Biography

Laurence van Lent is a Professor of Accounting and Economics at Frankfurt School of Finance and Management. 

Professor Van Lent’s research has been published or is forthcoming in leading journals in economics, finance, management, and accounting, including The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, Management Science, Journal of Accounting and Economics, The Accounting Review and Journal of Accounting Research. He received the David Solomons Prize from the journal Management Accounting Research. His current research interests include (1) the political economy of accounting and finance, (2) text-as-data applications in economics, and (3) organizational design and performance management. 

Laurence van Lent has extensive editorial experience. He has received distinctions for his work as a reviewer, winning Outstanding Reviewer Awards from the Journal of Accounting Research, Contemporary Accounting Research, and BuR Business Research. He served as the Editor-in-Chief of European Accounting Review, the journal of the European Accounting Association, from 2011-2015. He has served on the Editorial Board of Contemporary Accounting Research, European Accounting Review, and BuR Business Research. He was a Joint Guest Editor of a special issue of the European Accounting Review on Conservatism in Accounting. Between 2017 and 2020, he was an Editor of The Accounting Review, the flagship journal of the American Accounting Association. He was also an Associate Editor of the Journal of Accounting Research and became the Senior Editor of this journal in 2024. Since 2023, he has been a Consulting Editor for the China Accounting and Finance Review.

Professor Van Lent has a strong interest in the education of Ph.D. students. He was the founding chair of the Tilburg Ph.D. program in Accounting, and his students have been placed in prestigious institutions such as The University of Chicago, USC, London Business School, Melbourne, Nanyang Technological University, and Mannheim. As a faculty in residence of the EAA Doctoral Consortium and organizer or faculty of numerous Ph.D. workshops and (EU-sponsored) training networks (e.g., INTACCT, FIRRE, SPAR), he demonstrates his continued commitment to improving graduate education in Europe. He is an Editor for the EAA Ph.D. Advisory College, an initiative of the European Accounting Association to help early-stage Ph.D. students with their research. In 2020, he was appointed vice-dean of doctoral programs at Frankfurt School and served in this position until 2024.

Laurence van Lent holds a Master’s degree in Economics from the Radboud University Nijmegen (cum laude) and a Ph.D. in Economics from Tilburg University (1999). He was a visiting scholar at the William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Rochester (1996-1998) and a visiting professor at the University of Melbourne (2004), the LMU Center for Advanced Management Studies in Munich (2014), and Columbia Business School in NY (2022). In 2011, he was a visiting fellow of the Initiative on Global Markets at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, where he returned in the Spring of 2019 for another short-term visit. Currently, he is the Visiting Chair Professor of Accounting and Economics at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.