Previous lecturers

Previous lecturers

The Gjesdal Lecture has been held since 2010. Here's an overview of previous guest lecturers.

  • 2023: Stefan J. Reichelstein, Stanford Graduate School of Business

    2023: Stefan J. Reichelstein, Stanford Graduate School of Business

    Stefan J. Reichelstein is The William R. Timken Professor of Accounting, Emeritus at Stanford Graduate School of Business and Senior Fellow ay Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and Precourt Institute for Energy.

    Title of his lecture: Corporate Carbon Accounting

  • 2022 Ilia D. Dichev, Emory University

    2022 Ilia D. Dichev, Emory University

    Ilia D. Dichev is Goizueta Foundation Chair in Financial Reporting & Professor of Accounting at Emory University's Goizueta Business School.

    Title of the lecture: "Dollar-weighted returns: Why investor returns are typically lower and more volatile than investment returns"

  • 2019 Thomas Hemmer, Rice University

    2019 Thomas Hemmer, Rice University

    Thomas Hemmer is a professor at Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

    Thomas Hemmer's profile page at Jones GSB

  • 2018 Maria Correia, London School of Economics and political Science

    2018 Maria Correia, London School of Economics and political Science

    Maria Correia is an Associate Professor at the Department of Accounting at London School of Economics and political Science.

    Title of her Gjesdal lecture:

    After 50 years - what is the future of bankruptcy prediction?

  • 2017 Katherine Schipper, Duke University

    2017 Katherine Schipper, Duke University

    Katherine Schipper is the Thomas F. Keller Professor of Business Administration at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.

    Ms. Schipper holds a BA degree summa cum laude from the University of Dayton, MBA, MA and PhD degrees from the University of Chicago and honorary degrees from Notre Dame University, NHH Norwegian School of Economics, the Stockholm School of Economics and the Singapore Management University.

    Prior to joining Duke University’s faculty, she was a Board member of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB).

    She has also been a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Chicago.

    Ms. Schipper has published research papers on topics in financial reporting, corporation finance and corporate governance. She is a frequent speaker on matters related to international accounting convergence, financial reporting standard setting and financial reporting quality.

    She has been named the American Accounting Association’s Outstanding Educator and Distinguished International Lecturer, and has been elected to the Accounting Hall of Fame.

    Professor Shipper's web page at Duke University

  • 2016 Robert Wilson, Stanford University

    2016 Robert Wilson, Stanford University

    Title of lecture: On Reciprocity

    Robert Wilson is the Adams Distinguished Professor of Management, Emeritus, at the Stanford Business School, where he has been on the faculty since 1964. His research and teaching are on market design, pricing, negotiation, and related topics concerning industrial organization and information economics. He is an expert on game theory and its applications.

    Dr. Wilson has been a major contributor to auction designs and competitive bidding strategies in the oil, communication, and power industries, and to the design of innovative pricing schemes. His work on pricing of priority service for electric power has been implemented in the utility industry. His book on Nonlinear Pricing (Oxford Press, 1993) is an encyclopedic analysis of tariff design and related topics for public utilities, including power, communications, and transport; it won the 1995 Leo Melamed Prize, awarded biannually by the University of Chicago for “outstanding scholarship by a business professor.” His work on game theory includes wage bargaining and strikes, and in legal contexts, settlement negotiations. He has authored some of the basic studies of reputational effects in predatory pricing, price wars, and other competitive battles.

    He has published approximately 100 articles in professional journals and books since completing the Bachelor, Master’s, and Doctoral degrees at Harvard College and the Harvard Business School. He has been an associate editor of several journals, and delivered several public lectures. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow, former officer and Council member of the Econometric Society. The Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration conferred an honorary Doctor of Economics degree in 1986, and the University of Chicago, an honorary Doctor of Laws degree in 1995.

    On problems of pricing strategy, he has advised the U.S. Department of the Interior and oil companies (on bidding for offshore leases), the Electric Power Research Institute (on pricing of electric power, design of priority service systems, design of wholesale markets, funding of basic research, and risk analysis of environmental hazards and climate change), and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (on pricing product lines in high technology industries). With Paul Milgrom he designed for Pacific Bell the auction of spectrum licenses adopted by the FCC, and subsequently worked on the bidding strategy team, and later for other firms. He contributed to the designs of the power exchange and auctions of ancillary services in California, and he has continued to advise EPRI; the California Power Exchange; the California, New England, and Ontario System Operators; the Canadian Competition Bureau; Energy Ministries of several countries; and others involved in the design of auctions for electricity, power and gas transmission, and telecommunications in the U.S.A. and elsewhere. His designs of other auctions have been adopted by private firms. He has been an expert witness on antitrust and securities matters.

