Master in Professional Accounting Admissions Blog

Insider Information for Prospective Texas McCombs MPA Students

Tag: Jeff Hales

REGISTER: Attend the Virtual MPA Faculty Open House

Join us virtually on March 23 for the Master in Professional Accounting Faculty Open House as members of the MPA faculty will be present to speak about the courses they teach, the curriculum taught within the program, and career opportunities in their areas of expertise.

March 23 from 5:00 – 7:00 p.m. CT (virtual)

Please feel free to join the Faculty Open House for all two hours or you can join during the time(s) you’d like to hear from certain professors (see below).

Professors Who Will Be Present from 5:00 – 6:00 p.m. CT

Patrick Badolato
Financial Statement Analysis Course and Investment Banking/Consulting Topics

Patrick Badolato’s teaching expertise focuses on Financial Statement Analysis, a case-based class that moves away from generic ratios and metrics and towards critical thinking in an effort to use an array of financial information to understand the past and form well-motivated predictions for the future; Financial Accounting, a class that emphasizes the importance of accounting’s thoughtful and logical representation of business events; and Accounting Concepts and Research, a class that offers a deep dive into the business reasons and economic motivations behind accounting standards.

Jeff Johanns
Audit/Assurance and Its Importance in Financial Reporting

Jeff Johanns is an Associate Professor of Instruction in the McCombs School of Business at UT Austin. He is a former U.S. Assurance Risk Management Leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and a Certified Public Accountant licensed in Texas with more than 30 years of experience in public accounting and the private industry. His clients at PwC ranged in size from Fortune 500 public companies to private start-ups.

Donna Johnston-Blair
Corporate Tax Course and Building a Portfolio of Tax Knowledge

Donna Johnston-Blair started her career at Arthur Andersen (in both Toronto and Denver) as audit staff and eventually became a tax manager. She also worked at Deloitte and Storage Technology Corporation before starting her own consulting practice and ultimately becoming a professor. She has taught across the United States and has been at McCombs since 2013. Donna was named a Texas Ten professor of the year in 2018.

Professors Who Will Be Present from 6:00 – 7:00 p.m. CT

Jeff Hales
Environmental, Social, and Governance Course

Jeff Hales has taught financial accounting at all levels, and his research has appeared in multiple journals, including The Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Accounting and Economics, and more. He is currently an editor at Contemporary Accounting Research and an editorial board member of The Accounting Review and Accounting, Organizations and Society. He also serves as Chair of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, is a member of the Climate Disclosure Standards Board, and is a member of both the Financial Accounting Standard Board’s Financial Accounting Standards Advisory Council and the UK Financial Reporting Council’s Future of Corporate Reporting Advisory Group.

Nick Hallman
Analytics Course

Nick Hallman is an Associate Professor at the McCombs School of Business with a focus in audit. He received his PhD from the University of Missouri-Columbia and is a member of the editorial board for both The Accounting Review and Auditing: A Journal of Practice and Theory. This fall, he will teaching a data analytics course at UT Austin tailored specifically for Master in Professional Accounting students.

Mallary Tenore
Writing Skills Course

Mallary Tenore is a lecturer at The University of Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism. She’s also the Associate Director of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at UT Austin. In 2013, she was named one of the top 50 female innovators in digital journalism. Mallary’s articles and essays have been published in The Washington Post, The Dallas Morning News, Austin Moms Blog and more. She will teaching a writing skills course for Master in Professional Accounting students in the fall of 2022.

Sign up to meet these professors and explore the classes you can take as an MPA students! We’ll see you on March 23!

Three Steps to Better Investing

Advice on selecting mutual funds, listening to CEOs, and considering climate change, courtesy of Texas McCombs research, including our very own accounting professor Jeff Hales.

Better Investing
If you’re looking to make better investment decisions, it’s a good idea to listen to the experts. And who’s more of an expert than a business researcher who studies investing and the stock market.

With that in mind, consider applying these practical research findings from Texas McCombs to your investments:

Seek low taxes on mutual funds. A study by finance professor Clemens Sialm showed that funds with lower tax burdens had higher-than-average returns. That’s why Sialm urges fund shoppers to look beyond past performance and check out taxes as well. “You have to dig deeper in the prospectus, but the information is there,” he says. Research websites such as Morningstar can help. They list the taxable distributions along with the performance of a fund.

Bet on big-talking CEOs. When executives use extreme language on quarterly earnings calls — words such as “astonishing,” “incredible,” and “exceptional” — it can benefit capital markets, according to research from accounting professor Jeff Hales. For executives who speak in superlatives, their words can produce a stronger reaction in stock prices, increased trading volume, and adjusted analyst forecasts. CEO language can even foreshadow a company’s future earnings.

Read the entire article on Big Ideas.