Accounting and taxation

Our Accounting and Taxation department aims to undertake research that provides unique insights and understanding, as well as making a difference to the teaching and practice of accounting around the world. We focus on 4 main disciplinary areas:

financial accounting
managerial accounting
taxation
auditing

Our faculty have a broad range of research interests and contributions which include:

innovations in accounting education
strategic and managerial aspects of e-learning
student persistence and achievement in accounting
incentives and motivating performance
corporate governance
strategy and management accounting
social, ethical, and environmental disclosures
corporate social responsibility

Sample research projects in progress

Climate-Related Financial Disclosure (Dr. Aris Solomon)

In 2017, the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures produced a report on the issue, which encouraged companies and institutional investors to disclose their environmental impact in financial terms with particular reference to risks. Dr. Aris Solomon from Accounting and Taxation is in the process of surveying the largest pension funds in Canada to see what interest they have in requiring companies they invest in to disclose climate related-financial information and in disclosing their own. Dr. Solomon has applied for funding from the CPA Canada Educational Foundation in order to undertake interviews senior managers at the pension funds, using an informed grounded theory methodology and analysing data using specialist software from NVivo. This research will provide valuable new insights into the way in which climate-related financial information is reported.

Rethinking Management Education (Dr. Deborah Hurst & Dr. Mark Morpurgo)

Business leaders around the world have long claimed that undergraduate business students do not possess the requisite “soft skills” deemed important by employers and business community leaders. These skills include, from the employer’s perspective, the ability to communicate, make decisions, think critically and work in high performance teams. Further to this is the issue that much work today is completed within a distributed work environment, meaning that new graduates are expected to be proficient in demonstrating soft skills in both face-to-face and distributed environments in order to be successful. The research underway by Drs. Hurst and Morpurgo are concerned with the development and testing of a new management education program offered within a simulated environment facilitated by artificial intelligence. The research will test the extent to which the simulated work environment will help build a future-ready workforce by allowing students to demonstrate their technical business knowledge, as well as develop their soft skills.

Recent publications and conference Activities

Al Zyoud H., & Elloumi, F. (2017). Dynamics of Canadian trade patterns: A time series analysis. International Journal of Economics and Finance, 9(3), 115-125.
Liu, W. (2019). Motivating performance when the going gets tough: The effect of reward type and employee firm identity. Presented at the Canadian Academic Accounting Association Annual Conference (Ottawa, Canada)
Liu, W. (2018). The effects of incentive contract type and group identity on sabotage when relative performance information is provided. Presented at the American Accounting Association Annual Conference, Washington DC, USA.
Liu, W. (2018). The effects of incentive contract type and group identity on sabotage when relative performance information is provided. Presented at the Canadian Academic Accounting Association Annual Conference, Calgary, Canada.
Opara, M., & Elloumi, F. (2017). The emergence of Public-Private Partnerships (P3s) in Alberta: Lessons from the Anthony Henday Highway. Canadian Public Administration Journal, 61(1), 268-288.
Opara, M., Elloumi, F., Okafor, O., & Warsame, H. (2017). Effects of institutional environment on Public-Private Partnership (P3) projects: Evidence from Canada. Accounting Forum, 41(2), 77-95.
Solomon A., & Clappison M. (2018). Accounting for captive belugas: A whale of a business. In J. Atkins, & B. Atkins (Eds.), Around the World in 80 Species: Exploring the Business of Extinction Accounting (pp. 289-323). London: Routledge.