Areas of Expertise (4)
Financial Accounting
Financial Reporting
Auditing
Judgment and Decision Making
Biography
Lisa Koonce holds the Deloitte and Touche Endowed Chair in Accounting (the No. 1-ranked accounting department in the country at both the undergraduate and graduate levels for many years in a row, according to U.S. News and World Report).
Koonce's research and teaching interests include the judgment and decision making implications of financial reporting. She has won an astonishing array of teaching excellence awards--both in number and in quality-- from McCombs, The University of Texas, and UT-System.
Koonce is a prolific financial accounting researcher, having published more than 40 peer-reviewed articles in the leading academic accounting journals such as The Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting Research, and Accounting, Organizations and Society. She has also held editorial positions for the same journals, as well as for the Journal of Behavioral Finance, Accounting Horizons, and Contemporary Accounting Research.
She has won several research awards from the American Accounting Association and the McCombs School of Business.
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Education (3)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Ph.D., Accounting 1990
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: M.A.S, Accounting 1982
Southern Illinois University: B.S.B.A., Accounting 1981
Media Appearances (2)
US News & World college rankings make unfair comparisons
The Daiy Texan
2015-09-15
“The rankings are a great source of pride for me, personally, and the other professors in my department,” said Lisa Koonce, a professor in McCombs’s first-ranked accounting program. “It means we have done a great job and are being recognized for it.” Rankings are also a self-fulfilling prophecy, as in the case of the accounting department, where the best students choose to attend the best institutions.
The Texas 10: Reuben McDaniel and Lisa Koonce
Alcalde online
2013-03-01
Growing up in a small town in Southern Illinois, Lisa Koonce never thought she would attend college, let alone become a professor. She assumed she would be a secretary. “It’s surprising to me still, at this point in my life, that I’m actually a university professor,” Koonce says. “People from my town didn’t do that sort of thing.” Today, Koonce is the Deloitte and Touche Chair in Accounting at UT, where she has taught for 22 years and she’s earned a number of awards, including The University of Texas System Regents’ Teaching Award.
Articles (10)
Example-Based Reasoning and Fact-Weighting Guidance in Accounting Standards
Contemporary Accounting Research
2017-03-01
The provision of examples as implementation guidance is pervasive in accounting standards. Prior research has established that preparers engage in “example‐based reasoning,” a tendency to favor the accounting treatment in an example, even when the example does not exactly match the transaction at hand. In this paper, we investigate whether fact‐weighting guidance counteracts this tendency.
How Do Experienced Users Evaluate Hybrid Financial Instruments?
Journal of Accounting Research
2016-12-01
In this paper, we experimentally test whether the features of hybrid instruments affect the credit‐related judgments of experienced finance professionals, even when the hybrid instruments are already classified as liabilities or equity. Our results suggest that getting the classification right is not of primary importance for these experienced users, as they largely rely on the underlying features of the instrument to make their judgments.
The Effects of Norms on Investor Reactions to Derivative Use
Contemporary Accounting Research
2015-12-01
Prior research indicates that a firm's use of derivatives to manage business risks is viewed favorably by investors. However, these studies do not consider a potentially key factor in this setting—namely, the typical behavior (or norms) regarding derivatives by other firms in the industry or the firm itself. In this paper, we report the results of multiple experiments that test whether norms are influential in affecting investors’ evaluations of firms’ derivatives choices.
Mental Accounting and Disaggregation Based on the Sign and Relative Magnitude of Income Statement Items
The Accounting Review
2014-11-01
We conduct a series of related experiments within the context of compound financial instruments to investigate whether managers' preferences follow the predictions of mental accounting theory; specifically, that presentation preferences vary as a function of the sign and relative magnitude of the income statement items. Results reveal that managers' disaggregation preferences reflect mental accounting.
Do Financial Statement Users Judge Relevance Based on Properties of Reliability?
The Accounting Review
2012-07-01
Via experiments set within the fair value context, Koonce shows that users do not view relevance and reliability as independent constructs. These findings are important because inappropriate assessments of relevance can influence firm valuation.
Investor's Retractions and Corrections of Management Earnings Forecasts
Accounting, Organizations and Society
2011-01-01
This research generally shows that companies' retractions and corrections of a previous erroneous voluntary disclosure have unexpected effects on investor judgment.
Judging the Relevance of Fair Value for Financial Instruments
The Accounting Review
2011-11-01
Koonce research tests if investors' views about fair value are contingent on whether the financial instrument in question is an asset or liability, whether fair values produce gains or losses, and whether the item will or will not be sold/settled soon.
Causal Reasoning in Financial Reporting and Voluntary Disclosure
Accounting, Organizations and Society
2011-05-01
The purpose of this paper is to review key theories from psychology that pertain to causal reasoning and then to identify how these theories can be successfully used by behavioral researchers interested in financial reporting and voluntary disclosure.
Earnings Trend and Performance Relative to Benchmarks: How Consistency Influences their Joint Use
Journal of Accounting Research
2010-09-01
This research shows that investors rely on an earnings measure only when it is consistent over time. It also shows that investors believe earnings trend and benchmark performance both provide information about a firm's future prospects and management's credibility.
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