Organising Committee
- Dr Demetris Christodoulou (General Convenor)
- Dr Richard Gerlach (Quantitative Research Convenor)
- Dr Maurice Peat (Financial Analysis Convenor)
Advisory Board
International Steering Committee
- Prof Mike Bradbury, Massey (New Zealand)
- Prof Stuart McLeay, Bangor (United Kingdom)
- Prof Stephen Penman, Columbia (United States)
Faculty Member Details
Dr Neal Arthur's current research areas are corporate governance and corporate regulation. In particular, his research has examined the economic determinants of corporate board composition and leadership, including the interaction between takeover markets and board composition as well as firm specific determinants of board composition and leadership. He is currently doing research on directors' liability and 'safe harbour' rules and the relationship between corporate governance and earnings management. He has contributed articles to Australian Journal of Management, Australian Accounting Review, Charter, Corporate Governance and the Journal of Corporate Finance. In addition, he is the co-author of the book Accounting for Corporate Combinations and Associations.
Prof Robert Bartels is Emeritus Professor in the Discipline of Operations Management and Econometrics. He has published widely in international academic journals, including the Journal of Econometrics, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the American Statistician, and the Review of Economics and Statistics. Bob has held various academic management positions at the University of Sydney, including Head of the School of Business and Head of the School of Economic and Political Science. In addition to his research interests, Bob has over 25 years consulting experience applying econometric and statistical methods to problems in business and government, including demand studies in the energy sector, methods for trade practices cases, efficiency analysis for benchmarking, and the analysis of micro-level sales data.
Dr Demetris Christodoulou has a multidisciplinary background with training in economics, econometrics,finance and accounting. He completed his PhD thesis in 2005 at the Athens University of Economics and Business whilst holding a fellowship at the Bangor University at Wales, and a visiting position at the University of Valencia. During 2000-2004 he was a full-time researcher in the European Commission research network ‘HARMONIA’, that investigated the harmonisation and standardisation of financial reporting between the EU member states. He is now an affiliated faculty member to the successor research network INTACCT (2007-2010), which examines the European IFRS revolution and issues related to compliance, market consequences and policy lessons. His research interests include the statistical properties of accounting data and the econometrics of empirical accounting research. Demetris is the director of MEAFA.
Prof Graeme Dean is co-editor of the Sydney-based accounting journal Abacus, acknowledged as one of the world's leading international accounting journals. Over a period of thirty years, Graeme's research has comprised three main areas: an analysis of corporate failures and the role of accounting in those failures as well as an analysis of optimal distributions in liquidations, public sector accounting and accounting for inflation. His latest major work (with Frank Clarke and Kyle Oliver), Corporate collapse: Accounting regulatory, and ethical failure, Cambridge University Press (2007), led to the award of a 2000 ARC Large Grant for further pursuit of inquiry into the accounting, legal and econometric issues related to corporate groups and corporate group liquidations.
Dr Nicolas de Roos received his PhD from Yale University in 2001 and joined the Faculty in 2003. His primary areas of research are in industrial organisation and applied microeconomics, with an emphasis on empirical and structural work. Particular research interests include the determinants of petrol prices and price cycles in Australia, the dynamics of Australian domestic airfares, cartel behaviour in dynamic environments, and the elicitation of attitudes toward risk from experimental data.
Dr Timothy Fisher received his PhD in Economics from the University of British Columbia in 1989. After working for the Bank of Canada and Wilfrid Laurier University, he joined the University of Sydney as Associate Professor of Economics in 2004. His primary area of research is law and economics, with a particular interest in commercial bankruptcy. He is the primary investigator on a three-year research grant, recently awarded by the Australian Research Council, on the topic of financial reorganization in Australia. His other recent research investigates residential real estate prices and the determinants of tenure and promotion in North American and Australian Economics departments.
Dr Richard Gerlach research interests lie mainly in financial econometrics and time series. His methodological work has concerned developing computationally intensive Bayesian methods for inference, diagnosis and model comparison for time series models, with recent focus on nonlinear threshold heteroskedastic models and volatility forecasting. His applied work has involved assessing asymmetry in major international stock markets, in response to local and exogenous factors, stock selection for financial investment using logit models, option pricing and hedging involving barriers etc. His research papers have been published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Journal of Time Series Analysis, the International Journal of Forecasting and others.
