Read how Accounting played a central role in the rise of financial capitalism as we know it today in LSE Business Blog by Dr Nadia Matringe

Congratulations to Dr Xi Li who was awarded the Review of Accounting Studies (RAST) Reviewer Award 2017 in the recent RAST Conference in Barcelona, Spain in October 2017.

Vasiliki Athanasakou and her co-author, George Athanassakos (University of Western Ontario) have just won the runner-up prize in the 2017 Charles Brandes Prize Award for their paper Earnings Quality and the Value Premium. The competition is sponsored by The Brandes Institute. The focus of the competition this year was to highlight new ideas and enhance the conversation on value investing. More information can be found here.

In his new book Financial Management for Technology Start-Ups, Professor Alnoor Bhimani  explains using straight-forward language, extensive practical illustrations and case studies how technology and innovation-based start-ups can adopt and use a financial toolkit that is effective and focused on their needs. Also featured in the LSE Business Review.

August 2017

American Accounting Association Notable Contribution to Management Accounting Literature Award 2017

Professor Wim A Van der Stede has been awarded the AAA Notable Contribution to Management Accounting Literature Award, given at this year’s AAA Annual Meeting in San Diego for his article on Earnings Targets and Annual Bonus Incentives in The Accounting Review(2014) with Raffi Indjejikian, Michal Matějka and Ken Merchant. Wim also won this Award in 2007 for his co-authored study on Subjectivity in Incentives in The Accounting Review (2004).

January -August 2017

LSE Business Review - Accounting, is a new knowledge-exchange initiative designed to share the best of modern social science ideas, theories and evidence with business decision-makers and professionals, and to learn from them in turn. Recent posts by Department of Accounting faculty include Dr Julia Morley, Dr Nadia Matringe, Dr Lukas Lohlein, Dr Tomasso Palermo, Professor Wim Van der Stede, and Dr Stefano Cascino.

October 2016

Professor Wim Van der Stede  and Dr Stefano Cascino   receives the 2016 LSE Excellence in Education Award.

Interview with Professor Wim Van der Stede about his teaching on the LSE Education blog.

19 October 2016

Congratulations to Professor Peter Pope who has been confirmed as a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences for contributions to social science. 

30 August 2016

 Dr Julia Morley on how we measure success in the social sector (Youtube). She examines the rise of social impact reporting and argues that a group of individuals working in social investment – many of whom have a background in finance – are driving this change.

10 August 2016

Wayne Landsman, visiting Professor of Accounting receives the Deloitte Wildman Medal Award for his paper 'Are IFRS-based and US GAAP-based Accounting Amounts Comparable?' with ME Barth, MH Lang, and CD Williams, at the 2016 American Accounting Association annual meeting in New York.  

July 2016

British Academy honours four LSE Fellows for distinguished research 

Four LSE professors have been elected as Fellows of the prestigious British Academy, the UK's national body for the humanities and social sciences.

In recognition of their outstanding research, Professors Emily Jackson (Law), Judy Wajcman (Sociology), Robin Burgess (Economics) and Michael Power (Accounting)  are among 66 new distinguished scholars elected to join the 1000-strong British Academy Fellowship.

Professor of Accounting, Michael Power, said: 

"As  the first accounting academic to be elected to the British Academy, this is a wonderful honour for me personally.  More importantly, it is also recognition for the field of sociologically-oriented accounting research which  was established at LSE several decades ago, and which now has so many vibrant connections to the wider social sciences and humanities."

Professor of Economics, Director of the IGC and a member of STICERD, Robin Burgess, said:

"Never has the process of linking economic research with public policy been more necessary in the interconnected world we inhabit. I look forward to working with the British Academy in this exciting endeavour."

Commenting on the announcement, LSE Pro-Director of Research, Professor Julia Black, said:

“The School congratulates all four professors on their election to the Academy, which champions the humanities and social sciences and the important role they play in our daily lives. Their election as Fellows is testament to their outstanding scholarship and research contribution to their respective fields.”

In addition to the UK Fellows, the British Academy elected 20 new Corresponding Fellows from overseas universities in the US, Australia, Spain and Germany as well as four Honorary Fellows.

Lord Nicholas Stern, IG Patel Professor of Economics at LSE and Chairman of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change, is stepping down as President of the British Academy after four years. His successor is Professor Sir David Cannadine.

The full list of 2016 Fellows is available here.

June 2016

Rodney Brown, receives award for Best Tax Paper at the 2016 Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand Conference

 Titled The Impact of Corporate Tax Avoidance on Debt Financing in a Full Dividend Imputation System, it is co-authored with Youngdeok Lim and Chris Evans (UNSW, Australia)

20 May 2016

Alnoor Bhimani receives Honorary Doctorate

On 20 May 2016, Professor Bhimani was conferred an Honorary Doctorate of Science in Economics and Business Administration by the University of Aalto in Finland.

The degree was in recognition of his research leadership in management accounting and its impact on the research agenda and orientation of the field across Europe.

Professor Pekka Ilmakunnas paid tribute to  Professor Bhimani’s efforts in developing collaborative ties between universities including his service to University of Aalto’s Scientific Advisory Board.   

Other recipients of the award included the President of Finland Sauli Niinistö, Professor Udo Zander of the  Stockholm School of Economics, Professor Harrison Hong of Princeton University and Sari Baldauf who served as Nokia’s Executive Vice President and has been named among the most influential women leaders in the world. 

The Aalto University School of Business is one of the oldest business schools in the Nordic countries ranked by the Financial Times among the top 30 in Europe.

 May 2016

St. James's Place Academy Prize

St. James's Place Academy Prize for academic excellence in Accounting
The St. James's Place Academy Prize in Accounting celebrated the achievements of three students on the MSc Accounting, Organisations and Institutions programme. The SJP Academy Prize (£500 for each student) was awarded to Akshay Joshi, Aizhan Sambetbayeva and Chung Yan Cheung who achieved the highest marks in their essays.