    Wilson's webpage at Stanford

  • 2015 Terry Shevlin, University of California, Irvine

    2015 Terry Shevlin, University of California, Irvine

    Title of the lecture: An Overview of US Based Accounting Tax Research

    Terry Shevlin is the Professor of Accounting, Paul Merage Chair in Business Growth, Associate Dean of Research and Doctoral Programs at the UCI Paul Merage School of Business.

    He earned his PhD from Stanford University in 1986 and joined the faculty at the University of Washington where he worked for 26 years until joining UCI in the summer of 2012. He visited the University of Iowa in 1991-92. He held the Paul Pigott/Paccar Professor of Business Administration from 2004-2012. While at Washington he held various administrative position: faculty director of the PhD Program 1998-2006 and Accounting Department Chair from 2006-2012.

    He has served as editor on three academic journals: Journal of the American Taxation Association (1996-1999), Senior Editor, The Accounting Review (2002-2005) and Co-editor, Accounting Horizons (2009-2012) and on numerous editorial boards (including the top four accounting journals). He has published nearly 30 articles in the very top accounting and finance journals.

    He has received a number of awards for his research and mentoring of PhDs the most recent being named the American Accounting Association Outstanding Educator for 2012. He was also named the American Taxation Association 2005 Ray M. Sommerfeld Outstanding Tax Educator. He has won the American Taxation Association Tax Manuscript Award three times (in 2004, 1995, and 1992) and twice won the AAA Competitive Manuscript for young scholars (1990 and 1987). He was awarded the UW Business School Dean’s Faculty Research Award four times.

    His research interests are broad and include the effect of taxes on business decisions and asset prices, capital markets-based accounting research, earnings management, employee stock options, research design and statistical significance testing issues. He has spoken at numerous doctoral consortiums.

    Shevlin's webpage at UC Irvine

  • 2014 William R. Kinney, Jr., University of Texas at Austin

    2014 William R. Kinney, Jr., University of Texas at Austin

    Title of the lecture: Global Auditing Standards and Jurisdictional Regulation: The Role of Core Concepts

    William R. Kinney, Jr. is the Professor of Accounting, Charles and Elizabeth Prothro Regents Chair in Business and Price Waterhouse Fellow in Auditing at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business.

    William Kinney received his B.S. and M.S. from Oklahoma State University and his Ph.D. from Michigan State University. His research and teaching interests include financial accounting and auditing.

    Kinney's webpage at UT Austin

  • 2013 Bengt R. Holmström, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

    2013 Bengt R. Holmström, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

    Title of the lecture: Opacity and Liquidity in Money Markets

    Bengt Robert Holmström is the Paul A. Samuelson Professor of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was head of the Economics Department from 2003-2006. He holds a joint appointment with MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

    He is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society and the American Finance Association, and an elected foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Finnish Academy of Sciences and Letters. He is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (corporate finance). In 2011 he served as President of the Econometric Society.

    He received his doctoral degree from Stanford University in 1978. Before joining MIT in 1994, he was the Edwin J. Beinecke Professor of Management at Yale University’s School of Management (1983-94) and associate professor at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University (1979-82).

    Holmström is a microeconomic theorist, best known for his research on the theory of contracting and incentives especially as applied to the theory of the firm, to corporate governance and to liquidity problems in financial crises.

    He holds honorary doctorate degrees from the University of Vaasa, Finland, Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden, and the Hanken School of Economics, Finland. He was awarded the Banque de France-TSE Senior Prize in Monetary Economics and Finance in 2012, the Stephen A. Ross Prize in Financial Economics and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange – MSRI Prize for Innovative Quantitative Applications in 2013, the Distinguished CES Fellow award from CESifo, Munich, and the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 2016.

