Overview

The Accounting PhD program is designed to produce great scholars and educators by providing a solid foundation in both the theoretical and empirical tools of accounting research. Your program of study will be personalized to leverage your background and research interests.

Through coursework, research seminars, and individual original research, you’ll demonstrate your mastery of accounting through summer papers and your dissertation. The Accounting faculty will both supervise your individual research project and engage in collaborative co-authored research.

Accounting Research

Research Methods: Analytical

Analytical researchers model economic and accounting institutions with the goal of generating empirically testable propositions. Primary research questions of interest are the relation between accounting disclosures and security prices, undertaken within market equilibrium models, and the role of accounting information in mitigating incentive problems within firms, generally formulated within principal-agent models. Other economic models are employed as well. Analytical research demands high-level training in economic theory, statistics, and mathematics. Analytical accounting researchers on the Fuqua faculty: Kevin Chen, Qi Chen, Xu Jiang, and Hao Xue.

Research Methods: Empirical-archival

Empirical researchers rely on economic theory to study, among other things, the valuation implications of accounting disclosures, executive compensation and other corporate governance issues, and financial intermediary reporting choices and forecasting behavior. Empiricists use commercially available and proprietary databases and field experiments to test hypotheses within a statistical framework and must be well-trained in economic theory and statistical methods. Empirical accounting researchers on the Fuqua faculty: Kevin Chen, Scott Dyreng, Henry Eyring, Elia Ferracuti, Bill Mayew, Katherine Schipper, Rahul Vashishtha, Mohan Venkatachalam, and Mengjie Xu.

Research Topics

Our Accounting faculty are engaged with a wide array of accounting research topics.  Some of the more recent topics they are researching are listed below. Please visit the faculty websites for more details on their current research.

Accounting & Asset Pricing