Accounting PhD

Well, since accounting is made up out of "whole cloth" the dissertation can be on what ever the degree granting school is willing to accept. AIR, and its been a while, the "real" PhD's considered the granting of the PhD for business study as something of a joke. The more acceptable solution, to them, was the granting of the DBA. (Same thing as far as the money and position went, but it wouldn't confuse people into thinking they were "real academics.) The B Schools bring in so much money the administrators have to protect them, so that isn't going to change.

Your not going to see a Nobel awarded for work from a business doctorate. The exception would be some really rich person donating to the Nobel foundation a huge amount of cash to support a Nobel prize for accounting. ( I think that is how they got the one for Economics, but that is another story. )

I think business is worthy of a PhD. Look at the work of people like Collins in his books "Good to Great" and "Built to Last".

His work is built on substantive research. There is quite a bit of good business research being done.

For examples of accounting research, I suggest taking a peak at the accounting web site of your favorite business school's accounting department. They describe the research of their accounting professors. For instance, in New York, we have:

actually several nobel prizes have been awarded in economics to business school professors. Michael Spence of information economics and, also, the inventors of black-scholes options pricing theory come to mind.

Mermin

But not for "Accounting"....

2) 20 years ago, the finance and accounting were usually the same department; thus, "finance" professors also did "accounting" research. Myron Scholes, co-developer of options pricing theory, described his research in his nobel prize speech as follows: "I worked on measures of risk and the effect of differential risk on security returns in a paper with Merton Miller. I studied the relation between accounting and market-determined measures of risk in another paper with William Beaver and Paul Kettler."

4) Many finance professors today study what are essentially "accounting" topics, including financial analysis of earnings and cash flows, asset valuation, analysts forecasting of earnings, the Sarbanes Oxley act, stuff like that.

So I have been educated...thanks. I hadn't actually related what I recalled (admittedly little) of what I had read regarding Nobel laureate economics topics as very much related to "accounting". Econmetrics, the options pricing theories, etc., were the kinds of things I thought of.

the lesson is: If you want to do finance research, join an accounting phd program. The difference between a finance phd and an accounting phd is that accounting phds put more emphasis on the use of financial statements in their research. (They also have to teach nuts and bolts accounting to MBA students, so they are expected to learn GAAP on the side, although GAAP is not the primary subject of their phd research work.)

On the other hand, if you mainly want to study nuts and bolts GAAP rules and how they work, join an MACC program. You won't be studying much GAAP as a phd accounting student! You are ultimately correct that there is no such thing as "pure" accounting research, even within accounting phd programs.

Just because someone uses accounting in the title or an accounting publication covers it, doesn't make it accounting.

Taxation is taught in accounting departments and more than half of accountants' gross comes from preparing tax returns. That doesn't make the legal compliance of taxation the same thing as accounting.

The Nobel Economics prize is something that was added long after Mr. Nobel was in his grave and had no control over the use of his name.

"In 1969, the Swedish central bank (Sveriges Riskbank) established a prize known as the "Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel", which is commonly shortened to the Nobel Memorial Prize. The Nobel Memorial Prize has a similar procedure of award selection (by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences) as the original Nobel prizes. It also disburses the same monetary amounts and shares in the formal ceremony."

Ref:

I guess if you had enough money you could get a Nobel prize set up for Accounting.

On Sat, 10 Sep 2005 18:21:30 GMT, in alt.accounting Ron Todd wrote in :

Tiny typo quibble, it is Riksbank.

But you would have to get Sweden (or maybe Norway) to let you use the phrase. Certainly the Templeton Prize looks to be trying to echo the Nobels, though he should be announcing them in fall to do it right.

In a general sense, it does...

The general definition of accounting does not include any reference to taxation at all.

Wayne Brasch

Put there is an "accounting" in a general sense in order to get the proper numbers to put on a tax return, no?

What I mean is you still have to have an accounting system and actually do accounting (by the rules and perhaps theory set forth by tax laws) in come up with a proper tax return.

Ron Todd wrote: "I've always thought it was a phony - baloney prize made up to give an unearned stature to academics etc., who weren't at the level to contribute anything to real science. "

Are you saying that the only legitimate academic fields are "science" and that everything else (music, history, literature, economics, diplomacy, business, accounting, ...) are all worthless? Why so?

Quite a while ago, in exchanges with Mr. Todd I could not but come to the psychological hypothesis that he himself might be a bitter academic underachiever with little respect to the academic values and the scientific process. With my years in the profession one occasionally encounters the said phenomenon. True or false, the typical hallmarks would seem to be there.

All the best, Timo

I see; Mr. Todd is a bit slow in the noggin.