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Texas McCombs Department of Accounting Facts

June 11, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Can you guess what year the first accounting course was offered at UT? Or when the first accounting PhD degree was conferred? How about the year we hired our first tenure-track female faculty member? We’ll take you through a short history of the Department of Accounting at The University of Texas at Austin.

Department of Accounting Facts

spurgeon bell

Spurgeon Bell was Dean of the School of Business Administration from 1922-1925.

1912: Spurgeon Bell stands before 20 students in UT’s first accounting class, the Theory and Practice of Accounting.

1928: George Newlove is the first accounting faculty member to receive a distinguished professorship, funded by discovery of oil on university land in 1923.

1934: The first PhD in Accounting at the College of Business Administration is awarded to Lloyd Raisty.

1939: For the first, but not the last, time, accounting classes are populated with more women than men (due to WWII enlistment in the armed forces).

1947: The Department of Accounting is one of five departments created in the College of Business Administration.

1948: The Master in Professional Accounting program is established.

anna fowler

Anna Fowler taught at UT from 1977-2004.

1957: Luzine Bickman is the first Black student to be initiated into the Theta Chapter, a UT fraternal accounting organization.

1958: With nine inaugural members, the Department of Accounting’s Advisory Council is established.

1962: The new Business Administration Economics Building opens (now known as CBA).

1977: Anna Fowler is the first female, tenure-track professor hired by the Department.

1985: The five-year integrated approach to the MPA is introduced, allowing McCombs freshmen and sophomores to begin working on their masters in accounting while still in undergrad.

rowland atiase

Rowland Atiase has been a faculty member since 1987.

1987: Rowland Atiase is the first Black, tenure-track professor hired by the Department.

1994: Texas McCombs’ Department of Accounting is ranked #1 in Public Accounting Report’s survey for the first time.

2002: The ECON-MPA program, which allows UT economics students to get a head start on MPA coursework during their senior year, is created.

2012: The Department of Accounting celebrates its 100 year anniversary!

2019: The MPA Program adopts a proposal requiring every course within the program to include content on data analytics.

As you explore your future in accounting, we hope you discovered  some new and useful information on the Department of Accounting. Reach out to us or visit our website to learn more!

 

Nathan Sharp and Family

The Takeaway: An Interview With PhD Alum Nathan Sharp

April 2, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Nathan Sharp coauthored “Inside the ‘Black Box’ of Sell-Side Financial Analysts” with Lawrence Brown, Andrew Call, and our very own Department Chair, Michael Clement. The FARS (AAA) recently selected that paper as the best financial accounting paper published in the last five years. Nate sat down and chatted with us about life post-Texas McCombs, working at Texas A&M, researching with Michael Clement, and much more. He is pictured with his wife (Holly), daughters (Kennedy, London, and Kate), and sons (Jackson and Austin) in the fall of 2018.

TELL US A LITTLE ABOUT YOURSELF.
I spent much of the early part of my life in Utah, but I got to Texas as fast as I could. Next summer will mark 17 years since I moved to Texas. My wife and I have five children, and my family is the center of my world. After I finished my PhD at UT, I started my career as a faculty member in the Mays Business School at Texas A&M University. Coming to Texas A&M was one of the best decisions of my life. My family and I have been so happy to stay in Texas, and I have been blessed with great colleagues and great students at Texas A&M.

HOW DID THE UT DOCTORAL PROGRAM SHAPE YOU TO BE THE PROFESSOR YOU ARE TODAY?
I have thought often of the tremendous debt of gratitude I owe to the faculty at UT-Austin. I was so fortunate to begin my journey into accounting academia at a place where I could be taught and mentored by many of the top scholars in our field. UT’s accounting faculty has a depth and breadth that is unmatched by any other program I know of. The foundations of my career were laid in the PhD program at Texas McCombs, and any successes I’ve had in my career since then trace back to the way UT’s PhD program shaped me.

CAN YOU TELL US MORE ABOUT YOUR RESEARCH PAPER “INSIDE THE ‘BLACK BOX’ OF SELL-SIDE FINANCIAL ANALYSTS”?
In many ways, this was a ground-breaking paper in the analyst literature. We were the first scholars to survey sell-side financial analysts to gain detailed insights into the inputs and incentives that influence their research. Using a survey allowed us to ask questions that no other research paper had asked before. Our team of researchers complemented each other very well, and we had a lot of fun working together on this paper and seeing our idea come to fruition. In 2016, 0ur paper became the most highly cited paper in the Journal of Accounting Research among all papers published in that journal during the preceding eight years. One of our coauthors had a relative who worked in finance at a Fortune 100 company, and I still remember the day he reached out to share that the CFO of his company had discovered our paper on SSRN and shared it with the entire finance team at the company. It was neat to see that our paper was making an impact not only within but also outside academia. Our study also received a lot of attention in the popular press; journalists at The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, CNBC, Yahoo! Finance, and The Economist wrote stories about our paper.

YOU HAVE WORKED WITH MICHAEL CLEMENT ON OTHER PAPERS BESIDES THIS ONE — WHAT IS IT LIKE WORKING WITH HIM?
Michael is the type of colleague and coauthor everyone wants to find. I think part of what makes Michael so unique is that he brings together incredible institutional knowledge and experience with one of the top scholarly backgrounds in the country in the areas in which he researches. That is a rare combination. We followed up our sell-side analyst study with research on buy-side analysts, which was published in 2016 in the Journal of Accounting and Economics. Our latest study on investor relations officers is forthcoming in 2019 in the Journal of Accounting and Economics. These three papers are a trilogy of studies that complement each other and provide unprecedented, rich detail about each of these important participants in our capital markets. Frankly, no other team could have completed these three papers without Michael. He brought so much to the table that was invaluable for these projects. I have never had more fun working on research, and I have never learned more than I did through the trilogy of papers we published together. Michael has been the mentor of a lifetime.