Prof David Johnstone's research interests are in the multi-disciplinary foundations of financial and statistical models of inference and decision making. His PhD was on the topic of significance tests and their logical foundations, and recent research is in probability forecasts, and the economic and statistical evaluation of probability forecasts. Part of this work overlaps with theory in probabilistic decision making in gambling and the evaluation of probability forecasts relative to market prices (the probabilities implicit in betting market odds). His most recent research is on analogies between decision rules in betting and the rules used to fit probability forecasting models to data.
Prof Stewart Jones research interests cover such topics as credit risk and corporate distress analysis, accounting theory, standard setting, international standards harmonization, financial analysis and research methodology (with a particular interest in discrete choice modelling and stated preference experiments). Over the past decade he has published over seventy scholarly research pieces in financial reporting/accounting. His industry experience includes project management for the Australian Accounting Research Foundation and as a financial analyst for such organisations as the Australian Securities and Investment Commission.
Dr Hajime Katayama is an applied econometrician who works in a range of fields in economics, including environmental economics, international trade, labour economics, and health economics. He received his PhD in Economics from Pennsylvania State University in 2003. Recently, he has been working on environmental economics. In particular, he is interested to estimate the effect of firms' voluntary actions on their environmental performance
Dr Sandra van der Laan's research interests lie in accounting in two broad strands of research. The first centres on accounting as a social discourse and accounting as a mechanism to discharge accountability. As such, she has been researching in the areas of social accounting and ethical investment. She has published her research in a number of top ranking international journals such as Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal, Journal of Business Ethics and Critical Perspectives on Accounting. Sandra's second strand of research is centred the investigation of the Australian class order deed of cross guarantee, by examining the economic consequences of the financial reporting regulation that was first introduced in 1986.
Dr Dmytro Matsypura research is multidisciplinary and combines his background and interests in management, engineering, computer systems, and applied mathematics. His general area is complex decision-making on global supply chain network systems with a specific focus on global issues and an emphasis on management science and operations management. He is especially interested in electric power networks. The methodological tools that he utilizes are: variational inequalities, dynamical systems, network theory, multicriteria decision-making, game theory and optimization.
Dr Maurice Peat has a PhD in Finance from UTS, in the area of distress modelling. He joined the university in 2004, where he held a senior lectureship in the Faculty of Business. He taught in both the School of Finance & Economics and Business Information Systems during his 15 year tenure at UTS. Maurice's current research interests cover such topics as credit risk and corporate distress analysis, a managerial decision context for financial analysis, the economics of restructuring transactions and risk management.
Dr Vasilis Sarafidis's main area of research is on panel data econometrics, and specifically on the impact of cross-sectional dependence on the properties of various panel estimators and the development of new methods that allow testing for the presence of cross-sectional dependence in dynamic large-N, small-T panel data models. Vasilis' work has includes theory and Monte Carlo applications of the Generalised Method of Moments in dynamic large-N, small-T panels. His reseach appeared in Journal of Econometrics, the Econometrics Journal and the Stata Journal.
Dr Maxwell Stevenson has conducted extensive research within the areas of mathematical economics, mathematical statistics, financial econometrics, corporate finance and financial analysis. He has had a career-long interest in the application of time series analysis and forecasting to all of these research disciplines. Max is actively involved in the measurement of risk management relating to electricity markets and equity markets. He has published a number of academic and practitioner articles and presented his work to numerous invited presentations at national and international academic and industry-sponsored conferences.
Dr Jiri Svec holds a PhD in Finance from the University of Sydney, in the area of risk management within the energy markets. His research interests include the electricity, weather and carbon credit markets. Jiri is also actively involved with industry in an ongoing relationship with a merchant bank, undertaking research and development in the area of modelling and managing credit risk.