    Holmström's webpage at MIT

  • 2012 Rajiv D. Banker, Temple University

    2012 Rajiv D. Banker, Temple University

    Title of the lecture: Implications of Cost Behavior Research for Financial Accounting Research

    Rajiv D. Banker is the Merves Chair and Director of the Center for Accounting and Information Technology at the Fox School of Business, Temple University. Previously, Dr. Banker has served as the Anderson Chair and Dean at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Riverside, the Ashbel Smith Chair in Accounting and Information Management, Director of Accounting and Information Management Programs, Director of Center for Practice and Research in Software Management and Director of Center for Excellence in Asian Management at the University of Texas at Dallas (with joint appointments in the accounting and information management, and information systems and operations management areas), Professor of Accounting and Management at Carnegie Mellon University (with joint appointments in the schools of public policy and management, and industrial administration) and the Arthur Andersen Chair in Accounting and Information Systems at the University of Minnesota (with joint appointments in accounting, information systems and operations management departments).

    Dr. Banker received a Bachelor of Science degree with Highest Honors from the University of Bombay concentrating in Mathematics and Economics. He received several academic awards, including those for standing first at the Bachelor of Science examination at the University of Bombay. He received a Doctorate in Business Administration from Harvard University concentrating in Planning and Control Systems. He qualified as a Cost Accountant and as a Chartered Accountant, securing several awards including those for standing first and third respectively at national examinations of the two institutes.

    Dr. Banker is internationally recognized as a leader in interdisciplinary research in management. He has received numerous awards for his research, including awards for Notable Contribution to the Management Accounting Literature and Notable Contribution to the Governmental Accounting Literature by the American Accounting Association, and best paper awards at international conferences in information systems and in accounting. He has published more than 150 articles in prestigious research journals including Management Science, Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Journal of Accounting Research, Operations Research, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, Communications of ACM, IEEE Transactions in Software Engineering, Academy of Management Journal, Strategic Management Journal, and Econometrica.

    His research articles are cited over 150 times each year by other researchers in a wide range of disciplines. One of his papers is ranked fourth highest in citations in the 50-year history of Management Science. He is recognized by the Institute for Scientific Information (Web of Science) as one of only 243 most highly cited researchers in economics and business worldwide that have made fundamental contributions to the advancement of science and technology.

    Dr. Banker’s research interests range from analytical modeling to statistical analysis of data collected from different companies to address complex or emerging problems of importance to managers. His research on information systems explores issues of technology enabled competitive strategy, investments in information technology, software productivity and quality metrics, and management of software development and maintenance. His research in accounting addresses questions pertaining to performance measurement, incentive compensation, strategic cost management and public accounting industry analysis. His research in management science includes the development of new analytical methods for productivity and efficiency evaluation. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Financial Executives Research Foundation, the Institute of Management Accountants, and several leading corporations.

    Dr. Banker has chaired and served on committees of several professional institutions. He has served as editor and on advisory boards of leading research journals in information systems, accounting and operations management. He has consulted extensively with many organizations and served as an expert witness. He has been invited to lecture to executives and academics at leading institutions around the world. Most recently, he has been a guest faculty at the London School of Economics, Ecole Nationale-Paris, Indian School of Business, Peking University, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro-Brazil, and University of Auckland-New Zealand.

    Dr. Banker has supervised many doctoral students placed at prestigious research universities. Six of his doctoral students have won awards for best dissertations and three others have received runner-up awards. He has been the recipient of three teaching awards voted by graduate and undergraduate students. Dr. Banker has co-edited a book on Strategic Information Technology Management and co-authored a textbook on Management Accounting that has been translated into seven languages.

    Banker's webpage at Temple University

  • 2011 Ray Ball, University of Chicago

    2011 Ray Ball, University of Chicago

    Title of the lecture: The Global Financial Crisis and the Efficient Market Hypothesis: What Have We Learned?

    Ray Ball is the Sidney Davidson Distinguished Service Professor of Accounting in the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business.

    He studies corporate disclosure, earnings and stock prices, international accounting and finance, market efficiency and investment strategies. He is coauthor of "An Empirical Evaluation of Accounting Income Numbers," an article published in the Journal of Accounting Research in 1968 that won the American Accounting Association's inaugural award for seminal contributions in account literature. This article revolutionized the understanding of the impact of corporate disclosure on share prices, and of earnings releases in particular. It laid the foundation for much of the modern accounting literature. Ball also is the author of "Anomalies in Relationships between Securities' Yields and Yield surrogates," published in the Journal of Financial Economics in 1978, the first academic reference to systematic anomalies in the theory of efficient markets.

