You'll have the chance to explore activities 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 for 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.
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.
You’ll study with professors who conduct groundbreaking research and are recognized for their impact on academic literature, accounting practice and policy making, securities regulation and other key aspects of the field.
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.
Ryan Ball, studies the role of information in capital markets, debt contracting, and empirical asset pricing. His research papers include "The Debt-Contracting Value of Accounting Information and Loan Syndicate Structure", written with Robert Bushman and Florin Vasvari for the Journal of Accounting Research, and his dissertation, "Does Anticipated Information Impose a Cost on Risk-Averse Investors?"
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.
Hans B. Christensen, studies international accounting harmonization, mandatory IFRS adoption, and disclosure behavior. He was also an auditor with the firm PricewaterhouseCoopers for four years, where he audited financial statements prepared according to US-GAAP, IFRS, and various national European accounting standards.
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.
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.
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.
Andrew Van Buskirk, studies voluntary firm disclosures; information asymmetry; and securities regulation. In addition to research, Van Buskirk is an ad hoc reviewer for the American Accounting Association Annual Meetings, the Journal of Accounting Research, Contemporary Accounting Research, and the Accounting Review.- 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.
- Merle Erickson, studies the effect of taxes on the pricing and structuring of mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures; and the use of accounting information in valuation and contracting. He is also a co-editor of the Journal of Accounting Research, and has made presentations around the country, including at Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia University, Duke University, and UCLA.
- Andrei Kovrijnykh, studies the fields of managerial accounting, microeconomic theory, and labor economics with specific focus on specialization, reputational incentives, and managerial compensation.
- Regina Wittenberg Moen, specializes in financial reporting quality, financial contracting and information asymmetry, financial intermediation, and bond analysis. She has held positions at the Ministry of Finance in Jerusalem and the banking supervision department of the Bank of Israel.