Biography
Ira Weiss specializes in tax strategy, financial accounting, and venture capital. He teaches advanced MBA courses in tax strategy, accounting, entrepreneurship and venture capital.
Weiss currently teaches Taxes and Business Strategy, and Accounting for Entrepreneurs - from Start-up to IPO. In the tax class, Weiss feels it is important for students in his tax class to walk away knowing how to structure business decisions in the most tax-efficient manner, taking into account all other costs. He cites one significant use for the tools he teaches in class: learning how to structure merger and acquisition transactions. Students also learn many useful tax planning techniques for their personal financial decisions, such as whether they can deduct the cost of MBA tuition off their taxes. While teaching taxes and business strategy, he often is able to include some of the structures from real private equity deals to demonstrate the power of effective tax planning.
In 2017, Ira developed a new accounting course, Accounting for Entrepreneurs, from Start-up to IPO. Chicago Booth now offers 7 sections of this course a year.
Weiss has held positions at the accounting/consulting firms of Ernst & Young and Coopers & Lybrand, and serves on the boards of various start-up companies.
He earned a bachelor's degree in accounting from the University of Illinois in 1992. He received an MBA in 1999 and a PhD in 2001, from the Chicago Booth. He holds a CPA from the state of Illinois.
Outside of the classroom, he enjoys college basketball, mountain biking, Chicago and Illinois politics, and helped launch a nonprofit to address the Illinois pension challenges.
Research Interests
Corporate taxation; mutual fund taxation; accounting regulation; earnings management; and angel investing.
Academic Areas
- Accounting
- Entrepreneurship
Selected Publications
With Marcus Butler and Arthur Kraft, "The Effect of Reporting Frequency on the Timeliness of Earnings: The Cases of Voluntary and Mandatory Interim Reports," Journal of Accounting and Economics (2007).
With Feng Chen, and Lin Zheng, "The Predictive Role of Analyst Coverage Intensity: Evidence from Cross-Listing in the U.S.," Journal of Contemporary Accounting and Economics (2007).
With Daniel Collins and Edward Maydew, "Changes in the Value-Relevance of Earnings and Book Values over the Past Forty Years," Journal of Accounting and Economics (1997).