Accounting Faculty Research

Research by Mason Accounting Professor Bret Johnson, a former SEC staff accountant and academic fellow, shows how seemingly mundane intra-agency policies can have unintended effects that benefit Wall Street over Main Street.

As Jenelle Conaway, assistant professor of accounting at George Mason University School of Business, says, “Being able to compare companies more easily makes for more efficient investment choices. And that scales from the individual level up to banks choosing who they lend to, and companies choosing who they want to merge with and acquire.” Her recent research finds that comparability trends have grown complicated.

Bret Johnson, an associate professor within the Accounting Area, recently had accepted for publication an article entitled "Protecting Wall Street or Main Street: SEC Monitoring and Enforcement of Retail-Owned Firms" in Review of Accounting Studies.

In business, a specialist strategy can sometimes be riskier than a generalist one. Competing in only one industry leaves firms highly vulnerable to heightened income volatility, with extreme gains and losses, often alternating in quick succession. Innovative firms, whose business models are based on heavy R&D investments with uncertain returns, are especially affected by these fluctuations. Kelly Wentland, assistant professor of accounting, discusses this issue.

Government corruption has universally corrosive effects on U.S. society. Yet there is little uniformity to the structure of state-level corruption oversight agencies. Syrena Shirley, an assistant professor of accounting at Mason, recently published a research paper in Current Issues in Auditing suggesting that in the fight against corruption, these structural inconsistencies are impactful.

Bret Johnson, assistant professor of accounting at Mason, recently co-authored a paper in Management Science finding that SEC comment letters are leaking out among investors close to the company concerned, who then use it to their advantage. Technically, such information-sharing violates Regulation Fair Disclosure (FD), which prohibits companies from sharing secrets with network partners such as institutional investors and analysts.

Colin Koutney, an assistant professor in the accounting area, recently published the article Nonrecurring Income Taxes in Review of Accounting Studies.

Managerial overconfidence is a serious risk that has drawn increasing attention from executives, investors, and researchers in recent years. Mindy (Hyo Jung) Kim, an assistant professor of accounting at Mason, has not only found that it’s possible to incorporate ability-adjusted overconfidence into real-world business assessments, but that it happens routinely.

This paper aims to explore the current environment of business education, the role of liberal education and the school’s programs and their benefits. 

Kelly Wentland, an accounting professor at the George Mason University School of Business, recently published a paper in Management Science that further specifies and quantifies firm response to tax uncertainty.