Ray Ball

Ray Ball studies corporate disclosure, earnings and stock prices, international accounting and finance, market efficiency and investment strategies. He is coauthor of "An Empirical Evaluation of Accounting Income Numbers," an article published in the Journal of Accounting Research in 1968 that won the American Accounting Association''s inaugural award for seminal contributions in account literature. This article revolutionized the understanding of the impact of corporate disclosure on share prices, and of earnings releases in particular. It laid the foundation for much of the modern accounting literature. Ball also is the author of "Anomalies in Relationships between Securities'' Yields and Yield surrogates," published in the Journal of Financial Economics in 1978, the first academic reference to systematic anomalies in the theory of efficient markets.

Ball is a member of the Board of Trustees of Harbor Funds and Chair of its Audit Committee. He also serves on the Advisory Group for the Financial Reporting Faculty of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW). He has served on the Financial Accounting Standards Advisory Council (FASAC) of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), and on the Shadow Financial Regulation Committee.

Ball served as the Wesray Professor in Business Administration at the William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Rochester prior to rejoining Chicago Booth in 2000. He has served as a professor at the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management, and has taught at the London Business School, the Australian Graduate School of Management, and the University of Queensland.

He received a bachelor''s degree in accounting from the University of New South Wales in Australia, and an MBA in 1968 and a PhD in economics in 1972 from Chicago Booth. Ball was awarded honorary degrees by the Helsinki School of Economics, the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, the University of Queensland, the University of London, and the University of New South Wales. He was elected to the Accounting Hall of Fame in 2009. The American Accounting Association honored him as its 2012 Presidential Scholar (together with Philip Brown) and in 2014 with its FARS Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2015, the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales made him its eighth Honorary Member.

His interests include reading, cooking, wine, and clocks. Ball has been a Chicago Bulls fan for over 40 years.

Other Interests

Reading, cooking, wine, clocks, still a Bulls fan.

Research Activities

Financial reporting and disclosure; earnings and stock prices; international accounting and finance; market efficiency; the institutions of a market economy.

Publications

With Philip Brown, "An Empirical Evaluation of Accounting Income Numbers," Journal of Accounting Research (1968), which received the American Accounting Association's inaugural award for Seminal Contributions to the Accounting Literature. "Anomalies in Relationships Between Securities' Yields and Yield-Surrogates," Journal of Financial Economics (1978).

With S.P. Kothari and J. Shanken, "Problems in Measuring Portfolio Performance: An Application to Contrarian Investment Strategies," Journal of Financial Economics (1995).

With A. Robin and J.S. Wu, "Incentives Versus Standards: Properties of Accounting Income in Four East Asian Countries," Journal of Accounting and Economics (2003).

“Market and Political/Regulatory Perspectives on the Recent Accounting Scandals,” Journal of Accounting Research (2009).