“Many still see accountants as the proverbial bean counters who crunch numbers to produce financial statements. This is far from reality. Accounting information is present throughout society. Many important decisions are based on accounting information.”
Professor Elmar Venter, Associate Professor in the Department of Accounting says there are many misconceptions about accountants. An example is his PhD thesis that shows how the mandatory disaggregation of earnings into components is useful to investors and makes possible the improved pricing of earnings components.
Since 2014 he has been researching the economic consequences of integrated report quality (IRQ) with Professor Mary Barth of Stanford University, and Professor Steven Cahan and Dr Lily Chen of the University of Auckland. They examine whether IRQ is associated with stock liquidity, firm value, expected future cash flow, and the cost of capital. The study is motivated by the global interest shown by firms, investors and regulators in the work of the International Integrated Reporting Council. Their study has already received considerable public attention, and has been featured in the CFO Magazine and the Chartered Institute of Management Accountant’s global magazine, Financial Management. The study was one of the top ten most downloaded papers on the Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN) in the corporate finance and governance category (December 2015-January 2016).
Professor Venter regards networking as key to an academic career. “Research is not something that happens when you are in an office on your own. One has to expose one’s work to feedback. At first this is daunting because the peer review system has not been designed to make you feel good, but to improve your work.” He is fortunate to have been invited as one of only five globally emerging accounting and finance scholars to join the Deloitte International Association for Accounting Education and Research Scholar Programme, which has enabled him to grow his networks and to present his work to leading accounting and finance scholars at conferences in France, Germany, Italy, Romania and the USA.
