The PhD specialization in Accounting prepares students to become accounting scholars engaged in research and teaching at the highest levels in the general areas of financial information and contracting within and across organizations.
Yale SOM’s specialization in accounting is designed to develop strong theoretical and empirical skills. There is a heavy emphasis on original research to form a base for sustained scholarship. Co-authored research, with both faculty and fellow PhD students, is encouraged and supported.
Yale’s accounting program is small (matriculating one to two students each year), and involves informal and spontaneous frequent interactions with faculty. The program maintains a 1:1 faculty-to-student ratio. Students interact with emerging research in a host of ways, from conferences held on campus to weekly seminars where faculty and fellow PhD students present and discuss their work.
Candidates tend to pursue a broad range of research interests, helped by courses in accounting as well as in various areas of management, Department of Economics, Yale Law School, and other parts of the University. They develop fruitful relationships with other Ph.d. students, especially from the Finance PhD program.
Examples of research submitted as dissertations by students in the program:
- Intended Benefits and Unintended Consequences of Improved Performance Disclosure
- Asymmetric Inefficiency in Market Response to Non-earnings 8-K Information
- Real Earnings Management in Nonprofit Organizations
- How Does More Frequent Reporting Reduce Information Asymmetry?
- Real Earnings Management in the Financial Industry
- Accruals and price crashes
- Customer-base concentration: Implications for firm performance and capital markets
- The Treatment of Special Items in Determining CEO Cash Compensation
- Strategic Decentralization, Bargaining, and Transfer Pricing in Supply Chain Efficiency
- Keynesian Beauty Contest, Accounting Disclosure, and Market Efficiency
- Labor Unions and Management’s Incentive to Signal Declining Profitability
- Investor Expectations, Earnings Management, and Asset Prices
- Limiting Outside Directors' Liability through Charter Provisions: An Empirical Analysis
- Nickels Not Pennies: Explanations and Implications of Granularity in Analysts’ EPS Forecasts
- Auditor’s Pre-Negotiation Information, Accuracy of Financial Reports and Consulting Services
- Taxes, Debt, and Firm Value: New Evidence
Examples of research co-authored with faculty and other students:
Publications
- Management of reported and forecast EPS, investor responses, and research implications (Management Science
- Placebo Tests of Conditional Conservatism (The Accounting Review)
- Orphans Deserve Attention: Financial Reporting in the Missing Months When Corporations Change Fiscal Year (The Accounting Review)
- Why do EPS forecast error and dispersion not vary with scale? Implications for analyst and managerial behavior (Journal of Accounting Research)
- More Evidence of Bias in the Differential Timeliness Measure of Conditional Conservatism (The Accounting Review)
- The Effect of Litigation Risk on Management Earnings Forecasts (Contemporary Accounting Research)
- Friction in Related Party Trade when a Rival is also a Customer (Management Science)
- The Joint Determination of Audit Fees, Non-audit Fees and Abnormal Accruals (Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting)
Working Papers
- Rethinking Determinants of Trading Volume at Earnings Announcements
- Auditor Change Disclosures as Signals of Earnings Management and Risk
- Individual Investor Overextrapolation
- The Value and Information Effects of Initial Loan Contract Strictness
- The Information Quality Effect of Accruals-Based Benchmark Beating: Evidence from the CDS Market
- On the Contemporaneous Reporting of Income Increasing and Income Decreasing Special Items: Initial Evidence
- Conditional conservatism: the case of goodwill impairments under SFAS 142
- The power of firm fundamentals in explaining stock returns