Academic Areas Accounting Faculty and Research

The accounting faculty at Chicago Booth produce groundbreaking research across the accounting spectrum—from accounting practice and policymaking to securities regulation and the role of accounting in contracting.

Pathbreaking accounting professors at Booth such as Ray Ball, a recipient of the Wharton-Jacobs Levy Prize for Quantitative Financial Innovation, have revolutionized the modern accounting literature in business today. Much of the revolutionary accounting research our faculty create is incorporated into Booth’s curriculum through foundational accounting courses such as Accounting, Economic, and Regulatory Issues in Complex Deals, and innovative course offerings not found elsewhere, such as Taxes and Business Strategy.

Beyond their teaching acumen, our faculty in this academic area regularly publish in the world’s leading accounting journals, including the Journal of Accounting and Economics and the Accounting Review. Four faculty members are senior editors at the Journal of Accounting Research.

Accounting Faculty

At Booth, we believe in a multidisciplinary approach to business education. In addition to teaching foundational accounting courses such as Financial Accounting, our faculty are developing innovative courses that cross disciplinary lines.

Courses such as Accounting for Entrepreneurship: From Start-Up through IPO, for instance, incorporate the dynamics of the COVID-19 crisis into an examination of the tools needed to provide accounting and related functions for private, entrepreneurial firms. Other classes such as Taxes and Business Strategy use a textbook coauthored by Booth professor Merle Erickson to provide students with a durable, portable framework for thinking about tax planning.

Discover more about our accounting faculty, including the classes they teach, below.

Featured Research in Chicago Booth Review

Discover some of the latest research from our accounting professors.

Read More in Chicago Booth Review

Delphine Samuels

Awards and Honors

The American Accounting Association awarded Delphine Samuels with its 2020 Competitive Manuscript Award for her manuscript "Government Procurement and Changes in Firm Transparency.” The award, which is chosen by blind review, aims to encourage research among members of the American Accounting Association who have earned their PhD in the past five years.

Learn More About Her Research

Awards and Honors
Hans B. Christensen

Research with Impact

“A lot of the pressure comes from investors—regular people, retail investors, and also institutional investors. They want to have a return, but they also want to invest in something that they believe in.”

Hans B. Christensen, speaking to recent research he conducted with fellow Booth professor Christian Leuz. Their research examines what the economic impact would be if the United States mandated reporting standards for corporate social responsibility activities for US-based companies. What they find has broad implications for both firms and stakeholders.

Watch Professor Christensen Explain

Research with Impact

Our MBA Concentrations in This Area

Christian Leuz holding and speaking into a mic in a classroom.

Accounting

Learn how to evaluate economic performance, use accounting information for financial decisions, and create and assess managerial incentives.

Accounting

Our PhD Dissertation Areas in This Area

Accounting

As a PhD student in accounting at Booth, you’ll work with outstanding faculty and focus your doctoral research on your own areas of interest.

Accounting

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Accounting Faculty in the News



Patents signal positive impact of business school insights on innovation
November 7, 2024 | Financial Times
Chicago Booth’s Hans Christensen, Valeri Nikolaev, and coauthors discovered two key factors that influence how lenders react to financial shocks: capital channel and learning channel. The former results in lenders tightening contract terms, while the latter leads to adjusted terms.

Bad property debt exceeds reserves at largest U.S. banks
February 19, 2024 | Financial Times
“At some point if high vacancy rates hold, these property owners are not going to be able to service their debts, and banks are going to foreclose,” Chicago Booth’s João Granja says of lower loan allowances for commercial real estate in the wake of the pandemic.

These U.S. companies are best at cutting their emissions to fight climate change
May 29, 2024 | USA Today
With no national requirements for reporting carbon dioxide pollution, having more transparency and data about companies’ emissions is “incredibly important,” says Chicago Booth’s Christian Leuz.

Partnering across the University of Chicago and Beyond

Our accounting faculty members are active in and outside of the University of Chicago.

In true interdisciplinary spirit, several of our faculty members share perspectives that spark new ideas in economics as UChicago Scholars with the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics at the University of Chicago, including professors Ray Ball, Christian Leuz, and Douglas J. Skinner.

Other accounting faculty lend their expertise to editing journals. Philip G. Berger is a senior editor of the prestigious Journal of Accounting Research. He edits the journal with Booth professors Leuz, Skinner, and Haresh Sapra. 

Research Spotlight

Discover some of the latest working papers and published papers from our accounting faculty.

“CECL: Timely Loan Loss Provisioning and Bank Regulation”
Haresh Sapra, with coauthors Lucas Mahieux (Tilburg University) and Gaoqing Zhang (University of Minnesota)

“The Economics of Misreporting and the Role of Public Scrutiny”
Delphine Samuels, with coauthors Daniel J. Taylor (The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania) and Robert E. Verrecchia (The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania)

“Breaking It Down: Economic Consequences of Disaggregated Cost Disclosures”
Philip G. Berger, with coauthors Jung Ho Choi (Stanford University Graduate School of Business) and Sorabh Tomar (Southern Methodist University)

Research Centers in This Area

Research centers across Booth and the University of Chicago are hubs for innovation and world-changing research. The centers provide our faculty with research support, and our faculty members lend their expertise to the centers, enriching the student experience and the broader academic community at Booth.

See Our Other Academic Areas

Accounting  Applied AI  Behavioral Science  Econometrics and Statistics  Entrepreneurship  Finance  Macroeconomics  Marketing  Microeconomics  Operations Management  Organizations and Markets  Strategy and Leadership