Adrian Batchelor, Director of the St. James’s Place Academy, says: “Accountancy is a crucially important discipline within the financial services sector, so we are very pleased to have the opportunity to work with the London School of Economics, an internationally-recognised academic institution, and lend our support to its accountancy faculty through this new sponsorship. We look forward to further developing links between the LSE and St. James’s Place Academy in the future.”

15 May 2016

Matthew Hall with Anette Mikes and Yuval Millo awarded the David Solomons Prize for their paper 'How do risk managers become influential? A field study of toolmaking in two financial institutions' which appeared in Management Accounting Research. The £1000 prize is sponsored by the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA). The David Solomons prize is awarded for the best article in each annual volume of Management Accounting Research. The winning paper is determined by votes from members of the Editorial Board.

13 May 2016

Professor Michael Power was awarded the degree of 'Doctor of Economics Honoris Causa' by Turku School of Economics, Finland on 13 May 2016. The Honorary Doctorate is in recognition of his outstanding international research record and significant contributions from conducting interdisciplinary research in the areas of risk management, auditing and corporate governance.

22 April 2016

The Prize for the Best Paper in the ECGI Finance Working Paper Series was awarded to Professor Ane Tamayo and her co-authors Karl Lins (University of Utah) and Henri Servaes (London Business School) for their paper on ‘Social Capital, Trust, and Firm Performance during the Financial Crisis’.  The Finance Prize is sponsored by Standard Life Investments and was presented to the authors during the ECGI Annual Meeting held in London on the 22 April 2016. 

21 April 2016

Professor Alnoor Bhimani discusses how digital technologies will alter management in the next decade

Professor Bhimani delivered a speech at the Lahore School of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Pakistan on 21 April 2016 on 'Digitisation and the coming transformation of management'. His talk to an audience of business academics addressed the implications of the data deluge associated with the widening use of digitised communication technologies.  He discussed social, economic, cultural and demographic trends in South Asia and commented on the region’s extremely fast and increasingly pronounced penetration of internet enabled mobile devices.  He argued that whilst the growth of data production is driven by internet penetration, increased investments by users into more sophisticated devices enabling higher informational resolution will drive a ‘second’ data deluge in the next decade.  Professor Bhimani highlighted the link between digital connectedness and GDP growth which is becoming increasingly manifest in Asian economies including that of Pakistan.  As a consequence managerial practices and decision making approaches grounded in industrial economy principles will, in some contexts, need to alter and evolve toward servicing digitised enterprise environments.  The challenge for management education at LUMS which houses Pakistan’s premier business school will be to focus on digital communication concepts already familiar to millennials which constitutes a very large segment of the region’s population and who will sponsor economic and commercial growth over the coming decades.  Professor Bhimani identified a multitude of impacts the ongoing data explosion is sponsoring including altered decision making techniques, different pedagogic styles, innovative commercial and entrepreneurial models, wider reaching regulatory and public policy tools, and an array of uncharted social, cultural and gender effects.  LUMS academics identified and debated these and other issues tied to digitisation’s relationships with management practices, education and scholarly research.

14 April 2016

Alnoor Bhimani receives Honorary Doctorate

On 20 May 2016, Professor Bhimani was conferred an Honorary Doctorate of Science in Economics and Business Administration by the University of Aalto in Finland.

The degree was in recognition of his research leadership in management accounting and its impact on the research agenda and orientation of the field across Europe.

Professor Pekka Ilmakunnas paid tribute to  Professor Bhimani’s efforts in developing collaborative ties between universities including his service to University of Aalto’s Scientific Advisory Board.   

Other recipients of the award included the President of Finland Sauli Niinistö, Professor Udo Zander of the  Stockholm School of Economics, Professor Harrison Hong of Princeton University and Sari Baldauf who served as Nokia’s Executive Vice President and has been named among the most influential women leaders in the world. 

The Aalto University School of Business is one of the oldest business schools in the Nordic countries ranked by the Financial Times among the top 30 in Europe.

12 March 2016

St. James's Place Academy Prize

St. James's Place Academy Prize for academic excellence in Accounting
The St. James's Place Academy Prize in Accounting celebrated the achievements of three students on the MSc Accounting, Organisations and Institutions programme. The SJP Academy Prize (£500 for each student) was awarded to Akshay Joshi, Aizhan Sambetbayeva and Chung Yan Cheung who achieved the highest marks in their essays.

Adrian Batchelor, Director of the St. James’s Place Academy, says: “Accountancy is a crucially important discipline within the financial services sector, so we are very pleased to have the opportunity to work with the London School of Economics, an internationally-recognised academic institution, and lend our support to its accountancy faculty through this new sponsorship. We look forward to further developing links between the LSE and St. James’s Place Academy in the future.”

St. James's Place Academy

2016

LSE Accounting & Finance does well in 2016 QS World University Rankings. No.4 globally, No.1 in UK

18 February 2016

Professor Bhimani speaks on accounting in the digital era

4 February 2016

CARR project receives ESRC funding under the prestigious Open Research Area award scheme

Dr Andrea Mennicken and Prof Martin Lodge have been awarded a prestigious grant of £591,000 by the Economic and Social Research Council under the “Open Research Area (ORA) for the Social Sciences” programme to study relations between Quantification, Administrative Capacity and Democracy (QUAD).

18 December 2015

The BlackRock Research Prize for best paper on capital markets, funds management, and mutual funds was awarded to doctoral student Hami Amiraslani and Professor Ane Tamayo for their paper “Corporate Social Responsibility and the Agency Cost of Debt during the Financial Crisis” with Professor Karl Lins (University of Utah) and Professor Henri Servaes (London Business School). The award was presented to the authors during the Australasian Finance and Banking Conference at the Institute of Global Finance of the University of New South Wales in December 2015.

