Shyam Sunder to Head American Accounting Association

New Haven, Conn., August 15, 2005—Shyam Sunder, the James L. Frank Professor of Accounting, Economics and Finance at the Yale School of Management, has been named president-elect of the American Accounting Association. This is a three-year appointment to the Association’s Executive Committee. His post as president begins in August 2006.

The American Accounting Association is the premier forum for scholarly interchange in accounting. With 8,000 members throughout the world, it promotes worldwide excellence in accounting education, research, and practice.

Professor Sunder’s affiliation with the Association has spanned more than three decades. He has served as Distinguished International Visiting Lecturer (2000), Presidential Research Lecturer (1999), and Director of Research (1988-90). In addition, he was honored with the American Accounting Association-American Institute of CPA’s Notable Contributions to Accounting Literature Award (1982 and 1998) and Manuscript Award (1975).

A member of the Yale School of Management faculty since 1999, Sunder is a leading accounting theorist and experimental economist. His research contributions include financial reporting, statistical theory of valuation, economic theory of accounting and organizations, dissemination of information in security markets, design of electronic markets, experimental exploration of learning and expectations in monetary economies, minimal rationality economics and Japanese business and accounting. He pioneered the use of experimental methods in financial economics and macroeconomics and the use of programmed traders, known as zero-intelligence traders, to explore the structural properties of markets. Sunder developed CapLab, computer software used to teach financial decision making, which is used by many universities.

He is the author of three books including Theory of Accounting and Control, co-author of Experimental Methods: A Primer for Economists, and has edited several volumes, including Japanese Style of Business Accounting. Sunder has published more than 100 articles in premier research journals of accounting, economics, and finance.

Sunder, a native of India, attended IIT Kharagpur and graduated at the top of his class from the Indian Railways Institute of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering in Jamalpur. He received his masters and PhD degrees in Industrial Administration from Carnegie Mellon University. He is committed to improving management education in India. He guest lectures to MBA and PhD students and faculty at the Indian Institutes of Management and other universities, and advises their administrations to help them become world-class institutions and meet the managerial needs of Indian economy. In 2005, he was named the Honorary Research Director of the Yale-GLIM Management Research Center at the Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai, in a plan to help build world-class management research capacity in India.

Before joining Yale, Sunder taught at Carnegie Mellon, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Chicago. He has held visiting professorships at the Chinese University of Hong Kong; National Taiwan University; the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University; the Research Institute for Economics and Business Administration at the University of Kobe, Japan; the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain; the California Institute of Technology; and the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, India.