WHAT’S NEXT, NATE?
I am enjoying researching and teaching more than ever. The awesome thing about this career is that there are always new challenges, new research ideas, and new frontiers. I hope to follow in Michael’s footsteps by making a positive impact on students and colleagues in our field for many years to come.

Brian White

Meet Brian White, Associate Professor at Texas McCombs

March 21, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Brian White is a member of our Department of Accounting faculty and was recently promoted to Associate Professor, effective September 1, 2018. He teaches some of the accounting MBA courses here at Texas McCombs, so you may see him in some of your electives in the near future!

WHERE DO YOU CALL HOME?
Ann Arbor, Michigan is where I was born and lived for most of my childhood. However, my wife’s hometown of Liverpool, England is my adopted hometown. I lived in Liverpool for ten years, our three kids were born there, and we go back at least two or three times every year.

WHERE DID YOU ATTEND SCHOOL?
I received a BS in Foreign Service from Georgetown (I originally planned to pursue a career as a diplomat), an MS in African Studies from University of Edinburgh, an MBA from Manchester Business School, and a PhD in Accountancy from University of Illinois

WHY DID YOU CHOOSE TO STUDY ACCOUNTING?
Necessity is the mother of invention. My wife and I bought her family business—a small chain of retail stores based in Liverpool—from her grandparents when we were both 24 years old. She had grown up in the business and I had worked as a retail manager in high school and college, but neither of us had any experience running a business. We divided up the duties, and accounting was one of mine. I quickly decided that I needed some more training, so I applied to the evening MBA program at Manchester Business School. While I was there, I focused on accounting and finance because it was so relevant to what I was doing every day at work: tracking and reporting revenues and expenses, designing compensation plans for our employees, managing the annual audit (which was required for nearly all UK companies back then), etc. I also found I was pretty good at accounting, and it was interesting. Ultimately, I ended up becoming a CPA. When I decided to pursue an academic career, a PhD in accounting was the natural choice.

WHY DID YOU CHOOSE TO WORK AT UT?
The combination of our incredible students, world-class faculty, and the city of Austin made it a very easy choice.

WHAT CLASSES DO YOU CURRENTLY TEACH?
I teach the core financial accounting class to all of our incoming full-time MBA students. I also teach the same course in our Houston MBA program. Next fall, I’m looking forward to teaching the PhD seminar on behavioral research in accounting for the first time.

FAVORITE PUBLICATION THAT YOU’VE WRITTEN?
That’s like asking me to choose between my children! If I have to choose, I will go with a paper that I published with Shana Clor-Proell (from TCU) and my Texas McCombs colleague Lisa Koonce. The paper is titled, “How do experienced users evaluate hybrid financial instruments?” It was published in the Journal of Accounting Research in 2016. Hybrids—financial instruments that have characteristics of both debt and equity—are a tricky issue in accounting because it is difficult to know how to classify them on the balance sheet. In the paper, we find that experienced finance professionals rely primarily on disclosed features of hybrid financial instruments, rather than their classification, suggesting that accounting standard setters may want to focus on disclosure. It’s been a fun paper in part because we have had the opportunity to discuss it with board members at the FASB and IASB.

ON THE OTHER HAND… FAVORITE PUBLICATION THAT YOU’VE READ?
That’s a tough one too! I’m going to go with Jeffrey Hales’ 2007 paper, “Directional preferences, information processing, and investors’ forecasts of earnings,” published in the Journal of Accounting Research. That was the paper that convinced me I wanted to do behavioral research in financial accounting. Jeff shows that simply holding stock in a company can change investors’ beliefs about the company’s future performance via a cognitive process known as motivated reasoning.

WHAT IS SOMETHING THAT MANY PEOPLE DO NOT KNOW ABOUT YOU?
I played the bass guitar in a number of different bands in high school and college. Maybe even more unbelievable is that at the same time I had long, curly hair!

U.S. News and World Report 2020 Rankings

Department of Accounting ranked No. 1 by U.S. News

March 14, 2019 / / 0 Comments

U.S. News and World Report came out this week with its annual Best Business School rankings, and the Department of Accounting at Texas McCombs topped the list at No. 1 for the 13th straight year!

We are very fortunate to have such an phenomenal group of students, faculty, staff, and alumni who continue to make the Department of Accounting the best in the world.  Read the summary of the rankings below, including the Texas McCombs MBA program coming in at No. 19, or on Texas McCombs News.

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The Texas McCombs MBA hit No. 19 for the full-time MBA and No. 8 for working professionals. Three of the school’s business specialties were among the ranking’s top 10.

Landing at No. 19, the Texas McCombs Full-Time MBA Program maintained its venerable top-20 position in the 2020 edition of U.S. News & World Report ’s survey of the nation’s best graduate schools of business.

The Texas McCombs MBA has counted itself among the top 20 programs in 27 of the past 28 years. Among public schools, McCombs and the University of North Carolina tied for fifth place, behind the University of California, Berkeley (6, tied), University of Michigan (10), University of Virginia (12, tied), and UCLA (16).

Specialty Rankings

The U.S. News ranking also considers strengths in subject areas. Three McCombs business specialties landed in the top 10:

• Accounting: No. 1 (13th year in a row and 27th year in a row among the top five)
• Information Systems: No. 4 (27th year straight in the top five)
• Entrepreneurship: No. 10 (23rd consecutive year in the top 10)

Working Professional MBA Takes 8th

In the best part-time MBA rankings, McCombs placed at No. 8. The working professional MBA programs at McCombs, which include the Texas Evening MBA, the Texas MBA at Houston, and the Texas MBA at Dallas/Fort Worth, have held top 10 status for the past 10 years.

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