11 November 2015

Professor Wim A Van der Stede spoke at the CGMA 2015 Annual Awards and CFO Forum, then at Sun Yat-Sen University, and he also gave the opening keynote at the China Journal of Accounting Studies

19 October 2015

Professor Mike Power discusses his report on Risk culture in financial organisations

15 September 2015

Professor Wim Van der Stede speaks on recorded video in Atlanta on his experiences with the AAA at the AAA's Centennial

16 August 2015

Dr Matthew Hall's lecture-flipping for AC310

7 August 2015

AAA Annual Meeting 2015

The American Accounting Association’s President Bruce Behn invited Professor Van der Stede together with professors Diana Falsetta (University of Miami) and Robert S Kaplan (Harvard Business School) to participate in the Wednesday luncheon session at the AAA Annual Meeting in Chicago. Bruce adopted this format for his incoming president’s address to reflect with Diana, Bob and Wim on the AAA’s accomplishments and prospects at the start of its centennial year.

1 July 2015

Dr Vasiliki Athanasakou awarded the Best Young Researcher Award

Dr Vasiliki Athanasakou has won the Best Young Researcher Award for her paper The Relative Concentration of Bad versus Good News Flows co-authored with Norman Strong and Martin Walker at the recent Multinational Finance Society conference in Halkidiki, Greece, July 2015.

4 June 2015

Professor Peter Miller awarded an Honorary Doctorate at the University of Paris-Dauphine 

Professor Peter Miller was awarded an Honorary Doctorate at the University of Paris-Dauphine on 4 June. In his presentation at the Ceremony, Professor Berland paid tribute to Professor Miller’s distinctive contribution to the institutional analysis of accounting, and his many influential studies of the links among accounting, organising and economising in both the private and public sector. He also noted the impact his work has had on the French academic community.

31 May 2015

Dr Omiros Georgiou awarded ICAS grant

Dr Omiros Georgiou with others on an international team have been awarded a £10,000 ICAS grant for a research project to review and evaluate the literature on the role of the ‘true and fair view’ in accounting and assurance. The project aims to identify opportunities for future research and inform policy makers and debates, such as those on the conceptual framework by the International Accounting Standards Board.

29 May 2015

The Journal of Accounting and Public Policy (JAPP) conference

The Journal of Accounting and Public Policy (JAPP) held its fourth annual conference on 29 May 2015 at LSE. The conference rotates yearly between LSE, the IE Business School in Spain and the University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business. The theme of the conference this year was ‘Accounting Regulation and Politics’. 45 participants registered for the conference with four speakers presenting submitted papers and three invited speakers giving addresses. The paper topics included aspects of the politics of internal control regulation; the determinants of derivative usage in US Municipalities; price-regulation and accounting choice; and the social psychology of standard setting.  Sir John Bourn, the past UK Comptroller and Auditor General and Head of the UK National Audit Office, gave the distinguished luncheon speech on the historical role of the comptroller and auditor general function and reflected on how the accountancy profession can enhance its contribution as a public good. Professor Shyam Sunder of Yale University discussed ‘Better financial reporting: Meanings and means’ articulating quite specific judgments on differentiating between macro and micro conceptions of the accounting domain. David Cairns (past Secretary-General of the International Accounting Standards Committee) was the Distinguished JAPP Conference Speaker and gave a talk reflecting on accounting regulation and politics in the context of standard setting practices.

6 May 2015

LSE Teaching Awards 2015

At this year's LSE Teaching Awards held on 5 May 2015, Dr Matthew Hall was selected as Highly Commended in the category of Award for Innovative Teaching in the LSE Student Union Teaching Awards. He was awarded this prize for his innovative approach to lectures called “lecture flipping”, where the course is taught using a two-hour learning session each week for the five weeks of the module (replacing the typical two hour lecture and one hour class each week). Students are assigned to one of four class groups, with each group consisting of approximately 25 students. Face-to-face lectures have been replaced by a series of short ‘mini-lectures’ that are watched on-line before each learning session. Students really enjoyed the new learning sessions and here are some of the comments from the students:

“Having two hour class discussions is very helpful - it allows unpacking of issues and answering of questions - there should be more classes like this - very helpful”.

“The entire structure of the module (lectures online and extended classes) is the most useful way of learning I have had this year”.

Robert Charnock, PhD student and Graduate Teaching Assistant, was also selected as a Winner in the category of LSESU Award for Professional Mentoring and Personal Development. Here are some of the comments from the students:

“Outside of class he has been more than a teacher but also a mentor and friend – giving personal advice from his experiences and going out of his way to help me discover my true passions in life and where to take my skills to explore career paths”.

“He helped me devise a plan to network with people in an industry I am interested in working in and he often checked on how I was doing. He goes above and beyond”.

Rodney Brown and Nadine De-Gannes  were also awarded the Department of Accounting Graduate Teaching Assistant Award for their very high standard of teaching on AC100.

The LSESU Teaching Awards are run by the Students' Union, supported by the Teaching and Learning Centre and sponsored by the Annual Fund.

1-2 May 2015

40 years of Accounting, Organizations and Society 

On 1 and 2 May this year, the Department hosted a conference to mark the forthcoming 40th anniversary of the journal Accounting, Organizations and Society (“AOS”) in 2016. The journal opened for business in 1976 and was founded by Anthony Hopwood who was editor in chief until his death in 2010. His first editorial opened with the following words on the social significance of accounting:

Accounting has played a vital role in the development of modern society. To this day it remains the most important formal means of collecting, analysing and communicating information on the financial activities and performance of all forms of organization. And the terminology and underlying calculus of “profits”, “costs” and “assets” continue to exert a profound impact on human consciousness and action.

These words remain as relevant today as they were in 1976 and continue to inform the agenda of AOS. Over four decades the journal supported and published a wide ranging and cumulative body of work from many methodological schools with a common focus, namely to understand the social and organizational roles and conseque4nces of accounting. To mark the achievements of the journal ten papers were commissioned which will be published in 2016. The idea was that each paper would both reflect on, and also develop, key themes from the field of AOS work. In this sense the event was part celebration and retrospection, and part agenda-building for the future.

