Tag Archives: spreadsheet error

402709 01: Stadium employees remove letters from one of the Enron Field signs March 21, 2002 in Houston, TX. The Houston Astros paid $2.1 million to get back the naming rights to their stadium from collasped energy trader Enron. (Photo by James Nielsen/Getty Images)

Dear Analyst #87: What we can learn about Enron’s downfall from their internal spreadsheet errors

Everyone is probably familiar with the 600,000 emails released by Enron after their scandal right at the turn of the century. A lot of different analyses was done on those emails, but there’s one interesting analysis that I didn’t see until recently: the emails with spreadsheets as attachments. Felienne Hermans, a computer scientist at Delft […]

Dear Analyst #40: A spreadsheet error from two Harvard professors leading to incorrect economic policies after 2008 recession

It’s 2010, and the world is coming out of recession. Two Harvard professors–one of whom is a former economist for the IMF and chess Grandmaster–publish a paper suggesting that a country with a high public debt-to-GDP ratio of over 90% is associated with low economic growth. Turns out the Excel model the professors use is […]