Financial Accounting Standards Research Initiative

As someone who reads a lot of SoP's, here are the questions I want an applicant to answer, more or less in order: What is your purpose? What are your career aspirations?  What type of research do you want to conduct?  What topics and methods are you intending to pursue? What led you to your purpose? Why [...] Read more > >

As I've been considering this, I've thought about the different ways in which standard-relevant research can be conducted. I've realized there are implementation studies and there are theory-based studies. I'll demonstrate using papers we discussed in a PhD seminar this past spring. Obviously each paper contains elements of each category, but I focus on them [...] Read more > >

I just finished my first year of the PhD program. A large portion of my time was spent reading academic papers, many of which we subsequently discussed in workshops or seminars. Often I have spent hours trying to understand a paper only to arrive at the seminar and hear someone give a summary in which [...] Read more > >

In 1957, the Princeton Press published Milton Friedman’s famous book, A Theory of the Consumption Function.  An interesting assumption underlying the theory is that “the transitory components of consumption and income can be taken to be uncorrelated with the corresponding permanent components and with each, other.” One of the key inferences is that permanent (smoothed) consumption [...] Read more > >

Undergrads are nitpicked about their citations. MLA, Chicago, etc. Must be perfectly consistent. You will lose points for every missing comma or period. Unfortunately, this is not a skill I became proficient at. In fact, without the help of Google I couldn’t tell you the difference between MLA and Chicago formats. When I started a PhD [...] Read more > >

One of my goals this summer is to organize my academic papers. I need a system to keep track of the papers I’ve read, allow searching within documents (both PDF and word), and assist with bibliography creation. Rather than experiment with 20 different pieces of software, I thought I’d ask the FASRI audience for their [...] Read more > >

Happy New Year!  I’m back to blogging after a holiday hiatus, with a pointer to this article addressing the title question.  The author, a law professor, says no.  I say yes.  If you think of evaluating a paper as an audit, knowing something about the author’s motivation is part of the inherent risk assessment, and [...] Read more > >

Yesterday the PCAOB announced that they are seeking applicants for an academic fellow for the 2011-2012 academic year. Read more > >

Twin goals of FASRI are helping researchers to understand standard setters and to communicate complex research findings in a way the standard setters can understand.  Part of the challenge is knowing how to read and write.  Here is a bit of advice on each one. How to Read. There is an old Jewish saying: According to Rabbi Bunim [...] Read more > >

What does it take to get tenure? What about the full professor hurdle? Steve Glover, Doug Prawitt, Scott Summers, and David Wood provide some answers in their recent paper titled “Promotion Benchmarking Data for Faculty at the Top 75 US Accounting Research Institutions. One interesting finding is that publication expectations have increased in recent years: Our findings [...] Read more > >