Over 60 international participants enjoyed ten papers over the two days on: audit judgement research, the evolution of management accounting; accounting space and gender; how new accounting systems incept and take hold; the role and contribution of laboratory studies of accounting practice; accounting for sustainability; regulation and earnings management; accounting and decision making; the entrepreneurialisation of the self and management control; and the history of the roles of accounting in society. 

In his welcoming address, Mike Power, standing in for Peter Miller, paid tribute to Anthony Hopwood’s enduring legacy, and to the great work done by his immediate successor, Chris Chapman, to maintain that legacy while also modernising the editorial process. In addition, he drew attention to the unseen and often unsung work of the many reviewers who support the journal and its standards. The meeting also marked the passing of Ted O’Leary in 2014, whose work with Peter Miller had helped to give AOS, perhaps uniquely among accounting journals, a significant footprint in the wider social sciences. Relatedly, Keith Robson, AOS editor-in-chief elect, in concluding the proceedings, drew attention to the key contribution of “accounting outsiders” like Jim March and John Meyer to the fortunes of AOS over the years, both directly in their publications and also by virtue of their more general support.  

The Department of Accounting at LSE was strongly represented at the event. Indeed, we are proud to boast an Editor and five members of the AOS editorial board – the largest representation from any single institution – and we look forward to supporting the journal in the coming decades.

Professor Michael Power
Professor of Accounting

7 January 2015

7 January 2015

Professor Mike Power’s Research Impact Case Study featured among LSE’s REF 2014 Impact submission.

16 December 2014

An interview with Professors Peter Miller and Mike Power on what what motivated them to write their article entitled  “Accounting, Organizing and Economizing: Connecting Accounting Research and Organization Theory”, in The Academy of Management Annals (2013).

29 November 2014

Professor Wim Van der Stede gives keynote at the Shanghai National Accounting Institute 

On 29 November 2014, Professor Wim A Van der Stede gave a keynote at the Shanghai National Accounting Institute on the theme of Management Accounting: Global Experiences and Chinese Practices, particularly addressing management accountants’ roles and responsibilities in sustainable value creation. During his visit, Professor Van der Stede also gave further talks, such as at Xiamen University’s Management Accounting conference.

21 November 2014

LSE Public Lecture: Professor Alnoor Bhimani in conversation with Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus

In a conversation with Professor Mohammed Yunus, Professor Alnoor Bhimani explored the idea of and prospects for businesses which offer a ‘return of investment’ but no ‘return on investment’. Professor Mohammed Yunus is the founder of Grameen Bank and author of Building Social Business. He explained that Grameen bank has established a number of social businesses including joint ventures with commercial firms such as Danone, Intel, Reebok and BASF.  The intent is for these entities to develop business models that benefit the poor while leveraging their core competencies. Unlike traditional business, Professor Yunus noted that a social business operates for the benefit of addressing social needs that enable societies to function more efficiently. Social business provides a framework for tackling social issues by combining business know-how with the desire to improve quality of life. This opens the doorway to a new dimension for capitalism: a business model that does not strive to maximise profits but instead to serve humanity’s most pressing needs. Within our economic system, Professor Yunus stated that there are now two key types of organisations: private sector companies and not-for-profit enterprises. Where both governments and the markets reach their limits, charities may fill the gap. But this system has failed to involve the poor into its economics. A primary feature of a social business is that when the investment is paid back, profits stay with the company for expansion and improvement. No dividend is provided beyond the investment outlay. The argument is that for instance, in relation to technology, those who control it seek to maximise profit generation as a principal objective and use technology as their means to achieve this. But technology can also be used to end poverty or combat disease as primary aims for instance. The problem is that the present theoretical framework under which capitalism operates does not allow this option - however the inclusion of social business creates this choice.  

18-19 October 2014

Graduate Weekend 18-19 October 2014

The Department of Accounting held another successful Graduate Weekend for postgraduate students of the Diploma in Accounting and Finance, MSc Accounting and Finance, MSc Accounting, Organisations and Institutions, MSc Law and Accounting and PhD in Accounting programmes. It was held at the Cambridge City Hotel and was attended by around 140 students as well as faculty and staff. It started with a fun and challenging team activity led by Eventus, followed by a panel where five alumni took part in a discussion and Q&A session on graduate recruitment. Students then went punting on the River Cam before gathering for dinner at the hotel and drinks at a nearby bar. On Sunday, students had the opportunity to go on a walking tour of Cambridge before returning to LSE in the afternoon.

20 August 2014

Visiting Professor Wayne Landsman receives the 2014 Outstanding Educator Award by the American Accounting Association (AAA).

Visiting Professor Wayne Landsman received the 2014 Outstanding Educator Award by the American Accounting Association (AAA). He also received the 2014 Best Paper Award by the AAA Financial Accounting and Reporting Section for his study Cost of Capital and Earnings Transparency published in Journal of Accounting and Economics (2013). Both awards were presented at the 2014 AAA Annual Meeting in Atlanta in August.

10 August 2014

Edinburgh Culture Visit 2014

Professor Mike Power recently participated in the Edinburgh Culture Summit in August 2014. He gave a short plenary talk and led some private seminars for culture ministers from around the world on the theme of values and measurement. Among others, Nelson Mandela's granddaughter participated in the event. Please click here for the links to the speeches.

2-6 August 2014

Professor Jorgensen shares two dissertation supervision awards at the 2014 AAA

Professor Bjorn Jorgensen shared two dissertation supervision awards at the 2014 American Accounting Association, from the Management Accounting Section (MAS) and the Financial Accounting and Reporting Section (FARS), respectively. The MAS Award was for supervising Dr Paige Patrick (now at the Foster School of Business, University of Washington) on Renegotiations of Target CEOs’ Personal Benefits During Mergers and Acquisitions. The FARS Award was for supervising Dr Jeremy Michels (now at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania) for Essays on Disclosure.

