Devin Shanthikumar

Professor Devin Shanthikumar is an Associate Professor in the Accounting group, and is the Accounting Area Coordinator. She teaches undergraduate, MBA, and executive-level courses in Managerial Accounting. Prior to joining The Paul Merage School of Business, Shanthikumar served on the faculty at the Harvard Business School (HBS), where she taught both Financial Accounting and Managerial Accounting for MBAs, and wrote cases which are used in accounting courses across the country.

Her research focuses on the investing decisions of individual investors and the impact that these investors have on the market, as well as on the role of financial intermediaries and information sources, such as analysts, the press, and the Internet. For example, Shanthikumar has examined whether small and large investors each account for analysts’ conflicts of interest, the mistakes that small investors make when reacting to patterns of earnings performance, such as streaks of positive earnings surprises, and the role that “local bias” plays in investors’ Google search behavior, and the effects this local bias has on the stock market around earnings announcements. Her research has been published in top journals, including The Accounting Review, the Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, and Management Science.

Shanthikumar earned her PhD in Business Administration with a focus in Finance from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, where she received the Jaedicke Merit Award for outstanding academic performance. She earned her BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science with Highest Honors from the University of California, Berkeley. Shanthikumar also completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard Business School, and is a graduate of one of Harvard Business School’s executive education programs, the General Manager Program, and one of Harvard’s teaching-focused short programs, the Colloquium on Participant Centered Learning.

Publications

• Private Firm Investment and Public Peer Misvaluation, (with Brad Badertscher and Siew Hong Teoh), The Accounting Review, forthcoming 2019.
• Local Bias in Google Search and the Market Response around Earnings Announcements (with Sabrina S. Chi), The Accounting Review, 2017, 92:4, 115-143.
• Do Security Analysts Speak In Two Tongues? (with Ulrike Malmendier), Review of Financial Studies, 2014, 27:5, 1287-1322. (Lead article)
• The Stock Selection And Performance Of Buy Side Analysts, (with Boris Groysberg, Paul Healy and George Serafeim), Management Science, 2013, 59:5, 1062-1075.
• Consecutive Earnings Surprises: Small And Large Trader Reactions, The Accounting Review, 2012, 87:5, 1709-1736.
• Are Small Investors Naive About Incentives? (with Ulrike Malmendier), Journal of Financial Economics, 2007, 85:2, 457-489.

News and Honors

• Prof. Shanthikumar’s research has been cited in publications such as The Economist, The Washington Post and Bloomberg Businessweek
• Best Paper Prize, Center for Corporate Reporting and Governance 2016 Annual Conference, for “The Informedness of Retail Investors: Evidence from Trading around Fraud vs. Non-Fraud Restatements”
• Winner, Hellman Faculty Fellowship, Harvard Business School Faculty Award (2006-2010)
• Best Paper Prize, Center for Corporate Reporting and Governance 2008 Annual Conference, for “After a Restatement: Long-Run Market and Investor Response”
• Jaedicke Merit Award for outstanding academic performance in the PhD program, Stanford Graduate School of Business, 2001-2002, 2003-2004