Shyam Sunder Named President of the American Accounting Association

New Haven, Conn., August 9, 2006 -- Shyam Sunder, the James L. Frank Professor of Accounting, Economics and Finance at the Yale School of Management, today begins his term as the 2006-2007 president of the American Accounting Association (AAA).

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.

In his presidential address, delivered today at the AAA 2006 Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., Sunder spoke about the “Imagined Worlds of Accounting.” He said, “Accounting scholarship examines the way things were and are, and how they might be. The theme of the 2007 AAA meeting will be to celebrate and explore the power of accounting in both these domains.”

Professor Sunder’s affiliation with the AAA 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, 1998) and the Manuscript Award (1975).

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.

In addition to his teaching and research at Yale, Sunder served as director of the Yale Center for Corporate Governance and Performance during its first year of start-up activity in 2005. The Center explores the role of corporate governance to better enable corporations both to be competitive in their markets and to contribute to society. He recently stepped down as director to focus on his responsibilities as president of the American Accounting Association.

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 one hundred articles in premier research journals of accounting, economics, and finance.

Sunder, a native of India, 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 in 1999, 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.