2 August 2014

Professor Van der Stede receives runner-up AAA Notable Contribution to Management Accounting Literature Award

At the 2014 AAA Annual Meeting in Atlanta, Professor Wim A Van der Stede received the runner-up AAA Notable Contribution to Management Accounting Literature Award for his article with Michal Matejka and Ken Merchant, Employment Horizon and the Choice of Performance Measures, which appeared in Management Science (2009).

9 June 2014

Professor Ted O'Leary 1950-2014

27 May 2014

35th Congress of the French Accounting Association

Dr Andrea Mennicken delivered the opening key note speech at the 35th Congress of the French Accounting Association AFC (Association Francophone de Comptabilité) in Lille on 27 May 2014.

In her presentation entitled Custody, Care and Cost: Accounting between Economy and Morality Andrea Mennicken discussed the transition from government by law to governance by numbers in the Prison Service of England and Wales. She explored what roles accounting, in particular performance measurement, can play in the organisation and management of value conflict, and raised the question of the extent to which accounting can be called upon as a “moralising” and “democratising” instrument, connecting a multitude of actors and domains, including disparate values and rationalities, such as those of security, decency and economy.

27 May 2014

The LSE Teaching and Learning Centre Teaching Awards 2014

Each year the LSE Teaching and Learning Centre (TLC) awards a prize to those GTAs (Graduate Teaching Assistants) and GTs (Guest Teachers) who have performed to a very high standard, based on student feedback. This year, Chris Constantinou and Renuka Fernando have been both awarded GTA Teaching Prizes for the high standard of their teaching on AC100. 

25 April 2014

Professor Alnoor Bhimani speaks on 'The Allure of Big Data'

Professor Alnoor Bhimani spoke at the 14th conference of the Social Study of ICTs held at the LSE. As a panel member discussing Big Data and innovation, he commented on the scale of the ongoing data growth in the global economy. He identified trends in mobile technology usage, digitisation, global population demographics and new regulatory structures put into place in the aftermath of the global financial crisis as being key drivers of the data profusion we are currently witnessing. He noted that the State and a number of large organisations deploy Big Data analytics in seeking to unravel hidden patterns and unknown correlations. Insights derived from Big Data analysis of mainly unstructured data he argued can offers a basis for developing new ways of addressing citizen needs and concerns as well as for providing customer service and product choices in addition to producing social value. Professor Bhimani discussed the implications not just for reporting structures and communication forms but identified also issues relating to ethics, governance and risk management which will need to be addressed in the face of the growing interest in Big Data analysis. He pointed to evidence of Big Data analysis illustrations and implications in enterprise contexts which echoed ideas communicated by Professors Theodore Porter, Jannis Kallinikos and Nick Couldry who were also speakers at the event.

3 April 2014

Professor Mike Power presents the RL Chambers Lecture

Professor Mike Power presented the RJ Chambers Research Lecture at The University of Sydney on 3 April 2014. He presented the findings and conclusions from his recent empirical research on risk cultures within financial institutions. Please click here for the final report Risk Culture in Financial Organisations. He also presented the Public Lecture Living in an Audit Society: Performance Reporting Systems after the Global Financial Crisis on 9 April 2014 at The University of Queensland.

27 March 2014

Dr Stefano Cascino awarded ICAS grant

Dr Stefano Cascino together with the other members of an international research team has been awarded a £40,000 ICAS grant to conduct a research project meant to understand whether valuation and stewardship are complementary or competing objectives of financial reporting. The research project aims to address this important gap in the empirical literature and to inform the debate over the current development of the Conceptual Framework by the IASB.

21 March 2014

Professor Peter Miller awarded Honorary Doctorate at Copenhagen Business School

The award is for his work on analysing the interrelations among accounting, organising and economising, both in the private and the public sector. Two other Honorary Doctors were announced in the same ceremony: Professor Darrell Duffie (Stanford University) and Professor Henry Hansmann (Yale Law School). Please see here for further details.

6-7 March 2014

"Numbers from the Bottom Up"

In the academic year 2013-14, a focus group of nine Fellows from various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences is studying the rise, spread and power of numbers in economic and social life. They have been convened at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study Berlin) under the leadership of Wendy Espeland, a sociologist from Northwestern University.

Quantification, including accounting, is often associated with objectivity, precision, rationality. It is increasingly also associated with accountability and efficiency. But why do we associate numbers with these qualities? What kinds of expertise and resources are needed in order to make credible numbers? What powers do we attribute to numbers and how do they interact with other kinds of authority, for example law? And in what ways have numbers changed how we engage in politics? In order to examine these questions, this focus group brings together international scholars from different fields such as accounting, anthropology, history, history of science, sociology, statistics to study the production and uses of numbers in different institutional contexts. Andrea Mennicken has joined the group from the Department of Accounting, LSE.

In March, the quantification focus group held a workshop entitled “Numbers from the Bottom Up”.  It was devoted to the study of the motives for making numbers, the authority attributed to numbers, the effects of numbers, and dynamics of their spread. From the LSE, Andrea Mennicken (Accounting), Mary Morgan (Economic History) and Michael Power (Accounting) participated.

Michael Power (Department of Accounting, LSE) examined the social life of accounting estimates and their transformation into stabilized, trusted organizational and regulatory facts via inscriptions and audit trails in the field of life assurance.

Andrea Mennicken (Department of Accounting, LSE) analysed attempts aimed at the quantification of decency in the prison service of England and Wales. She raised the question to which quantification, focusing in particular on instruments of rating and performance measurement, can be appealed to as a link connecting a multitude of actors and domains, including disparate values and rationalities, such as security, decency and economy.

Mary Morgan (Department of Economic History, LSE) investigated problems of aggregation and disaggregation in poverty measurements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She explored the disaggregation work that it takes to provide aggregated numbers, such as the Booth poverty index, with power and political traction in social policy and urban planning.

