Philip Berger

Phil Berger served on the faculty of the Wharton School from 1991 – 2002 (including as a tenured Associate Professor from 1998 – 2002) before joining Booth as a tenured Full Professor on July 1, 2002. His research focuses on financial reporting and corporate finance, he has published in all the top peer reviewed accounting and finance journals, and he has been an editor of Journal of Accounting Research for 18 years. Berger has chaired or served on the dissertation committees of many top accounting students from Booth who currently work at such top schools as Harvard, MIT, Wharton, Stanford, Columbia, Yale, NYU, Ohio State, Washington University, UCSD, and others. Having served a three-year term as Deputy Dean for Booth’s part-time MBA programs (evening, weekend, and EMBA), he recently completed five years of serving as the Director of Booth’s Chookaszian Accounting Research Center.

His teaching interests are mainly in accounting for entrepreneurs, financial accounting, and empirical accounting research. His teaching experience covers undergraduate, MBA, executive, and Ph.D. courses. While at Wharton, he won every MBA teaching award that the Wharton School offers. At Chicago Booth, he has been awarded the 2011 Phoenix Prize.

Berger holds Ph.D. and MBA degrees from the University of Chicago as well as undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Saskatchewan, Canada.

Research Interests

• Firm valuation; firm diversification; effects of accounting regulations; quality of accounting disclosures; information intermediaries; organizational design and corporate governance.

Academic Areas

• Accounting

Publications

• With Eli Ofek, "Diversification's Effect on Firm Value," Journal of Financial Economics (1995).
• With Eli Ofek and David Yermack, "Managerial Entrenchment and Capital Structure Decisions," Journal of Finance (1997).
• With Rebecca Hann, "The Impact of SFAS No. 131 on Information and Monitoring," Journal of Accounting Research (2003).
• With Daniel Bens and Steven Monahan, "Discretionary Disclosure in Financial Reporting: An Examination Comparing Internal Firm Data to Externally Reported Segment Data," The Accounting Review (2011).
• "Challenges and opportunities in disclosure research--A discussion of 'the financial reporting environment: review of the recent literature'," Journal of Accounting and Economics (2011).