Dr Andrey Vasnev graduated in Applied Mathematics from Moscow State University in 1998. In 2001 he completed his Master’s degree in Economics in the New Economic School, Moscow. In 2006 he received Ph.D. degree in Economics from the Department of Econometrics and Operations Research at Tilburg University under the supervision of Jan R. Magnus. He worked as a credit risk analyst in ABN AMRO bank before joining the University of Sydney. His research appeared in Econometric Theory, Econometrics Journal, and Economics Bulletin.
National and International Member Details
Prof Mike Bradbury is a professor in accounting at Massey University. He obtained his PhD at the University of Auckland and has held visiting positions at the University of Sydney and the Sloan School of Management, MIT. Prior to his academic career he was, for ten years, a chartered accountant with a large accounting firm in Auckland and London. Mike's research interests lie in the area of corporate financial reporting and financial analysis. His publications have appeared in the Journal of Accounting Research, The Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting and Public Policy, Abacus, Accounting and Finance, and the Journal of Corporate Finance. He is on the editorial board of a number of international journals, and serves on the Financial Reporting Standards Board of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of New Zealand and on the International Financial Reporting Interpretations Committee of the International Accounting Standards Board.
Prof Willem Buijink is a Professor of Accounting at the Department of Accountancy of Tilburg University and has a very rich academic experience drawn from a number of jurisdictions within Europe. Willem is currently the Vice-Dean for Research of the FEB and has considerable management experience of large-scale empirical EU-wide research projects in financial accounting, including his current position on the faculty advisory board of INTACCT. He is also a member of the editorial board of the European Accounting Review, the European Journal of Law and Economics, MAB, and Revista Española de Financiacion y Contabilidadalong, and a member of the Scientific Committee of the European Accounting Association since 1997.
Dr Robert Czernkowski Robert Czernkowski is a Senior Lecturer and teaches and researches in the area of financial accounting. His research interests include earnings/returns correlations and the information environment of firms, specifically in relation to how these are affected by both institutional and informal characteristics of the marketplace for stock. He has recently completed a PhD at the AGSM, examining the incentives for generation of information by market analysts. As part is his recent teaching across the financial accounting stream, Robert has been lecturer in charge of various financial accounting subjects and has taught financial accounting subjects in UNSW’s MCom program in China.
Dr Christina Dargenidou is a lecturer in Finance in Xfi (Centre for Finance and Investment) at Exeter University. She completed her PhD thesis at the University of Wales, Bangor whilst holding a doctoral research fellowship funded by the European Commission (Human Potential Network: HARMONIA project) to investigate the capital market consequences of the accounting harmonisation and standardisation in Europe. Before her appointment at Xfi, she had been working for the National Bank of Greece as an analyst. Her research interests include equity valuation and financial statement analysis.
Prof Paul Dunmore is a research professor at the School of Accountancy , Massey University, New Zealand. He teaches research methods, advanced financial accounting and advanced accounting information system. Paul has broad research interests involving the application of mathematical and statistical techniques to accounting-related problems. He has applied this expertise to study the economics of auditing, the statistics of financial ratios, distress prediction, audit efficiency, distributions of personal incomes and tax policy.
Dr Annita Florou is a Lecturer in Accounting at the University of Macedonia, Greece, and a pricipal investigator and representative of Greece to INTACCT. She has a number of plenty of publications in highly esteemed international journals. Her primary research interest includethe determinants and economic consequences of IFRS adoption, corporate governance quality, corporate governance effectiveness, earnings management, and executive compensation.
Dr Christos Grambovas is a research fellow at the Centre for the Analysis of Investment Risk, at the University of Manchester. Christos held joint positions as a teaching and research fellow in the University of Wales at Bangor and post-doctoral research fellow in the University of Valencia (Spain). While undertaking his PhD (Wales), he was a pre-doctoral research fellow in the University of Valencia and at the Autonoma University of Madrid, as part of the team on the European Commission FP7 research project 'Harmonia'. Christos's research interests’ fall at the interface of accounting and finance, including how accounting information can be used for the valuation of listed companies, accounting conservatism, and the interconnection between accounting and economic issues.
