AICPA Honors Four Professors for Contributions to Accounting Literature

The American Institute of CPAs (AICPA) has awarded four professors with the AICPA’s 2018 Notable Contributions to Accounting Literature Award. The winners, listed below in alphabetical order, were honored for their paper “Do the FASB Standards Add Shareholder Value?”, which was published in The Accounting Review:

Urooj Khan, Associate Professor of Business at Columbia University
Bin Li, Assistant Professor at the Naveen Jindal School of Management, University of Texas at Dallas
Shivaram Rajgopal, the Roy Bernard Kester and T.W. Byrnes Professor of Accounting and Auditing at Columbia University
Mohan Venkatachalam, RJ Reynolds Professor of Business Administration at Fuqua School of Business, Duke University

The award was presented by Susan Wolcott at the American Accounting Association Annual Meeting. In addition to the award, the recipients received $2,500. The Notable Contributions to Accounting Literature Award is given annually to work which has withstood a rigorous process of screening and scrutiny based on certain criteria, such as originality, breadth of potential interest, soundness of methodology and potential impact on accounting education.

“The subject of this paper is unique in the field of accounting literature. Academics, as well as practitioners, regulators and standard setters themselves will all benefit from better understanding the impact of accounting standards upon stock performance,” Steve Matzke, director, faculty & university initiatives at the Association of International Professional Accountants. “For these reasons, these four professors are extremely deserving of this award.”

“Do the FASB Standards Add Shareholder Value?” evaluated the impact of standards passed by the FASB from 1973-2009 as reflected by the stock returns of firms affected by those standards. To make the assessment, they did comparisons between those impacted and those who were not impacted. The study found that the large majority of FASB standards has with very minimal shareholder reaction to their issuance, with only 19-of-138 of standards increasing shareholder value, while 15-of-138 standards

Were associated with decreasing shareholder value.

“By evaluation the impact of FASB’s standard setting, the authors are helping to fill a void that existed in accounting literature,” added Matzke.

Nominations of outstanding articles, books, monographs, AICPA-sponsored research studies, or accounting literature appearing in other types of publications will be accepted through 11:59 pm Eastern Time on January 31, 2019.