    Ball is a member of the Board of Trustees of Harbor Funds and Chair of its Audit Committee. He also serves on the Advisory Group for the Financial Reporting Faculty of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW). He has served on the Financial Accounting Standards Advisory Council (FASAC) of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), and on the Shadow Financial Regulation Committee.

    Ball served as the Wesray Professor in Business Administration at the William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Rochester prior to rejoining Chicago Booth in 2000. He has served as a professor at the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management, and has taught at the London Business School, the Australian Graduate School of Management, and the University of Queensland.

    He received a bachelor's degree in accounting from the University of New South Wales in Australia, and an MBA in 1968 and a PhD in economics in 1972 from Chicago Booth. Ball was awarded honorary degrees by the Helsinki School of Economics, the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, the University of Queensland, the University of London, and the University of New South Wales. He was elected to the Accounting Hall of Fame in 2009. The American Accounting Association honoured him as its 2012 Presidential Scholar (together with Philip Brown) and in 2014 with its FARS Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2015, the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales made him its eighth Honorary Member.

  • 2010 Joel S. Demski, University of Florida and John Christensen, University of Southern Denmark

    2010 Joel S. Demski, University of Florida and John Christensen, University of Southern Denmark

    Title of the lecture: Science in Accounting

    Joel S. Demski, University of Florida

    Joel S. Demski is the Frederick E. Fisher Eminent Scholar in Accounting at the Fisher School of Business at the University of Florida. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1967. After completing his Ph.D., he took his first professorial position at Columbia University. In 1968, he joined the accounting faculty at Stanford University, where he held the Paul Holden Professorship and later the Joan E. Horngren Professorship in Accounting. In 1985, he moved to Yale University to become the Milton Steinbach Professor of Information and Accounting Systems, and in 1994, to the University of Florida to become the Frederick E. Fisher Eminent Scholar in Accounting.

    He is a leading researcher in the entire world regarding applications of information economics and agency theory to accounting. His pathbreaking work on applications of information economics and agency theory to accounting is presented in numerous journal articles, books, and other published papers. His work and that of the countless students he inspired has created a new domain for accounting theory.

    He is one of the most widely cited authors in the accounting literature and many of his papers have been awarded national prizes for their importance and influence. One of his first papers, “An Accounting System Structured on a Linear Programming Model,” won the 1967 AICPA Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Accounting Literature and 3 years later, another paper, “The Use of Models in Information Evaluation” (written with his former colleague Gerald Feltham), captured the same award. Another early paper, “Decision Implementation Interface: Effects of Alternative Performance Measurement Models” won the 1969 American Accounting Association Competitive Manuscript Award.

    His many honors include an honorary doctorate from Odense University in Denmark, the American Accounting Association’s Outstanding Educator Award (1986), multiple awards of the AICPA-AAA Outstanding Contribution to Accounting Literature Award (1967 and 1970), and the University of Florida Foundation Research Professorship. He is also the 64th member of the Accounting Hall of Fame.

    For many years, he has played an active role in the accounting profession, including serving as the president-elect as well as on many of the committees and editorial boards at the American Accounting Association. He has also been a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Accounting Research and many other leading journals.

    He is known as a true scholar for his probing mind and uncompromising pursuit of excellence. He is also well-known as a mentor and as a superb example for others because of his willingness to invest himself in the work of his colleagues and students. He has mentored many outstanding academics, such as Gary Sundem, Stan Baiman, Frøystein Gjesdal, John Christensen, Rick Antle, Rick Lambert, Srikant Datar, Steve Huddart, Bente Villadsen and Pierre Liang.

    John Christensen, University of Southern Denmark

    John Christensen is the Professor of Accounting at the Department of Business and Economics at the University of Southern Denmark. He received his Ph.D. from Standard University in 1979.

    He has been an editor and a member of the editorial board for several leading accounting journals, such as The Accounting Review, Review of Accounting Studies, and European Accounting Review.

    He has broad research interests, including agency research in accounting, communication structures, transfer pricing, valuation as an information source, modern costing systems, accounting theory, the conceptual framework of financial accounting, reporting discretion and auditing, and product costing. His research work has been published at premier accounting journals, such as Journal of Accounting Research, The Accounting Review, and Review of Accounting Studies.