Observations by a German PhD Student...

Background: Matthias Mahlendorf, a PhD student from Germany, wrote an article about his experience at the PhD Consortium and ABO Conference. The article will be published (in German and in a slightly longer version that contains more detailed explanations for German readers) in the Zeitschrift für Controlling & Management (ZfCM). The intention is to give an understanding of the ABO Research Conference to the German accounting community. ZfCM is the leading German journal for Management Accounting and Control, with respect to its scientific reputation. The journal addresses both, academics and practitioners.

Once a year, behavioral accounting researchers meet at the ABO Research Conference. This year, the conference took place in Portland Oregon, from 6th to 7th of October. Most researchers came from the United States, but some participants traveled a long way (e.g. from Canada, Australia, Singapore, Israel and Germany) in order to attend this small, but exquisite conference. Several participants called the ABO Research Conference one of the most interesting and probably the most enjoyable conference throughout the year, even before the conference started.

In the run-up of the conference, a Doctoral Consortium had been organized. Moderated by Brian Church, professor at Georgia Institute of Technology and editor of Behavioral Research in Accounting (BRIA), experienced researchers gave an overview of Behavioral Research and advice for "Starting your career" to the Ph.D. students.

The official part of the conference began with a speech by Tim Louwers, president of the ABO section. Afterwards, Joshua Herbold received the Outstanding Dissertation Award, for his works on "Determinants of Error Attribution in Accounting Estimates."

The main part of the conference comprised 18 talks with subsequent discussion. Most presentations covered accounting and auditing issues, one session focused on Taxation. Methodically, most of the research used experiments, which is typical for the ABO section and behavioral research in general.

Within the accounting research, several presentations addressed behavioral effects of incentives. Another prominent topic were the effects of disclosures. In Auditing, talks covered themes like the impact of affect on auditors' judgment, cultural differences and dysfunctional auditor behavior. The Taxation presentations dealt with individuals' tax evasion judgments and tax professionals' ethical environments.

The second day started with a highlight, the panel discussion with Jesse Dillard, Judy Rayburn, Dan Stone and Arnold Wright on the question "Do AAA journals represent the diversity of accounting research?" The relevance of this topic, which had already been discussed at the AAA Annual Meeting in summer 2006 in Washington, can be illustrated with the growing dominance of financial accounting. Although Financial Accountants are a minority among all accounting researchers, they publish the majority of all articles in many relevant journals. At the same time, the percentage of non-financial dissertations has reduced from 60% to 30% during the last decades. Disconcerting facts for all non-financial accounting researchers, indeed.

On Saturday, Theodore Mock, from the University of Southern California and the University of Maastricht received the ABO Lifetime Contribution Award. His acceptance speech dealt with "Secrets of success? Some hypotheses as to what seems to work and what doesn't." Besides quite obvious success factors, such as persistence, Theodore Mock mentioned some surprising factors, too. Looking back to the early days of his career, Mr. Mock saw some advantage in not knowing too much about accounting. This gave him the freedom to explore new paths in accounting research.

Being an accountant, another success factor close at hand, is, to keep record and evaluate one's own performance. Mr. Mock lives up to what he teaches. For several years, he measured his own daily performance on a 10 point scale. For each goal, one point could be achieved, whereby the goals comprised scientific elements (e.g. writing one page for a journal article), as well as private elements (e.g. spending time with his wife).

Having attended the two conference days, I can completely agree upon the view, that this conference is one of the most interesting and enjoyable. The number of participant (around 90) is manageable and allows for easy personal contact, the atmosphere is very friendly and cooperative, and the speakers and participants are excellent. To sum up, this has been a great experience. Next year, the conference will take place in Philadelphia on 19th of October 2007 and I'm looking forward to it.