Adam Greiner
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Adam Greiner teaches in the School of Accountancy. He received his PhD in Business Administration (Accounting) from Florida Atlantic University in 2013. His research examines managers’ accounting choices and voluntary disclosures in settings relevant to standard setters, auditors and the capital market. Greiner’s research has appeared in a wide range of academic journals, including Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory; Accounting Horizons; Journal of Accounting, Auditing and Finance; Advances in Accounting; Accounting and Business Research; and Journal of Forensic and Investigative Accounting.
Before entering the doctoral program, he worked at a regional public accounting firm as a senior auditor and in the corporate accounting and reporting division at Wachovia Corporation. His primary teaching interests include intermediate accounting and financial accounting theory. He is a licensed Certified Public Accountant in North Carolina.
What do you study? How did you become interested in the field?
I was in public accounting for three years, then corporate banking for two before entering my PhD program. My years in the field provided great institutional insights and some very practical research questions, which later became some of my first published studies, and this path gave some credibility to the fact that practical questions can lead to worthy research topics.
I became intrigued by earnings management, which concerns managers influencing net income to meet their financial reporting objectives. These actions can often meet immediate needs of the firm, but they can be myopic decisions that lead to long-term consequences. So, a lot of my studies explore drivers of earnings management behaviors as well as consequences of those decisions.
What are you researching currently?
I’m still looking at earnings management settings, but my research has shifted more towards managerial characteristics that influence those choices, specifically political ideology. Right now I’m working on a study about CEOs’ political ideologies, which capture risk preferences and thus influence the extent to which their accounting choices are more or less informative about firm performance. I’m also working with Lorenzo Patelli on another study involving the impact of CEO political ideology on the relationship between shareholder proposals and executives’ linguistic complexity on earnings conference calls. This idea stemmed from an audit fee study that he and I conducted to explore audit risk via textual analysis of CEO letters to shareholders. Our current study aims to further understand factors that impact information process costs that the market faces when managers obfuscate company activity.
So as I’m diving further into this idea of political ideology, I’m finding that there are a lot of intersections to study: ideology, communications and shareholder activism. And so back to earnings management, managerial disclosures can offer a rich environment for investors to understand the costs and implications of these ideological characteristics.
How do you bring your research into the classroom?
When I came to DU, a seasoned professor told me that it’s good to keep one foot in academics and one foot in practice, and that idea has helped in both my research and my teaching efforts. When thinking about research studies, I ask, how can I bring their practical implications into the classroom?
Earnings management is prevalent and it’s important to introduce students to the idea that there are good sides and bad sides to the choices that managers make. You hear a lot about bad behavior in newspapers (but rarely if ever about good behavior) when it comes to earnings management, so you have to be careful when reading the business press. My Financial Accounting Theory class takes a deep dive into these perspectives, and I use earnings management behaviors to motivate topics in my other accounting classes. Doing so I think helps students develop a healthy skepticism about the information they consume which is skill they need to be effective accountants.
We are teaching a really socially-conscious generation, and I think it’s important that we help them understand the role that our disciplines play in society. Accounting plays a major role in supporting the economy, in terms of providing information that helps leaders make good decisions and minimizes conflicts of interest. With bad information, they can make inefficient business decisions that can flow into fewer employment opportunities, less innovation, and frankly less well-off communities. Ultimately, I hope we can form students to think critically about the dynamic and exciting marketplace they face and be good stewards of resources.
How would you like to see your research impact the world?
I think where it can affect the most is corporate governance and investment choices. Informing corporate boards and investors about implications of managers’ behaviors in the firm has many benefits, and it is crucial to the capital market that their incentives are aligned. If political ideology explains managers’ risk preferences, then monitoring mechanisms can be implemented accordingly.
More broadly, I like to think that accounting research plays a critical role in facilitating a well-functioning capital market. Providing measures of firm performance that inform users of financial statements contributes to better investment decisions, which benefits society through the efficient allocation of resources. If we don’t have healthy businesses from the largest to the smallest, then we experience a challenging economy and difficult market environment. With contributions in the areas of managerial characteristics, managers’ accounting choices and information processing costs, I hope my research can be a part of the discussion.