Accounting Program

The Accounting PhD program is designed to produce great scholars and educators by providing a solid foundation in both the theoretical and empirical tools of accounting research. Your program of study will be personalized to leverage your background and research interests.

Through coursework, research seminars, and individual original research, you’ll demonstrate your mastery of accounting through summer papers and your dissertation. The Accounting faculty will both supervise your individual research project and engage in collaborative co-authored research.

Overview of Program Requirements

Our Accounting PhD program requires you to complete:

  • Area-specific requirements
    • Course requirements as outlined in the Accounting curriculum page
    • A first-year summer research paper and a second-year research paper
    • Qualifying exams in empirical and analytical accounting research
    • Teaching and research assistantship
  • Preliminary exam
  • Dissertation thesis proposal
  • Final dissertation defense exam

Check out the Curriculum

The same Team Fuqua culture that permeates all of Duke’s professional business programs is prominent in the Accounting PhD program.  Innovation through collaboration is our defining characteristic.  Our accounting faculty possesses unmatched topical and methodological span, which we leverage through co-authorships with one another and co-teaching of our PhD seminars.  In addition to involving PhD students in our collaborative research process, students also have access to cutting edge classes in Fuqua’s Finance area, Duke’s Economics department, and the course catalog of our neighboring university, UNC Chapel Hill. 

Accounting Research

Our Accounting faculty are engaged with a wide array of accounting research topics.  Some of the more recent topics they are researching include:

  • Properties of accounting numbers
  • Role of accounting in asset pricing
  • Accounting standards
  • Compensation and managerial career concerns
  • Debt contracting
  • Taxes
  • Financial analysts
  • Real effects of information disclosure
  • Accounting and the macro economy
  • Firm communication
  • Corporate governance
  • Managerial traits
Accounting Recent Placements
  • Zeqiong Huang (2016) - Yale University
  • Mani Sethuraman (2016) - Cornell University
  • Thomas Steffen (2015) - Yale University
  • Alex Young (2015) - North Dakota State University
  • Dirk Black (2014) - Dartmouth College
  • Ning Zhang (2013) - Queens University
  • Amanda Gonzalez (2013) - University of Nebraska, Lincoln
  • Gianfranco Siciliano (2013) - Bocconi University
  • Zhenhua Chen (2012) - Tulane University
  • Bin Li (2012) - University of Texas, Dallas

 

Additional Information about the Accounting Area