22 January 2014

Dr Stefano Cascino presents to the IASB

Dr Stefano Cascino (along with the other members of a research team awarded in 2012 with an ICAS-EFRAG grant), presented the findings from the research monograph titled “The Use of Information by Capital Providers”  to the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) on 22 January 2014.

The objective of the research monograph was to survey the evidence on the use of financial accounting information by capital providers of public interest entities across Europe. Based on this evidence, the report reaches four main conclusions.

First, the study documents that capital providers are heterogeneous and that their information needs differ systematically. Information can be used to affect firm behaviour and cash flows via contractual arrangements (i.e., the stewardship role of accounting) and to value claims to reporting firms (i.e., the valuation role of accounting). While both accounting objectives yield similar information needs in some circumstances, theoretical studies identify areas where both objectives produce divergent information demands.  Second, the findings provide clear evidence that capital providers use multiple information sources and that these information sources interact. Third, direct, experimental and archival evidence clearly documents that investors tend to ignore or “miss-evaluate” relevant information. For example, even apparently benign presentational differences can have significant effects on capital providers’ decisions. While these behavioural aspects are extremely pronounced for individual investors, even professional equity investors seem to base their decisions on sub-optimal information and decision rules. This, in turn, implies that information-processing costs are relevant even for sophisticated capital providers. Fourth, the report highlights that we know surprisingly little about the actual information usage by capital providers. Direct evidence is scarce and many inferences are based on archival data that reflect investor decision behaviour and not their information gathering activities. Collectively, these findings have far-reaching implications for the current discussions surrounding the conceptual framework for financial reporting.

Please click here for a link for the webcast for the IASB talk.

24 October 2013

Professor Alnoor Bhimani is co-speaker at the 2013 P.D. Leake Lecture

Professor Alnoor Bhimani spoke with LSE Professor Leslie Willcocks at the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales’s annual P.D.Leake Lecture held on 24 October 2013. Their lecture entitled “How is Digital Information Transforming Business?”drew a large number of participants from industry, academia, the public sector and the accounting profession. Professor Bhimani discussed the pace of data growth in the global economy identifying the types of new data in existence and the underlying reasons for the extreme growth rate. He noted that a number of large organisations deploy Big Data analytics to unravel hidden patterns and unknown correlations. Insights derived from Big Data analysis of largely unstructured data provides a basis for developing new core competencies which are difficult for rivals to replicate. This is particularly so for internet based companies where markets exhibit ‘winner takes all’ characteristics. Professor Bhimani noted the lopsided cost mix balance of web-enabled companies and how this instilled pricing approaches and costing issues which point to a need to rethink the roles of cost management techniques. The lecture covered issues relating to cloud based computing, outsourcing and offshoring and pointed to a variety of challenges for the finance profession.

Please click here for the link to the PD Leake lecture recording

23 August 2013

Two new professors join the Department

Professor Peter Pope

Professor Peter Pope joins us from Cass Business School, where he was a Professor of Accounting from 2011-2013, and prior to that he held professorships at Lancaster University Management School and Strathclyde Business School. He has also held appointments as a Visiting Professor at New York University’s Stern School, the University of California at Berkeley, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Chinese University Hong Kong, Monash University and Macquarie University.

Peter’s teaching and research interests are in the areas of capital markets, financial reporting and securities valuation. He has published widely in leading accounting journals such as The Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting Research, Review of Accounting Studies and Contemporary Accounting Research, as well as in many international finance journals. His current research interests focus on IFRS implementation in Europe, global equity market anomalies and fundamental valuation models, with particular reference to the links between financial statement factors, risk and equity returns. He was the Scientific Coordinator of the EU-Funded (€2.5m) INTACCT Research and Training Network 2007-2010, and he has been the recipient of numerous other research grants.

His research has received several prestigious awards, including the 2008 Best Paper Award 2004-2008 from the Financial Accounting and Reporting Section of the American Accounting Association. He was also the British Accounting & Finance Association Distinguished Academic of the Year in 2006.

Peter has considerable experience in consulting and advisory roles for major organisations, mainly in the investment management industry. He has also served as the Academic Coordinator of the Institute of Quantitative Investment Research (UK) since 1991.

He is a qualified accountant (FCMA) and was previously a member of the UK Accounting Standards Board Academic Panel. He is co-editor of the Journal of Business Finance and Accounting, a former Associate Editor of Contemporary Accounting Research, and has served on the editorial boards of other leading accounting journals such as Journal of Accounting Research.

Professor Bjorn Jorgensen

Prior to joining the Department of Accounting at LSE, Professor Bjorn Jorgensen was a member of the faculty at Harvard, Columbia and Colorado. Bjorn, however, has visited with LSE in 1997 when he taught AC420 in Michaelmas term.

Originally from Denmark, Bjorn has a keen interest in international accounting and auditing standards and their enforcement. Specifically, his recent research investigates the consequences of the recent adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in over 120 countries. For example, he has investigated whether financial reporting quality under IFRS is comparable to US accounting standards. In this area, he also studies how Canadian companies that are cross-listed in the US choose between IFRS and US accounting standards. Finally, he examines firms’ classification of interest within the statement of cash flows. Bjorn also has had the opportunity to study IFRS adoption from a practical perspective since he served as a Visiting Academic Scholar at the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Professor Jorgensen also does research on the role of risk, and on measuring, managing and controlling for risk. Specifically, he studies the incentives for, and consequences of, managers’ voluntary disclosures about risks. He also studies ways in which firms effectively communicate, and regulators identify, very infrequently occurring extreme losses. Overall, his research concludes that risk disclosures affect inherent as well as perceived riskiness. While risk is not traditionally addressed in accounting research, LSE has long been on the forefront of research in this area as evidenced by the wide-reaching work of the Department of Accounting’s Centre for the Analysis of Risk and Regulation (CARR).

