When Blake Phillips began his doctorate in finance in 2009, he was asked to declare a focus. With previous degrees in biology and forestry and an interest in conservation, he zeroed in on sustainable finance.
The School of Accounting and Finance (SAF) caught up with Andres Perez-Vilarino (MAcc ’19) to discuss his career post-graduation, and to learn how he has leveraged his education and passions to help inform his role.
More than 30 nominations submitted for the 2023 Arts Awards for Excellence in Service, Teaching, and Research posed an especially tough challenge for members of the Arts Honours and Awards (AHA) committee this spring. So many outstanding members of the Arts community inspired their chairs, supervisors, and colleagues to put names forward as nominees to recognize their contributions and achievements. Today, Dean Sheila Ager and the AHA committee are happy to share the results.
Wenqian Hu’s paper Trust Versus Rewards: Revisiting Managerial Discretion in Incomplete Contracts was awarded the Lazaridis Institute Prize for the best paper on accounting issues relevant to technology firms. The paper finds that an algorithm-generated bonus allocation scheme improves employee productivity, compared with human managers’ bonus allocation.
In fast-paced and often rapidly changing work environments, employers continue to seek new and improved ways to recognize employees in the workplace. However, new research from the University of Waterloo suggests that public peer recognition may backfire by enabling comparisons among employees, and these comparisons may make some employees feel unfairly treated.
Krista Fiolleau, associate professor in the School of Accounting and Finance (SAF) has recently published a chapter titled “The professional responsibility of accountants as re-defined by the inclusion of the NOCLAR standard in the Code of Ethics” within the Research Handbook on Accounting Ethics alongside co-authors Pier-Luc Nappert from Université Laval and Linda Thorne from the Schulich School of Business. NOCLAR, an acronym meaning non-compliance with laws and regulations is discussed extensively throughout the chapter.
At the School of Accounting and Finance (SAF), students are encouraged to go above and beyond their studies to enhance their learning outside the classroom through attending conferences and competitions. On March 4, a group of SAF students competed at the Association of Canadian Intercollegiate Investment Clubs (ACIIC) pitch competition. The team, comprised of students from different disciplines including Accounting and Financial Management, Computer Science, and Software Engineering, came in third place at ACIIC’s annual stock pitch competition.
From becoming the first member of her family to graduate from university, Ranjini Jha now educates other students as a professor of finance at the University of Waterloo.
Currently, Ho works as an associate in private equity at Brookfield Asset Management and he attributes the start of building his investor mindset to his experience at the University of Waterloo with the Student Investment Fund (SIF). SIF gave him and other SAF students the unique opportunity to invest with real money and get hands-on-training in equity valuation and portfolio management with guidance from industry experts and faculty mentors. This taught him about value investing that he then applied to his co-op role as private equity analystat the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and when competing in the CFA Institute Research Challenge.
Mingyue Zhang is an assistant professor of accounting at the School of Accounting and Finance at the University of Waterloo.
She earned her PhD in Accounting from the University of Toronto (Rotman School of Management) and Master of Professional Accounting from Singapore Management University. She is also an affiliate of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants.(ACCA)