Accounting Research Conference Papers

2023 Presenters

Sarah Zechman, University of Colorado
Entering the friend zone:  An empirical analysis of CEO podcast appearances 

Sarah Zechman is a Professor and former Division Chair at the University of Colorado Boulder. Before joining Colorado, she was faculty at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, taught at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and spent several years at KPMG LLP. She is currently an Editor at The Accounting Review.

Regina Wittenberg-Moerman, USC
Digital Lending and Financial Well-Being:  Evidence from a Developing Economy

Regina Wittenberg-Moerman specializes in debt contracting and trading, banking, reporting quality, disclosure and developing economies. She has held positions at the Wharton School and the Chicago Booth. Wittenberg-Moerman is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Best Paper Prize by the Journal of Accounting and Economics and Dean’s Award for Research Excellence from USC Marshall. Wittenberg-Moerman is the senior editor of the Journal of Accounting Research. She also served on the editorial board of the Journal of Accounting and Economics and the Journal of Accounting Research and is a referee for numerous journals, including The Accounting Review, Journal of Finance and Journal of Financial Economics.

Joseph Weber, MIT
Audit Partners' Role in Material Misstatement Resolution:  Survey and Interview Evidence

Joseph Weber graduated from Penn State University in 2000 and is now a full professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  He has served as the head of the accounting department, the chair of the department of Economics, Finance and Accounting Group, and as the Director of the Sloan Fellows Program.  Joe’s research focuses on how managers choose accounting methods (i) when communicating corporate financial performance and (ii) when designing and implementing contracts between the firm and its managers and creditors.  Over the last twenty-three years, he has published over thirty papers that appear in the leading accounting academic journals, providing evidence on the determinants and implications of accounting and disclosure choices.  In addition, he has served as an editor or on the editorial boards of the Journal of Accounting Research, The Accounting Review, the Journal of Accounting and Economics.

Brent Schmidt, Penn State University
Current Expected Credit Loss (CECL) Model and Analyst Forecasts

Professor Brent Schmidt is an Assistant Professor of Accounting at Penn State University. Professor Schmidt’s research interests include financial reporting and disclosure, regulation, and financial institutions. Prior to graduate school, Professor Schmidt worked as a senior associate auditor at BKD, LLP in Cincinnati, Ohio. Professor Schmidt graduated with his PhD from The Ohio State University in 2019 and with his B.S. from Miami University (Ohio) in 2011. Professor Schmidt is a 2012 Elijah Watt Sells Award recipient and a licensed CPA in Ohio (inactive).

Dain Donelson, University of Iowa
The Merits of Securities Litigation and Corporate Reputation

Dain Donelson is the Henry B. Tippie Excellence Chair and Professor of Accounting and a Professor of Law (by courtesy) at the University of Iowa. His research involves the intersection of law and accounting, primarily in areas such as securities litigation, financial reporting fraud, earnings management, directors’ and officers’ insurance, corporate law, corporate governance, earnings properties, capital market regulation, and accounting standards. His education includes a J.D. from Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law and a Ph.D. in Accountancy from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 

Sean Cao, University of Maryland
From Man vs. Machine to Man + Machine:  The Art and AI of Stock Analyses 

Dr. Cao’s research has been featured in the Financial Times, CNBC, Bloomberg, The Guardian, and Quartz. Dr. Cao co-chaired conferences with the Review of Financial Studies (dual submission) on Fintech and Machine Learning. Dr. Cao also serves as a guest associate editor at Management Science. Dr. Cao is deeply committed to helping business communities through his research. He has been honored with the award by the Deloitte Initiative for AI and Learning (DIAL), leading to develop AI solutions for social inclusion and climate change. For teaching, Dr. Cao has been invited externally by major research universities to teach short-term doctoral seminars on AI and Fintech in finance and accounting.  He also writes a textbook for AI in accounting and runs a tutorial blog site (YouTube: Sean Cao_Fintech) that aims to help scholars outside of computer science smoothly adapt machine learning to finance and accounting research.