List of Concentrations

Accounting

The study of an organization’s financial information, accounting is often referred to as the language of business. An organization’s financial performance and health are reflected in its balance sheet and income statement. Accounting gives you a framework from which you can quantifiably evaluate how choices are affected by incentives and resources.

Accounting at Chicago Booth integrates finance, economics, organizational behavior, strategy and production to provide a broader perspective on organizational issues and the business environment. We consider both financial and managerial accounting – that is, the perspectives of both external audiences, such as investors, lenders, regulators, and analysts, as well as internal ones. Both deal with economic questions related to the production, exchange, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. Here, you’ll learn how to measure an organization’s financial performance so you can evaluate and make business decisions.

COCURRICULAR ACTIVITIES
COURSE SAMPLING
FACULTY SAMPLING

COCURRICULAR ACTIVITIES
You'll have the chance to explore operations outside the classroom in numerous ways that will also allow you to build new skills, relationships and networks. These include:

Corporate Finance Group

This group is dedicated to serving its members in their pursuit of a rewarding career in the field of finance. The Corporate Finance Group serves members with interests that cross various industries, including financial services, high tech, entertainment, and many others.

Distressed Investing and Restructuring Group

The Distressed Investing and Restructuring Group provides resources to its members and the Chicago Booth Community to enable a better understanding of the field and to improve the competitive position of Chicago Booth students interested in entering turnaround and crisis management.

American Bankruptcy Institute Corporate Restructuring Competition

Students from leading business schools participate in the American Bankruptcy Institute Corporate Restructuring Competition to solve a realistic business case of a hypothetical distressed company. Judges are experts in the turnaround/crisis management field.

Workshop in Accounting Research

Discussion covers papers dealing with current topics in accounting research, prepared for the workshop by faculty, students, and invited guests.

COURSE SAMPLING
You’ll have the option of taking courses that address your individual career choices. Samples include:

Managerial Accounting

This course provides you with a framework to understand and use the cost and accounting information you will encounter in careers in consulting, operations, marketing, or general management. The course covers the vocabulary and mechanics of cost accounting, basic issues involved in the design of managerial accounting systems, and the role of managerial accounting resource allocation and performance evaluation.

Accounting and Financial Analysis I

This course looks at the firm's accounting policy for a particular type of transaction and determines how that policy choice affects its primary financial statements. You will learn how to question whether these effects fairly reflect the underlying economics of the firm's transactions using the lenses of accounting, economics, finance and strategy. The goal is to improve your ability to use an accounting report as part of an overall assessment of the firm's strategy and the potential rewards and risks of dealing with the firm.

Accounting and Financial Analysis II

You will learn to read and utilize information in corporate financial statements and understand the economic essence of important classes of complex business transactions. The course integrates insights from financial economics with the complexities of financial accounting to explore important issues of deal structuring, valuation, organizational design, corporate restructuring, business strategy, and incentives.

Taxes and Business Strategy

Investment bankers, financial executives and consultants who want to have a competitive advantage by understanding how taxes impact the structure and value of deals; as well as managers and analysts who need to understand how firms strategically respond to tax incentives will find this course useful. You will learn to integrate concepts from finance, economics, and accounting to achieve a more complete understanding of the role of taxes in business strategy.

Financial Statement Analysis

You will be exposed to a financial analysis framework that provides links among a firm's business, its financial statements and associated disclosures, forecasting, and valuation. The perspective taken is that of an external stakeholder relying on publicly available information for decision-making purposes.

FACULTY SAMPLING
You’ll study with professors who conduct groundbreaking research, collaborate with the entrepreneurial and private equity communities, and bring their own entrepreneurial experiences into the classroom.

	Ray Ball, is coauthor of an article that revolutionized the understanding of the impact of corporate disclosure on share prices, and of earnings releases in particular that laid the foundation for much of the modern accounting literature.		Christian Leuz, studies the role of corporate disclosures, accounting transparency and disclosure regulation in capital markets, corporate governance and financing, and international accounting. He is an Executive Board Member of the Initiative on Global Markets, a Research Associate at the European Corporate Governance Institute, a Fellow at Wharton's Financial Institution Center and a Member of the Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee.
	Philip G. Berger, has received several research prizes and counts among his publications one of the most widely cited papers by an accounting professor. Berger has been published in The Accounting Review, the Journal of Accounting & Economics, the Journal of Accounting Research and other academic journals.		Valeri Nikolaev, studies voluntary disclosure, quality of financial reporting, the role of accounting information in debt contracting, corporate governance, and earnings management. His paper, "Agency theory of overvalued equity as an explanation for accrual anomaly" written with S.P. Kothari and Elena Loutskina, was nominated for the Gen McLaughlin prize in research on accounting ethics.
	Alexander Bleck, studies the effects of information and coordination problems in financial markets. During graduate school, Bleck worked for a start-up structured investment vehicle in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Germany and in the fixed income and credit derivatives division at JP Morgan in the United Kingdom.		Douglas J. Skinner, focuses his research on various aspects of corporate finance and financial reporting. His research has been prominently featured in articles in the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The Economist, and BusinessWeek.
	Andrei Kovrijnykh, studies the fields of managerial accounting, microeconomic theory, and labor economics with specific focus on specialization, reputational incentives, and managerial compensation.		Abbie J. Smith, has experience as a corporate director and has served on audit, finance, and compensation committees. She feels this has given her an inside perspective on the determinants of corporate investment, restructuring, financing, as well as reporting behavior and their implications for firms' current and future performance.