About Me

Biography

I am an associate professor in the James Benjamin Department of Accounting in the Mays Business School at Texas A&M University and hold the Deloitte Foundation Leadership Professorship. I primarily teach and conduct research in the financial accounting area.

My primary research interests are related to understanding (1) the intersection of law and accounting (e.g., securities and derivative litigation, fraud, misreporting, and corporate governance), (2) the behavior of banks and their financial reporting (e.g., fair value accounting, bank risk-taking, internal controls, and reporting quality), and (3) accounting standard setting (e.g., due process, comment letters, and standard characteristics). My research has been published in leading scholarly journals in accounting (e.g., The Accounting Review, Review of Accounting Studies, and Contemporary Accounting Research), economics (e.g., Journal of Law and Economics and Journal of Risk and Insurance), and finance (e.g., Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Journal of Corporate Finance, and Journal of Banking & Finance).

My teaching style emphasizes the importance of critical thinking and real-world application. I have taught financial accounting to students at the lower-level undergraduate, upper-level undergraduate, master's, and doctoral levels. I currently co-teach accounting theory to our master's students and a capital markets seminar to our doctoral students.

I received a Ph.D. in Accounting from the University of Texas at Austin. Before pursuing my doctorate, I worked as a Senior Associate at PricewaterhouseCoopers in their advisory and consulting practice in New York City and as a postgraduate technical assistant at the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) in Norwalk, Connecticut. I also have audit experience in both Dallas, Texas and New York, New York. The majority of my clients were financial service firms, and I worked on engagements related to accounting rule implementations, transaction structuring, fair value accounting, IFRS conversion, derivative identification, and financial due diligence.

I received a Master of Science in Finance, a Bachelor of Business Administration in Accounting, and a Minor in Psychology from Texas A&M University. I have a CPA license registered in the state of Texas.

In my spare time, I enjoy spending time with my beloved wife, our precious (and precocious) daughter, and our two rescue dogs. I love reading a good book, and one of my current goals is to finish the 100 greatest novels of all time using a list that I compiled by combining and averaging several online lists to reduce the influence of idiosyncratic reviewer taste functions.