Philip G. Berger
· Wallman Family Professor of AccountingUniversity of Chicago · Accounting
Active 1993–2025
About
Philip G. Berger is the Wallman Family Professor of Accounting at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He served on the faculty of the Wharton School from 1991 to 2002, including as a tenured Associate Professor, before joining Booth as a tenured Full Professor on July 1, 2002. His research focuses on financial reporting and corporate finance, and he has published in all the top peer-reviewed accounting and finance journals. Berger has been an editor of the Journal of Accounting Research for 23 years and has chaired or served on the dissertation committees of many top accounting students from Booth, who now work at leading institutions such as MIT, Wharton, Stanford, Columbia, Yale, NYU, Ohio State, Washington University, UCSD, among others. He was awarded the 2025 FARS Distinguished PhD Mentoring Award. Berger has held leadership roles including Deputy Dean for Booth’s part-time MBA programs and Director of Booth’s Chookaszian Accounting Research Center. His teaching interests encompass accounting for entrepreneurs, financial accounting, and empirical accounting research, with experience teaching undergraduate, MBA, executive, and Ph.D. courses. He has received numerous teaching awards, including the 2011 Phoenix Prize at Chicago Booth.
Research topics
- Political Science
- Business
- Accounting
- Actuarial science
- Economics
- Law
- Finance
- Management
Selected publications
The Effects of Mandatory Supplier Finance Program Disclosure on Credit Markets
SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01
preprintOpen access1st authorCorrespondingSupply chain shocks and firm productivity: The role of reporting quality
Journal of Accounting and Economics · 2025-09-16
article1st authorBeyond the Twilight Zone: The Restructuring and Resurrection of Zombie Firms
SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 2 citations
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingSSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingWithin-Firm Information Inequality and Employee Wage Disparity
SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingCompetitive Shocks and Firm Productivity: The Role of Accounting Information Quality
SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 3 citations
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingSSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingEmployer and Employee Responses to Generative AI: Early Evidence
SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 10 citations
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingBreaking it Down: Economic Consequences of Disaggregated Cost Disclosures
Management Science · 2023 · 44 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Accounting
- Economics
- Business
Motivated by the Financial Accounting Standards Board’s project on the disaggregation of income statement expenses, we study a Korean rule change that allowed firms to withhold a previously mandated disaggregation of cost of sales (CoS). We find that after withholding, firms’ profitability increases by 1.6 percentage points. Our industry-focused results suggest that withholding affects profitability by reducing the transfer of competitive information to peer firms. We then document a range of evidence consistent with the idea that firms withhold disaggregated CoS to protect cost innovations from rivals. First, we construct a novel measure of firms’ cost-innovative potential and show that it predicts withholding and subsequent profitability gains under the voluntary disclosure regime. Second, we document efficiency gains following the withholding of disaggregated CoS. Third, our survey experiment of 1,257 U.S. public firm managers shows that they would reduce investments in process/cost innovations if they were required to disaggregate CoS. Our study highlights to standard setters and academics that CoS disaggregation entails operational consequences for firms. This paper was accepted by Brian Bushee, accounting. Funding: The authors acknowledge financial support from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and the Southern Methodist University Cox School of Business. Supplemental Material: The data files and online appendix available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4780 .
Dynamic CEO-Board Cultural Proximity
SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 5 citations
articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
Frequent coauthors
- 13 shared
Eli Ofek
New York University
- 8 shared
Rebecca N. Hann
University of Maryland, College Park
- 6 shared
Andrew W. Alford
Goldman Sachs (United States)
- 3 shared
Jung Ho Choi
Stanford University
- 3 shared
Steven J. Monahan
University of Utah
- 3 shared
Sorabh Tomar
Southern Methodist University
- 3 shared
Daniel A. Bens
- 2 shared
Charles Ham
Indiana University Bloomington
Education
Ph.D.
University of Chicago
Other
University of Chicago
B.A.
University of Saskatchewan
Awards & honors
- 2011 Phoenix Prize
- 2025 FARS Distinguished PhD Mentoring Award
- Honoree of the Distinguished Alumni Award
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