Booth Prof. Honored with Distinguished Award

Christian Leuz, Joseph Sondheimer Professor of International Economics, Finance and Accounting at the Booth School of Business, is one of three recipients of the 2014 Distinguished Contribution to Accounting Literature Award.

Presented by the American Accounting Association for research, the award is given to those who have had a significant impact across the discipline for a period of at least five years. Leuz and his co-authors, were honored for their paper, “Earnings Management and Investor Protection: An International Comparison,” published in 2003 in the Journal of Financial Economics.

“The award is a big honor, and it feels great that other researchers in the profession recognize our work with this award. I am very thankful for that,” Leuz said.

The researchers compared the quality of financial reporting using various opacity and earnings management measures across 31 countries, and found that countries with more dispersed ownership, strong investor protection and large stock markets are less likely to have opaque and manipulated earnings reports.

“The award is also special because the paper was somewhat controversial when we wrote it,” Leuz said. Right after Enron and the accounting scandals in the U.S., many people were skeptical about the results and the way we measure the opacity of reported numbers across countries. But over time the paper’s insights have been replicated and applied in many other papers and settings.”

regions: Chicago

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