Department of Accounting | PhD Accounting Summer Camp 2022/2023

Welcome to the official page of the AES summer school, co-organized with New York University. The summer school will take place at NYU Stern School Business in New York City.
 

The topics of the school will be:

• Models of Strategic Communication in Accounting: Voluntary Disclosure, Cheap Talk and Earnings Management Theory

We will introduce students to the basic building blocks of the three dominant models of communication of relevance to accounting thought: verifiable disclosure and strategic withholding, aka 'voluntary' disclosure; soft/unverifiable disclosure and partial communication with partial alignment of interests, aka 'cheap' talk; and, lastly, Spence-like costly misreporting, aka 'earnings management.' We will discuss the basic tools to lay out these problems and formally develop the primary insights, and differences in implications of each of these frameworks.

• Introduction to the Theory of Optimal Contracts: Risk-Neutral and Risk-Averse Models, Dynamic Models

We shall present a self-contained treatment of the most widely models of incentives, starting with risk-neutral agency models subject to limited liability constraints, to risk-averse models à la Holmström (1979). Some attention will be placed on understanding the tools and mathematical methods commonly used to derive properties of these models, especially Lagrange-based methods. We will also present the formulation of dynamic contracts in Spear and Sprivastava (2019) and implementations into single-period contracts in the context of CARA utilities.

• Structural Estimation: Hands-on Practice on Taking the Models to Data

This section of the school will focus on simplified applications to get first experiences in taking these models to data. We will provide an extensive coverage of Conditional Choice Probabilities which provide an easy approach to estimating dynamic choices without numerically solving for the entire equilibrium; we will also discuss how to solve dynamic investment problems, dynamic contracting problems and provide examples of uses of non-parametrics to estimate earnings management models. This session will be based on hands-on work and involve students working through sample codes.

The summer school will be run as twelve 90-minute sessions, co-taught by F. Zhou (Wharton), Ilan Guttman (NYU) and Jeremy Bertomeu (UC San Diego). The sessions are open to Ph.D students and faculty. While we do not require prior experience in game theory or the course topics, we recommend basic knowledge of conditional expectations and differentiation in order to best benefit from the sessions. You will receive a set of materials to review before the summer school in order to be ready for the sessions.