The Ph.D. program with a specialization in Accounting will prepare the graduate students by having a thorough understanding of the growing academic and practical accounting body of knowledge. In addition, it aims to develop scholars able to publish in peer-reviewed journals.
• Required courses (9 Credit Hours):
ACCT 800 Analytical and Empirical Research in Financial Accounting and Reporting
The course introduces students to both analytical and empirical research in financial accounting. The course will discuss the variety of topics and methods addressed by accounting scholars and will seek to provide insight into the characteristics that distinguish the highest quality research. The class is designed to help students to better evaluate research in workshops, develop new ideas, and do empirical tests. Students also are exposed to a wide range of empirical research methodologies, including large sample archival research, small sample nonparametric methods, and field-based research.
ACCT 801 Contemporary Issues in Management Accounting
This course explores analytical and empirical research. It focuses on studying management control and performance measurement issues largely from an economics perspective using archival methods. This course, required of accounting doctoral students, covers contemporary research in managerial accounting. We review major trends in analytical and empirical research, including agency theory. Students are required to design a research project around a managerial accounting question.
ACCT 802 Doctoral Seminar in Accounting Theory
This course has been designed to research in accounting theory. In addition to discussing accounting in its familiar role as an income measurement tool and as an input to decisions under uncertainty, this course study how efficient markets, compensation practices, debt covenants, and other broad economic consequences impact accounting policy makers and those who make accounting choices. This course covers the following topics in the realm of accounting theory: accounting information and the capital markets, accounting method choice, accounting regulations, economics of information, politicization and virtualization of accounting theory, survey and empirical research in accounting.
• Elective courses (6 Credit Hours):
ACCT 803 Issues in Auditing and Assurance
This course is a survey of recent empirical research in auditing. This course introduces a significant number of the research questions and methods in empirical research in auditing. Every Ph.D. student in accounting to gain some appreciation for the complexity of designing an empirical project, the questions that arise in data collection, the sensitivity of results to choice of statistical techniques, and the difficulty of communicating technical material accurately and efficiently.
ACCT 804 Contemporary Accounting Information Systems Issues
The course explores the technological aspects of accounting knowledge and practices. This course explains why Accounting Information Systems are valuable when making business decisions, and provides a basic overview of how IT infrastructure works. Accountants play an important role in designing accounting information systems. A new role of the accountant’s community includes understanding how accounting information systems work in order to measure how cost-effective the system is performing, assess reliability, and to engage in continuous improvement of the system. Students will be required to solve cases utilizing problem solving techniques and critical thinking.
ACCT 805 Corporate Governance and Accounting Ethics
The objective of the course is to enable the doctoral students to explore interesting issues and research questions in corporate governance finance. The students will be introduced several advanced topics and current and contemporary issues in corporate governance and accounting ethics and expose them to some current issues. An emphasis will be put on the link between empirical and theoretical work, and how to critically think and analyze the corporate governance and accounting ethics issues. The course will have weekly seminars held and the students will prepare and discuss a broad range of prescribed readings. Each seminar addresses methodological themes as well as substantive research material.
ACCT 806 Special Topics in Accounting Research
This course will offer exploration of a special topic, issue, or trend in the accounting (e.g. Taxation, public sector accounting, gas and oil accounting, accounting education, Islamic accounting, and others).