Participation in DAR Courses

In the mid of October, DART’s Swiss partner network, DAR, organized a three-day-lasting seminar on “Empirical Research in Financial Accounting: Market-Based Research in International Accounting” at the University of Zurich. Several DART students had the opportunity to participate in the seminar held by Luzi Hail (Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania). The class format was a mixture of lectures and discussions based on paper presentations held by the course participants. The focus was primarily on contribution and research design issues of the selected papers. The course topics covered identification in empirical research, the impact of institutional factors on accounting outcomes, voluntary and mandatory adoption of IFRS, the role of enforcement, and securities regulation. Further, Hail put a strong emphasis on appreciating the role of theory in applied work. Moreover, he provided first-hand insights into the development and review process of several of his papers.

Shortly after, Thomas Hemmer (Jones Graduate School of Business, Rice University) gave a course in “Analytical Research in Managerial Accounting: Agency Models in Accounting.” DART students Negin Attar and Felix Niggemann were fortunate to participate in the course and benefited greatly from Hemmer’s expertise. The course laid out general agency-model structures from the field of economics and their applications in theoretical accounting research.