Prof Stuart McLeay is chaired Professor of Treasury and Director of Research at the University of Wales Bangor. Stuart is affiliated to Lancaster's 5* Management School, where he originally completed his PhD at the International Centre for Research in Accounting. He is a qualified chartered accountant who has lived and worked in Germany, France and Italy, having more that ten years experience with the European Investment Bank, Price Waterhouse and other international firms in the financial sector. He has held visiting academic positions at Warwick Business School, Copenhagen Business School, the University of Augsburg and Hautes Etudes Commerciales in France, the University of Siena , the University of Frankfurt, La Trobe University Melbourne and the University of Technology Sydney. His research interests are in accounting, banking and finance, and he is the coordinator of a European doctoral training network. His research interests include the financial markets, accounting regulation, financial analysis, European finance, statistical modelling and comparative international research.
Prof Stephen Penman from Columbia University, the US, is George O. May Professor of Accounting and Morgan Stanley Dean Witter Research Scholar. Stephen's research focuses on financial statement analysis and the use of accounting information in equity valuation. Prior to his appointment at Columbia, he held the L. H. Penney Chair at the University of California, Berkeley. He has published numerous papers on accounting and equity valuation and has received the AICPA/American Accounting Association Award for notable contributions to the literature. He is author of Financial Statement Analysis and Security Valuation, published in 2001 by Irwin/McGraw-Hill, for which he received the Wildman Medal. Penman serves as co-director of the Center for Excellence in Accounting and Security Analysis at the Columbia Business School and also as managing editor of the Review of Accounting Studies.
Prof Peter Pope is the Director of the International Centre for Research in Accounting, Lancaster, and a joint editor to the Journal of Business Finance & Accounting. He is also the chief network coordinator of INTACCT, involving ten universities from across Europe. Peter has written over 60 articles in international journals, numerous books, monographs and chapters, and has an exceptional record in PhD supervision. He has recently received the American Accounting Association award for the best paper in Financial Accounting and Reporting Section, as well as recognised with the Distinguished Academic award, an annual recognition of research excellence made by the British Accounting Association.
Dr Ivana Raonic is a lecturer in Financial Analysis at Cass Business School, at CITY University, London. She has previously taught at the University of Siena where she spent two years as a post-doctoral research fellow. She also has practical experience with PriceWaterhouseCoopers where she worked as an auditor. Her research interests include the analysis of capital markets, corporate governance and earnings properties.
Prof Michael Smith is a chaired Professor of Management (Econometrics) at the Melbourne Business School. Michael's primary area of research is in business statistics and its application to finance and marketing. His methodological research has involved work on the development of computationally intensive methods for time series, forecasting, nonparametric regression, longitudinal studies, multivariate analysis, econometric modelling and data mining. His research has been published in the the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society and Journal of Econometrics. He has been an invited speaker at the joint statistical meetings held in the USA in 1996 and 1999, a presenter at other international conferences and universities and has been awarded both small and large grants from the Australian Research Council funding schemes.
Prof Mark Tippett from Loughborough University, the UK, is immediate past Joint Editor of The British Accounting Review and is a past Chairman of the Conference of Professors of Accounting and Finance. Research interests span theoretical and applied work on stochastic processes including the time and cross sectional properties of financial ratios; the relationship between equity prices and accounting (book) figures; the impact of real options on equity prices; estimating returns on financial instruments using discretely sampled data; the probability density function for equity returns; the value of the option to lease. Publications have appeared in such journals as Abacus, Accounting and Business Research, Accounting and Finance, The British Accounting Review, Journal of Banking and Finance, Journal of Business Finance and Accounting, Journal of Futures Markets, Journal of Portfolio Management, Management Science, Organisational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes, Research and Development Management Journal.
Prof Geoffrey Whittington is trained as a Chartered Accountant and started his academic career as a researcher in the Department of Applied Economics at Cambridge and Director of Studies in Economics at Fitzwilliam College. He subsequently held the chairs of accounting and finance at Edinburgh and Bristol before returning to Cambridge as Price Waterhouse Professor of Financial Accounting in the Faculty of Economics (1988). He left in 2001 to take a five-year appointment as a full-time member of the International Accounting Standards Board, returning to Cambridge in 2006. His research interests include the theoretical underpinnings of accounting standards, including the current revision of the conceptual framework for financial reporting; measurement in accounting, particularly fair value and its relationship to other current value measures.