About

Ravi Bapna is the Curtis L. Carlson Chair Professor in Business Analytics and Information Systems and serves as the Academic Director of the Carlson Analytics Lab at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management. He is closely affiliated with the Carlson School's MS in Business Analytics program and the Carlson Analytics Lab, where graduate students study a broad range of data analysis techniques and apply them to real business problems. These students are skilled in exploratory data visualization, predictive analytics techniques, programming, data engineering, machine learning methods, and more, emerging as data science professionals. Partner organizations have the opportunity to work with these talented students while supporting the educational mission of the programs.

Research topics

• Accounting
• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Business

Selected publications

• Can Institutional Constraints Curb Innate Personality Traits? A Study of Audit Engagement Partners

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024 · 1 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Business
  • Psychology
  • Social psychology
  PublisherDOI

• Valuation Implications of Unconditional Accounting Conservatism: Evidence from Analysts' Target Prices

  Contemporary Accounting Research · 2018-10-26 · 15 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  ABSTRACT We examine whether financial analysts understand the valuation implications of unconditional accounting conservatism when forecasting target prices. While accounting conservatism affects reported earnings, conservatism per se does not have an effect on the present value of future cash flows. We examine whether analysts adjust for the effect of conservatism included in their earnings forecasts when using these forecasts to estimate target prices. We find that signed target price errors (actual minus forecast) have a significant positive association with the degree of conservatism in forward earnings, suggesting that target prices are biased due to accounting conservatism. Cross‐sectional analysis suggests that more sophisticated analysts and superior long‐term forecasters adjust for conservatism to a greater extent than other analysts. In additional analyses, we explore the mechanism through which conservatism leads to bias in target prices. We first show that analysts' earnings forecasts are negatively associated with the degree of conservatism; that is, analysts include the effect of unconditional conservatism in their earnings forecasts. Based on alternative earnings‐based valuation models that analysts may use, our evidence suggests that analysts fail to appropriately adjust their valuation multiple for the effect of conservatism included in their earnings forecasts when using these forecasts to derive target prices. As a consequence, we find that, for extreme changes in conservatism, the bias in analysts' target prices due to conservatism leads to a distortion of market prices. The evidence highlights the concern that analysts may not appreciate the valuation implications of conservative accounting which could inhibit price discovery.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Credit Default Swaps and Managers’ Voluntary Disclosure

  Journal of Accounting Research · 2017-12-26 · 120 citations

  article

  ABSTRACT We investigate how the availability of traded credit default swaps (CDSs) affects the referenced firms’ voluntary disclosure choices. CDSs enable lenders to hedge their credit risk exposure, weakening their incentives to monitor borrowers. We predict that reduced lender monitoring in turn leads shareholders to intensify their monitoring and demand increased voluntary disclosure from managers. Consistent with this expectation, we find that managers are more likely to issue earnings forecasts and forecast more frequently when traded CDSs reference their firms. We further find a stronger impact of CDS availability on firm disclosure when (1) lenders have higher ability and propensity to hedge credit risk using CDSs, and (2) lender monitoring incentives and monitoring strength are weaker. Consistent with an increase in shareholder demand for public information disclosure induced by a reduction in lender monitoring, we find a stronger effect of CDSs on voluntary disclosure for firms with higher institutional ownership and stronger corporate governance. Overall, our findings suggest that firms with traded CDS contracts enhance their voluntary disclosure to offset the effect of reduced monitoring by CDS‐protected lenders.

  PublisherDOI

• Fair Value Accounting: Consequences of Booking Market-Driven Goodwill Impairment

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2014-01-01 · 16 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Active CDS Trading and Managerss Voluntary Disclosure

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2014-01-01 · 23 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Valuation Implications of Accounting Conservatism

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2013-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Do Analysts Understand the Valuation Implications of Accounting Conservatism when Forecasting Target Prices

  Institutional Knowledge (InK) - Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University (Singapore Management University) · 2012-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Conservatism in earnings does not have a direct impact on the present value of future cash flows. This paper examines whether financial analysts correctly undo the effect of accounting conservatism incorporated in their own earnings forecasts in arriving at their target price forecasts. Based on prior findings, we consider alternative valuation models/heuristics that may be used by analysts to estimate target prices, e.g. the forward P/E and the PEG ratio. Our evidence suggests that analysts fail to fully undo the effect of accounting conservatism embedded in their forecasts of earnings and earnings growth when estimating their target price forecasts. More sophisticated analysts undo the effect of conservatism to a greater extent than other analysts, although their target price forecasts also exhibit conservatism-induced bias. In contrast, the market on average appears to correctly unravel the conservatism in future earnings when pricing securities. However, for extreme levels of conservatism, our evidence suggests that the under/over-statement of target prices leads to a distortion of market prices.

  PublisherOA PDF

• Timeliness of Analysts' Forecasts: The Information Content of Delayed Forecasts

  Contemporary Accounting Research · 2012-11-29 · 54 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Wiley in Contemporary Accounting Research.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Detection of Channel Stuffing

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2011-01-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• The Conservatism Principle and the Asymmetric Timeliness of Earnings: An Event‐Based Approach*

  Contemporary Accounting Research · 2011-10-25 · 69 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract We test the asymmetric timeliness hypothesis by using information in extreme events as a measure of good/bad news. Our focus on extreme events is motivated by two arguments. First, the accounting concept of materiality in conjunction with litigation risk influences managers and auditors to make more conservative choices with respect to material events. Second, focusing on extreme shocks minimizes the probability that accounting slack may obscure the effect of asymmetric timeliness (Beaver and Ryan 2005). We identify individual events using short‐window extreme returns, since long‐window returns would aggregate the effect of multiple events and thus limit our ability to detect the asymmetry. Taken together, these features of our research design provide a more powerful test of asymmetric timeliness. Consistent with prior studies, we document that the correlation between bad news and concurrent earnings is significantly higher than that between good news and concurrent earnings. Our analysis of extreme events also enables us to document higher correlation of good news with earnings two or more quarters ahead. This is in contrast to prior studies that were unable to document asymmetry in the relation between returns and subsequent earnings in the opposite direction to that between returns and concurrent earnings. Our paper contributes to the growing literature on conservatism by modifying the Basu methodology to enhance the power of the test of asymmetric timeliness.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Rajdeep Singh

  Punjabi University

  12 shared

• Ramgopal Venkataraman

  The University of Texas at Arlington

  11 shared

• Alexander Nekrasov

  University of Illinois Chicago

  11 shared

• Jae Bum Kim

  Seoul National University

  7 shared

• Somnath Das

  7 shared

• Haiwen Zhang

  University of Minnesota System

  6 shared

• Zining Li

  University of Florida

  5 shared

• Baohua Xin

  University of Toronto

  5 shared

Awards & honors

• 6.0 Club for Teaching Excellence, Haas School of Business, U…
• Pacesetter's Award for Best Undergraduate Teacher, Fisher Co…