Accounting
AICPA Recognizes Three Academics During AAA Conference
The Distinguished Achievement in Accounting Education Award honors full-time college accounting educators who excel in teaching and have achieved national prominence in the accounting profession.
Aug. 20, 2019
The American Institute of CPAs (AICPA) recognized three outstanding academics for their teaching and research during the annual American Accounting Association annual meeting in San Francisco.
Stephen Moehrle, a professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, is the recipient of the 2019 AICPA Distinguished Achievement in Accounting Education Award, while Panos N. Patatoukas and Yaniv Konchitchki, professors at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, share the 2019 Notable Contributions to Accounting Literature Award.
The Distinguished Achievement in Accounting Education Award honors full-time college accounting educators who excel in teaching and have achieved national prominence in the accounting profession.
“Throughout his career, Professor Moehrle has exhibited a commitment to educating students and practitioners on best practices and standards for accounting,” said Steve Matzke, director, faculty & university initiatives at the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants. “He brings an engaging style to the classroom that encourages students while at the same time generates scholarly articles and practical guides to advance the thinking around and practice of the profession.”
Moehrle has an extensive list of teaching and service awards and publications during his nearly 30 years teaching accounting. He is best known for some of his more recent work, including co-authoring the article “The CPA Profession: Opportunities, Responsibilities, and Services,” which was published by the AICPA, and the monograph “Understanding Academic Accounting Regulation Research: Before and After Sarbanes-Oxley. Studies in the Development of Academic Thought.”
The Notable Contributions to Accounting Literature Award is given annually to work that 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.
Patatoukas and Konchitchki earned this recognition for their coauthored papers “Accounting earnings and gross domestic product,” which was published in the Journal of Accounting and Economics and “Taking the Pulse of the Real Economy Using Financial Statement Analysis: Implications for Macro Forecasting and Stock Valuation,” published in The Accounting Review.
The two researchers evaluated aggregate accounting earnings from the 100 largest companies to determine how such data could be used to forecast GDP, as well as annual stock market returns. Their efforts uncovered that the financial statement analysis offer macroeconomic researchers and forecasters another tool for gauging the real economy.
“These two papers offer insight into how one can estimate larger economic activity by evaluating the accounting earnings of the nation’s largest companies,” said Matzke. “Their work provides new opportunities for economic forecasters to use the work of accountants to better predict Gross Domestic Product growth.”
This is the second time Patatoukas has won the award, having previously earned it in 2017.