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PhD Course Descriptions
Acct9300 - empirical design in accounting research (course syllabus).
This is an empirical research design course covering topics related to empirical methodology, causal inference, econometric analysis, and panel data approaches. At least one graduate level course in econometrics is recommended.
ACCT9400 - Research in Accounting I (Course Syllabus)
This is Part I of a theoretical and empirical literature survey course covering topics that include corporate disclosure, cost of capital, incentives, compensation, governance, financial intermediation, financial reporting, tax, agency theory, cost accounting, capital structure, international financial reporting, analysts, and market efficiency.
ACCT9410 - Research in Accounting II (Course Syllabus)
This is Part II of a theoretical and empirical literature survey sequence covering topics that include corporate disclosure, cost of capital, incentives, compensation, governance, financial intermediation, financial reporting, tax, agency theory, cost accounting, capital structure, international financial reporting, analysts, and market efficiency. Please contact the accounting doctoral coordinator for information on the specific upcoming modules/topics that will be taught.
ACCT9420 - Research in Accounting III (Course Syllabus)
This is Part III of a theoretical and empirical literature survey sequence covering topics that include corporate disclosure, cost of capital, incentives, compensation, governance, financial intermediation, financial reporting, tax, agency theory, cost accounting, capital structure, international financial reporting, analysts, and market efficiency. Please contact the accounting doctoral coordinator for information on the specific upcoming modules/topics that will be taught.
ACCT9430 - Research in Accounting IV (Course Syllabus)
This is Part IV of a theoretical and empirical literature survey sequence covering topics that include corporate disclosure, cost of capital, incentives, compensation, governance, financial intermediation, financial reporting, tax, agency theory, cost accounting, capital structure, international financial reporting, analysts, and market efficiency. Please contact the accounting doctoral coordinator for information on the specific upcoming modules/topics that will be taught.
ACCT9810 - Workshop Colloquium I (Course Syllabus)
Students attend workshops in departments outside of accounting to provide student exposure to theory, research designs and methods that are being explored outside of accounting to provide breadth of exposure to foster innovative research ideas. Students are required to attend 15 non-accounting workshops over one academic year and write up a referee report for 8 of those workshop papers. They are also required to write up at least one research proposal that stems from theories or research methods gleaned from one or more of the workshops attended.
ACCT9820 - Workshop Colloquium II (Course Syllabus)
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ACCT7343 - Empirical Research in Managerial Accounting
ACCT 7343 Empirical Research in Managerial Accounting (3 semester credit hours) Presents a detailed study of empirical research in the area of managerial accounting. Emphasis in on providing an understanding of the current research in managerial accounting. Topics covered include managerial incentives, design of compensation contracts, performance measurement and cost management. May be repeated for credit as topics vary (9 semester credit hours maximum). Additional prerequisites may be required depending on the specific course topic. (3-0) T
The NYPD gave officers iPhones. Here’s what we learned about race and policing.
Monday, June 3, 2024
While a growing number of studies have indicated persistent patterns of racial discrimination in policing, the data these papers rely on often come from officers’ self-reports of their own behavior. That means the data could be biased, a concern that led University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management Assistant Professor Jeremy Watson and two colleagues to look into the impact of digital technology.
Tracking data on New York City Police Department stops and complaints in 2017 and 2018—the period when iPhones were being rolled out across precincts in New York City—the researchers found an 18 percent increase in reported stops overall as well as a 22 percent increase of stops involving non-White citizens.
“On the whole, our study raises the possibility that race-based disparities in policing may have been underestimated thus far because of reporting gaps,” explained Watson, who worked with Brad Greenwood, professor of information systems and operations management at the Donald G. Costello College of Business at George Mason University and Gordon Burtch, professor of information systems at the Questrom School of Business at Boston University.
The trio’s paper, forthcoming in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , examined the recent rollout of iPhones across the NYPD, which included a series of digital tools designed to replace the handwritten memo books officers previously relied on. Instead of scribbling in the physical books, which NYPD officers were required to hang onto even into retirement, officers could log their activities directly into a centralized database maintained by the NYPD. These detailed digital records shed fresh light on how cops spend their time—and attention—on the beat.
