David Francis Larcker

David Francis Larcker is the James Irvin Miller Professor of Accounting, Emeritus, at Stanford Graduate School of Business, Faculty Director of the school’s Corporate Governance Research Initiative, and a Senior Faculty of the Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance.  He received a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering and a Master of Engineering Management from Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T) in 1972 and 1974, respectively. He went on to complete a Ph.D. in Accounting at the University of Kansas in 1978.

Upon graduation, he began his academic career as an Assistant Professor at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. At Kellogg, Larcker quickly rose to a full professorship in 1984, just six years since graduating from his doctoral studies. His tenure at Northwestern was followed by appointments to the Ernst & Young Professorship of Accounting at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and, later, to his current position at Stanford University in 2005.

Known as a pioneer in the empirical literature on incentive problems and compensation contracts, Larcker’s research interests are broad and span from topics in executive compensation, corporate governance, and managerial accounting to methodological issues in applied econometrics. These research interests have found an expression in over 70 peer-reviewed articles published in premier accounting, finance, economics journals, over 75 thought pieces for the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford, and three books. His contributions have been cited over 100,000 times and have become cornerstones of research in their respective areas. In addition to his prodigious research output, he has given generously of his time to the accounting discipline and its institution.

He has co-authored over 40 manuscripts with doctoral students and young researchers—several of whom have become prominent academics themselves—and he has served on the American Accounting Association’s Doctoral Consortium for almost a decade. He has also served as the AAA’s Distinguished Visiting International Lecturer, a member on the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) committees considering executive stock options and valuation methods, and as an editorial board member of some of our most distinguished journals, such as Accounting, Organizations and Society, The Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Journal of Accounting Research, and Journal of Accounting and Public Policy.

David Francis Larcker is the One Hundred and Eighth member of The Accounting Hall of Fame.