Research

01 Promises

An appointment is not
the whole story.

Who joins matters. So does where the seat sits. My sustainability research looks beyond announcements to the changes they represent, from board and executive appointments to environmental hiring. Work on biodiversity credits asks where comparability itself breaks down.

Records readJob postings, and board and executive appointments.

Commitment is one thing a disclosure can obscure. Financial activity is another.

02 Money

Read what the numbers
leave out.

A subsidiary list does not tell us how a tax haven is used. Financial ratios do not capture every sign of cash pressure. With Lillian Mills, I use language in corporate filings to construct measures of both and examine their relation to tax avoidance.

Records readThe language of corporate filings.

Those choices are made by people. Their histories belong in the explanation.

03 Judgment

The person behind
the decision.

Professional judgment does not begin at the office door. I study how military experience relates to CEOs’ tax choices, how political donations reveal differences in analyst behavior, and how exposure to a deadly hurricane changes forecasts.

Records readService histories, political donations and storm tracks.

Personal history also matters when deciding whom to trust with other people’s money.

04 Gatekeepers

Who gets trusted.
Who gets blamed.

Prior criminal records and conditions at career entry can tell us something about later professional conduct. But a complaint is not a neutral measure of misconduct. My work on immigration concerns examines how the social climate affects complaints against minority financial advisors.

Records readAdvisor licensing records, complaints and career start dates.

The people who check financial information are also changing how they work.

05 AI

A new tool changes the work.

AI is part of my research toolkit. It is also something I study. With Michael Shen, I examine how AI adoption changes audit firms’ hiring and skill requirements. Offices that adopt AI hire more people, not fewer. AI adoption also improves audit quality.

Records readAudit office hiring records.

Best Archival Paper Award
2021 AAA Auditing Midyear Meeting

More powerful tools make checking the underlying evidence more important.

06 Evidence

The evidence needs checking too.

The measurement problem also reaches our own datasets. I examine analyst identifiers in I/B/E/S and build tools for consistent industry classification. As a member of the Management Science Reproducibility Collaboration, I also contribute to checking whether published research can be reproduced.

Records readI/B/E/S identifiers, industry codes and published replication files.

All 15 publications