Accounting
Accounting focuses on financial information and contracting within
and across organizations. The organization might be a large, multidivisional
international enterprise, an organized security trading institution,
a public sector entity, or a similar organization. Financial information,
in turn, might take the form of formal audited financial statements,
proprietary internal cost studies, budget projections, competitor
cost studies, SEC filings, or supervisory evaluations. Contracting
includes relationships with employees, managers, security-holders,
customers, vendors, community and government. The focus is on financial
information and contracting within and across organizations.
 SOM's program in accounting is designed to develop strong theoretical and empirical skills. The typical student will build "producer" skills (the ability to generate original research) in one-area and "consumer" skills (the ability to read and understand) in the other. These skills are developed in appropriate economics and empirical methods courses, as well as in specialized accounting seminars. For example, principal-agent relationships, game theoretic bargaining encounters, estimation in the presence of errors in variables, and field and laboratory experimentation are all techniques that receive application in the accounting program.
The student is also expected to become acquainted with institutional details of the current financial reporting scene. This includes knowledge of the structure of the audit industry, regulatory apparatus, and information practices in a typical organization.
Examples of potential areas of research for the accounting dissertation include:
- The role of accounting information in organization design
- Transfer pricing in a large organization
- Balancing short-run and long-run managerial incentives
- Interactions between financial and non-financial disclosure in an organized security market
- Asset valuation in an incomplete market economy
- Framing effects of competing financial portraits
- Auditor independence in an oligopolistic product market setting
- Strategic cost disclosure
- Balancing tax and non-tax factors in firm decision making
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