A curious pattern
There was an 18 percent increase in reported stops after a precinct received iPhones, which would be consistent with the digital tools making it easier for officers to report a citizen interaction. Further, the researchers discovered that this increase resulted in neither more arrests nor more complaints from the public. It wasn’t, therefore, that the phones were somehow causing the police to stop people more often, but rather that so-called “unproductive stops”—those leading to no further action—were being reported more often.
However, when breaking down the results across White and non-White citizens, the researchers found that unproductive stops involving non-White citizens were entirely responsible for the increase. In other words, the observed changes were based on police encounters with non-White members of the public, that would likely have gone unreported in the days of pen and paper. More specifically, after switching to the smartphone system, officers logged 22 percent more stops involving non-White citizens, while the number of reported stops of White citizens remained unchanged. These are statistical averages—the pattern was more marked in high-crime neighborhoods and those with a greater proportion of non-White residents.
Greenwood, of George Mason University, offered an interpretation of the finding: “The concern here is that we have an underreporting which is concentrated in certain groups, which means that we need to be cautious when interpreting prior work. On the one hand, it opens the door to bias in police interactions with civilians being worse than initially anticipated, at least based on the frequency of stops. On the other hand, it could mean that older data doesn’t accurately reflect the likelihood of an arrest once a stop occurs. And we need to be doubly cautious, because we don’t know if officers are reporting stops more frequently just because it is easier, or for some other reason.”
No sweeping conclusions
The authors strongly caution against making sweeping conclusions based on the study. “The only thing we know for sure is that more and deeper work is needed by scholars and policymakers to ensure transparency between law enforcement and the people they are charged to protect,” said Greenwood, who also documented in a 2022 paper how the introduction of body-worn cameras for the NYPD resulted in a significant reduction in abuse-of-authority complaints.
As police officers are not obligated to document all civilian interactions, their decisions regarding what (and what not) to report can be biased. The introduction of new technology, as in the case of the NYPD, can help counter such biases, but is not the only avenue worth pursuing. The researchers recommend that police departments “investigate the appropriate organizational complements (i.e. policies and procedures) necessary to uncover and eliminate such biases.”
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COMMENTS
ABSTRACT: This paper discusses an approach to introducing empirical accounting research design to Ph.D. students. The approach includes a framework for evaluating accounting ex-. periments as well as studies based on passive observation of subjects or data. Alternative.
This Commentary is intended to help beginning Ph.D. students identify, evaluate, and communicate essential components of proposed empirical accounting research using a three-step process. The first step is a structured top-down approach of writing answers to three related questions—What, Why, How—that emphasize the central role of conceptual thinking in research design, as well as ...
This book provides a course on financial accounting research that begins at an upper-undergraduate ("honours") or introductory PhD level. One goal of the course, like most PhD courses, is to prepare PhD students to take further research courses and to go on to do their own research.
SYNOPSIS This Commentary is intended to help beginning Ph.D. students identify, evaluate, and communicate essential components of proposed empirical accounting research using a three-step process.
By the end of class, students should have a grasp on the tools used in modern empirical analysis, be able to critically evaluate a study's research design, and be able to develop a multi-facetted set of tests for a given research question. The course is intended for students with exposure to the academic accounting literature with a reasonable grasp of statistical inference and regression ...
By the end of class, students should have a grasp on the tools used in modern empirical analysis, be able to critically evaluate a study's research design, and be able to develop a multi-facetted set of tests for a given research question. The course is intended for students with exposure to the academic accounting literature with a reasonable grasp of statistical inference and regression ...
A tight connection and constructive feedback loop between theory and empirical research is appealing but often not achieved in accounting re-search practice. To be clear, a disconnect between empirical and theoretical studies is not uncommon in applied fields and accounting research is no exception in this regard.
Anticipating and addressing such issues can help accounting researchers, especially doctoral students and junior faculty members, convert an initial empirical accounting research idea into a thoughtful and carefully designed study.