Finally, Bjorn also studies how earnings management may lead to unusual patterns in accounting numbers. For example, firms appear more likely to report earnings per share of one pound than 99 pence. He documents that these patterns are more likely to arise in fiscal year earnings than in earning for the trailing four quarters. Bjorn’s work applies research methods from accounting, economics, finance, history and statistics.

Professor Jorgensen has taught both undergraduate, master and doctoral level courses and combines case-based learning with current research and regulatory developments. He is an effective teacher who received the Best MBA Core Teacher Award earlier this Summer. To date, Bjorn has advised over thirty doctoral students who now work at universities around the world including Alabama, Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, IESE, INSEAD, KAIST, Toronto, UCLA, Washington and Wharton, as well as the Federal Reserve Board and USAF.

31 July 2013

Dr Andrea Mennicken and Professor Wim Van der Stede nominated for LSE Student Union Teaching Awards

Two faculty members in the Department, Dr Andrea Mennicken and Professor Wim Van der Stede, were nominated for the LSE Student Union Teaching Awards 2013. The LSESU Teaching Awards are the only awards within the School where the nominations come entirely and directly from the students. To receive this nomination is an expression of the students’ gratitude for Andrea and Wim’s inspiring teaching, and recognises them as among the outstanding teachers within the School.

27 July 2013

New publication by Dr Matthew Hall: Harvard Business Review

24 June 2013

Professor Alnoor Bhimani speaks at the Fundación Ramón Areces

As part of the Ninth International Accounting Research Symposium held in Madrid over 24 – 28 June 2013, Professor Bhimani delivered a presentation on “Issues in global management accounting and control research”. The Symposium attracts young research scholars interested in different aspects of accounting research. Professor Bhimani spoke on different methodologies used in comparative management accounting research. He noted that the history of cross national accounting studies has followed the trajectory of business growth and the internationalisation of business practices over the past 60 years. Most prior studies assume a functionalist evolution of accounting across time and space but professor Bhimani noted that long standing perspectives from a variety of areas including sociology, anthropology and philosophy provide highly useful alternative avenues for undertaking comparative investigations. He noted also that digital technologies and recent institutional globalising forces have led to a need to understand the multiplicity of cultures people who use and produce accounting information operate in. This calls for a renewed consideration of how far existing research methods are appropriate for exploring cross cultural and international issues in the field. 

20 May 2013

Professor Wim A Van der Stede joins the AAA Task Force on Global Engagement

Professor Wim A Van der Stede joined the American Accounting Association (AAA) Task Force on Global Engagement corresponding with AAA President Professor Mary Barth’s focus on Global Engagement and Perspectives. The Global Engagement Task Force is charged with identifying ways for the AAA to enhance its ability to be global thought leaders in accounting. Professor Barth said, “Your experience and knowledge make you invaluable to the AAA in tackling this important issue. I need your insights!"

2 May 2013

LSE Teaching Blog: Law and Accounting Cafe - a novel approach to peer led MSc dissertation development

LSE’s Corporate Accountability (LL440) is delivered collaboratively by the School’s Department of Law and Department of Accounting. When faced with the challenge of how to make the most of a two hour session designed to help students with the long essays they write over the summer, two of the course’s teachers, Dr Yasmine Chahed and Professor Mike Power, decided to try something new in 2011. ‘The plan was not to offer the typical essay workshop, but to create a forum in which students had to give each other feedback on their long essay plans … to address relevant questions in connection with the essays that they were actually writing,’ says Dr Chahed.

To read the full article on the LSE Teaching Blog, please click here

4 April 2013

Dr Gerben Bakker wins prestigious Ralph Gomory prize

Dr Gerben Bakker, senior lecturer in economic history and accounting, has won the Ralph Gomory Prize at the 2013 Business History Conference (BHC) in the United States.

The $5,000 prize, which is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, was awarded by the BHC for the best article published in 2011 and 2012 that examines the impact of business enterprise on the economic conditions of the countries in which they operate.

The prize was awarded for Dr Bakker’s article Trading facts: Arrow’s fundamental paradox and the origins of global news networks, published in Peter Putnis, Chandrika Kaul and Juergen Wilke (eds) International communication and global news networks: historical perspectives (Hampton Press/International Association for Media and Communication Research, 2011).

Dr Bakker said: ‘I’m very happy; this is the most prestigious (and largest!) prize I've ever won.

25 January 2013

LSE Professor awarded honorary doctorate

Professor Michael Power of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) has been awarded an honorary doctorate by Uppsala University in Sweden. 

Professor Power, a professor of accounting and director of the Centre for the Analysis of Risk and Regulation (CARR), was only one of two academics being awarded an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Social Sciences. He gave an address to the Faculty and was presented with the award at the University’s graduation ceremony for all doctorates and honorary doctorates on Friday 25 January.

Michael Power said: “It is a great honour to receive this recognition from such a distinguished university. I very much enjoyed both my visit to Uppsala and the ceremony”.

On announcing the awards, the University wrote: “In 1997, Michael Power published the book The Audit Society: rituals of verification, a book that has been widely read internationally and inspired elaborative studies. His research has also been of significance in the public debate, where reference is commonly made to ‘the audit society’. In his pioneering studies, Michael Power uncovered the development of a society not only characterized by numerous audits, but where operations are also designed with an eye to being audited, evaluated, and revised.

“Power has also done significant research work on the development and standardisation of financial regulation and reporting and their importance in the organization and governance of companies and public activities. In his latest book, Organized Uncertainty: designing a world of risk management, Power analyses the explosive growth in recent years of ‘risk management’. He shows that this growth has less to do with actual dangers and potentials than might be thought, and more to do with the prestige and legitimacy of organisations.”

Ends

28 January 2013

8 November 2012   

'Risk Culture in Financial Organisations: an interim report'

This report which was published by the Centre for the of Analysis of Risk and Regulation (CARR) and the University of Plymouth, explores the issue of how financial institutions are increasingly investing in programmes to understand and manage their risk cultures. Despite near universal agreement that the organisational risk culture of banks and other financial institutions (BOFIs) played a major role in the global financial crisis this report has found that there is still no clear consensus on how such risk cultures can be effectively managed.

