas. The foundation made 85 grants to faculty at 16 Texas institutions for 2025, including:

  • Michael I. Jacobs, assistant professor in the chemistry and biochemistry department at Texas State University, who is investigating the structure and thermodynamics of intrinsically disordered proteins, which could "reveal clues about how life began," according to the foundation.
  • Kendra K. Frederick, assistant professor in the biophysics department at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, who is studying a protein linked to Parkinson’s disease.
  • Jennifer S. Brodbelt, professor in chemistry at The University of Texas at Austin, who is testing a theory called full replica symmetry breaking (fullRSB) on glass-like materials, which has implications for complex systems in physics, chemistry and biology.

Additional funding will be allocated to the Welch Postdoctoral Fellows of the Life Sciences Research Foundation. The program provides three-year fellowships to recent PhD graduates to support clinical research careers in Texas. Two fellows from Rice University and Baylor University will receive $100,000 annually for three years.

The Welch Foundation also issued $975,000 through its equipment grant program to 13 institutions to help them develop "richer laboratory experience(s)." The universities matched funds of $352,346.

Since 1954, the Welch Foundation has contributed over $1.1 billion for Texas-nurtured advancements in chemistry through research grants, endowed chairs and other chemistry-related ventures. Last year, the foundation granted more than $40.5 million in academic research grants, equipment grants and fellowships.

“Through funding basic chemical research, we are actively investing in the future of humankind,” Adam Kuspa, president of The Welch Foundation, said the news release. “We are proud to support so many talented researchers across Texas and continue to be inspired by the important work they complete every day.”

New Houston biotech co. developing capsules for hard-to-treat tumors

biotech breakthroughs

Houston company Sentinel BioTherapeutics has made promising headway in cancer immunotherapy for patients who don’t respond positively to more traditional treatments. New biotech venture creation studio RBL LLC (pronounced “rebel”) recently debuted the company at the 2025 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting in Chicago.

Rima Chakrabarti is a neurologist by training. Though she says she’s “passionate about treating the brain,” her greatest fervor currently lies in leading Sentinel as its CEO. Sentinel is RBL’s first clinical venture, and Chakrabarti also serves as cofounder and managing partner of the venture studio.

The team sees an opportunity to use cytokine interleukin-2 (IL-2) capsules to fight many solid tumors for which immunotherapy hasn't been effective in the past. “We plan to develop a pipeline of drugs that way,” Chakrabarti says.

This may all sound brand-new, but Sentinel’s research goes back years to the work of Omid Veiseh, director of the Rice Biotechnology Launch Pad (RBLP). Through another, now-defunct company called Avenge Bio, Veiseh and Paul Wotton — also with RBLP and now RBL’s CEO and chairman of Sentinel — invested close to $45 million in capital toward their promising discovery.

From preclinical data on studies in mice, Avenge was able to manufacture its platform focused on ovarian cancer treatments and test it on 14 human patients. “That's essentially opened the door to understanding the clinical efficacy of this drug as well as it's brought this to the attention of the FDA, such that now we're able to continue that conversation,” says Chakrabarti. She emphasizes the point that Avenge’s demise was not due to the science, but to the company's unsuccessful outsourcing to a Massachusetts management team.

“They hadn't analyzed a lot of the data that we got access to upon the acquisition,” explains Chakrabarti. “When we analyzed the data, we saw this dose-dependent immune activation, very specific upregulation of checkpoints on T cells. We came to understand how effective this agent could be as an immune priming agent in a way that Avenge Bio hadn't been developing this drug.”

Chakrabarti says that Sentinel’s phase II trials are coming soon. They’ll continue their previous work with ovarian cancer, but Chakrabarti says that she also believes that the IL-2 capsules will be effective in the treatment of endometrial cancer. There’s also potential for people with other cancers located in the peritoneal cavity, such as colorectal cancer, gastrointestinal cancer and even primary peritoneal carcinomatosis.

“We're delivering these capsules into the peritoneal cavity and seeing both the safety as well as the immune activation,” Chakrabarti says. “We're seeing that up-regulation of the checkpoint that I mentioned. We're seeing a strong safety signal. This drug was very well-tolerated by patients where IL-2 has always had a challenge in being a well-tolerated drug.”

When phase II will take place is up to the success of Sentinel’s fundraising push. What we do know is that it will be led by Amir Jazaeri at MD Anderson Cancer Center. Part of the goal this summer is also to create an automated cell manufacturing process and prove that Sentinel can store its product long-term.

“This isn’t just another cell therapy,” Chakrabarti says.

"Sentinel's cytokine factory platform is the breakthrough technology that we believe has the potential to define the next era of cancer treatment," adds Wotton.