The Department of Accounting is celebrating 100 years of academic excellence and fiercely forward thinking with a conference on research this summer—the Temple University 100th Anniversary Accounting Conference, taking place Aug. 9–10, 2018 at the Fox School.

The Department of Accounting shares with the Fox School, in celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2018. The department was founded the same year in which the Fox School was established as Temple University’s business school in 1918.

To commemorate the occasion, the Fox School Department of Accounting aims to bring together scholars interested in all aspects of accounting and welcomes research on all research topics. The event will take place immediately following the American Accounting Association’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C, on Temple’s Main Campus.

Keynote speakers for this conference include Professor Ray Ball, Sidney Davidson Distinguished Service Professor of Accounting at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and Professor Gregory Waymire, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Accounting at the Goizueta Business School, Emory University, and professor at the Argyros School of Business and Economics, Chapman University.

The August 2018 conference follows another major conference held in November 2017 by the Department of Accounting hosted jointly with the Fox School Department of Finance—the 28th Annual Conference on Financial Economics and Accounting (CFEA). The annual CFEA conference is hosted by members of a consortium of eight universities: Georgia State University, Indiana University, New York University, Rutgers University, Temple University, Tulane University, the University of Maryland, and the University of Toronto. It is a highly selective and refereed conference of research papers in financial economics and accounting. The conference aims to bring together financial economists and accounting scholars to share their research relevant to theory and practice of business.

Approximately 160 people gathered at Temple University’s Fox School of Business for the 2017 program, featuring two distinguished keynote speakers: Luigi Zingales, Robert C. McCormack Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance and Charles M. Harper Faculty Fellow at the University of Chicago, and John Core, Nanyang Technological University Professor and Professor of Accounting at the MIT Sloan School of Management. More than 330 papers were submitted; only 14 percent were accepted. Over the course of the two-day conference, speakers discussed 46 papers on significant topics within the two subjects, including pertinent topics such as blockchain and bitcoin.

The luncheon keynote speaker was Professor John Core, Nanyang Technological University Professor and Professor of Accounting at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His address, titled “Expected Profitability and Expected Returns,” examined how new asset-pricing models that revive a role for accounting numbers in predicting future stock returns will likely shape future research in several areas of corporate finance and financial accounting. He highlighted inconsistencies in profit measurement between two competing models and also explored the implications for research on cost of capital and performance evaluation.