6 November 2012

Department of Accounting hosts Public lecture - "Accounting Harmonisation and Global Economic Consequences"

The Department of Accounting organised an LSE public lecture by Hans Hoogervorst, Chairman of the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), and former Chairman of the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets. His biography can be viewed here. The podcast and video are available here.

20-21 October 2012 

Graduate Weekend in Cambridge: 20-21 October 2012

The Department of Accounting held its fifth Graduate Weekend for postgraduate students of the Diploma in Accounting and Finance, MSc Accounting and Finance, MSc Accounting, Organisations and Institutions, MSc Law and Accounting and PhD in Accounting programmes. This year it was held at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Cambridge, and was attended by around 140 students, as well as faculty and staff. It kicked off with a presentation and Q & A session entitled ‘Perspectives on employment opportunities within professional services’ by Rabiya Qadeer who is a Financial Services Advisory Manager at Ernst and Young LLP. Rabiya is also an alum of the LSE MSc Law and Accounting programme. This was followed by a fun and challenging team activity led by Eventus. Students were then free to explore Cambridge at their own leisure, before gathering for dinner at the hotel. After dinner, everyone let their hair down at a nearby bar/nightclub. On Sunday, students had the opportunity to take a private open-top bus tour around Cambridge before returning to LSE in the afternoon. Fun was had by all, as shown by the photographic evidence!    

18 October 2012

Feedback innovations and practices

The Department of Accounting has introduced over recent years a range of formative and summative feedback initiatives across both undergraduate and postgraduate courses that aim to enable a more continuous and on-going process of feedback on students’ performance. Some of these practices have been featured in the LSE Teaching Blog and can be viewed here.

11 October 2012

Professor Alnoor Bhimani delivers keynote speech at the UK-China Business Finance Forum at House of Lords

Professor Alnoor Bhimani spoke on ‘Globalisation and Technological Change: Implications for Accounting’ in a keynote address at the UK-China Business Finance Forum held at the House of Lords on 11 October 2012. He discussed some key implications of global economic trends and the rise of digitised technologies in relation to China’s economic performance and entrepreneurial potential. Professor Bhimani highlighted the changing role of accounting information in a technologically more grounded world and the risks, challenges and opportunities presented for China. He identified dimensions of the growing appetite for accountability, transparency and governance and their impact on accounting practices and financial controls. He commented on the premise on which successful Chinese internet sites such as Baidu.com, sina.com, taobao.com and sohu.com as well a top social media platforms such as qq.com, weibo.com and renren.com have managed to mobilise a presence among China’s half a billion plus internet users.  This he indicated presents the possibility of an evolving emergent array of business models which will rely on the effective analysis of a fast expanding information volume base and extreme levels of data complexity. Professor Bhimani discussed how business decision makers and consumers are co-creating products and the implications for financial and quantitative information analysis. He warned of the dangers of being reactive rather than proactive in the design of business information systems in ‘prosumer’ contexts where consumers are also producers and revenue generation and expenses arise from a diversity of sources.  He commented on the need for new modes of reflecting on information to sculpt continuously evolving business architectures in the search for value creation and economic growth.

1 October 2012 

The Department Welcomes Visiting Professor Peter Holgate

Peter Holgate, Senior Accounting Technical Partner of PricewaterhouseCoopers UK, will be taking up a three year position as a Visiting Professor from October 2012.

As PwC’s Senior Accounting Technical Partner, Peter Holgate heads a team of 40 professionals. He and the team are principally concerned with advising on technical accounting matters, including both UK GAAP and international accounting standards. 

He trained with a four partner firm in Leeds, worked in London and Nairobi as an auditor, and then moved into industry for three years.  In 1981 he joined the staff of the UK Accounting Standards Committee, and from 1984 to 1986 was Secretary of that committee.  In 1986, he joined the London accounting technical department of PricewaterhouseCoopers and was appointed a partner in the firm in 1990. 

He is a principal author of the Firm’s Manual of Accounting – UK GAAP and the Manual of Accounting – IFRS for the UK. He is sole author of Accounting principles for lawyers(CUP, 2006) and joint author of Accounting principles for non-executive directors (CUP, 2008).  He is the author of numerous articles in the professional press and a contributor to a number of books and other publications. He speaks frequently on accounting subjects at seminars and conferences.

Peter is a fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) and holds a Master’s degree in management and administration from the University of Bradford Management Centre.

Peter was appointed a member of the FRC's Urgent Issues Task Force in 1994.  He is a member of the advisory board of the ICAEW’s Financial Reporting Faculty. From 2006 to 2012 he was Chairman of the ICAEW’s Research Advisory Board.

In recent years, Peter has acted as Expert Witness on accounting matters in a number of tax cases , in which context he has been described as “a chartered accountant of the highest standing”.

6 September 2012

Professor Richard Macve presents plenary session of the BAFA South West Regional Group

Professor Richard Macve presented the opening plenary session in Aberystwyth University on 6th September 2012 entitled: ‘Accounting and Auditing from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern China: a “Reduced” History’. To view the presentation, please click here.

30 August 2012 

Professor Richard Macve participats in discussion panels at the American Accounting Association Annual Meeting

Professor Richard Macve participated in three discussion panels at the American Accounting Association (AAA) Annual Meeting in Washington DC in August 2012 as well as presenting a joint paper on China’s modernisation of its auditing profession with Dr Shuwen Deng of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. To view the presentation, please click here .

7 August 2012

Visiting Professor Wayne Landsman receives 2012 AAA Literature Award

Visiting Professor Wayne Landsman has received the 2012 American Accounting Association (AAA) Notable Contributions to Accounting Literature Award for his 2008 article “International Accounting Standards and Accounting Quality” (with M. Barth and M. Lang). He was honoured at the AAA Annual Meeting in Washington DC.