This textbook provides the foundation for a course that takes PhD students in empirical accounting research from the very basics of statistics, data analysis, and causal inference up to the point at which they conduct their own research. Starting with foundations in statistics, econometrics, causal inference, and institutional knowledge of ...
Converting an initial research question into a thoughtful and carefully designed empirical accounting study is a complex, multifaceted process. Certain broad issues, particularly concerning the study's contribution and research design, arise repeatedly in seminars and review reports.
The purpose of this course is to enable Ph.D. students to generate, test, and promote impactful ideas in the field of accounting research and neighboring disciplines. The course focuses on the application of core concepts and tools needed in students' current and future research to questions in the field of accounting. The course complements existing method courses (e.g., Financial ...
Critical Perspectives on Accounting (1992) 3, 87-92 CRITICAL COMMENTARIES KINNEY'S DESIGN FOR ACCOUNTING RESEARCH WILLIAM W. COOPER* AND STEPHEN A. ZEFF j * The University of Texas at Austin and -~ Rice University, Texas In "Empirical Accounting Research Design for Ph.D. Students" (Kinney 1986), William R. Kinney, Jr. expresses a point of view that is increasingly being represented as ...
Empirical Accounting Research Design for Ph.D. Students - Free download as PDF File (.pdf), Text File (.txt) or read online for free. This paper discusses an approach to introducing empirical accounting research design to Ph.D. students.
The book is organized into four parts. Part I: Foundations covers a variety of topics, including research computing, statistics, causal inference, and some details of data sets commonly used in accounting research. This part of the book covers material often not included in the formal coursework of a PhD in accounting.
As the first such course in the accounting Ph.D. program at Stern, I will put particular emphasis on helping you understand and develop intuition regarding the research design methodologies and empirical methods commonly used in empirical financial accounting research.
Accounting research is overwhelmingly an empirical discipline seeking to draw causal inferences and, as such, significant research training should be focused on research design issues. Part III of the book examines causal inference in depth, including natural experiments, regression discontinuity designs, instrumental variables, and fixed effects.
TL;DR: In this paper, a three-step process is described to identify, evaluate, and communicate essential components of empirical accounting research using a three step process, which is intended to help beginning Ph.D. students.
A further criticism of how positive accounting has narrowed debate is that a focus on researching and teaching 'what is' smothers exploration of how accounting can change for the better.
Formal theory and empirical research are complementary in building and advancing the body of knowledge in accounting in order to understand real-world phenomena. We offer thoughts on opportunities for empiricists and theorists to collaborate, build on each other's work, and iterate over models and data to make progress. For empiricists, we see room for more descriptive work, more experimental ...
This course is designed to introduce you the basic research methods and designs that are requisite to good empirical research in the field of archival financial accounting.
This is an empirical research design course covering topics related to empirical methodology, causal inference, econometric analysis, and panel data approaches. At least one graduate level course in econometrics is recommended.
The goals of the Accounting Information and Management Department (AIM) PhD program are to train students in research methods appropriate for the study of accounting issues from both an empirical/archival and an analytic perspective, and to prepare the students for an academic career at a research-oriented institution in the U.S. This cross-training in theory and empirical methods is one of ...
ACCT 7343 Empirical Research in Managerial Accounting (3 semester credit hours) Presents a detailed study of empirical research in the area of managerial accounting. Emphasis in on providing an understanding of the current research in managerial accounting. Topics covered include managerial incentives, design of compensation contracts, performance measurement and cost management. May be ...
This paper was presented at the 2003 International Audit Research Symposium, the 2004 American Accounting Association conference, and seminars at California State University, Fullerton; University of California at Los Angeles; University of Hawaii; University of Texas at San Antonio; and the Norwegian School of Economics and Business ...
The trio's paper, forthcoming in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examined the recent rollout of iPhones across the NYPD, which included a series of digital tools designed to replace the handwritten memo books officers previously relied on. Instead of scribbling in the physical books, which NYPD officers were required to hang onto even into retirement, officers could log ...