About Douglas Skinner

Douglas Skinner is a leading expert in corporate disclosure practices, corporate financial reporting, and corporate finance, with a focus on payout policy. His research addresses (1) the causes and capital market effects of managers' corporate disclosure choices (especially forward-looking information, including earnings forecasts, earnings pre-announcements, and guidance, corporate conference calls, etc.); (2) how the legal and regulatory environment affects managers’ corporate disclosures; (3) managers' incentives to use their discretion in the financial reporting process to manage reported accounting earnings ("earnings management"); (4) how stock prices respond to earning releases, especially for high growth companies ("earnings torpedoes"); and (5) the determinants of firms' payout policies, including whether and how much firms should pay out, the form of payout (dividends versus stock repurchases), etc. Professor Skinner also has research interests in Japanese accounting, auditing, and corporate governance practices.

Professor Skinner’s research is published in prominent accounting and finance journals, including The Accounting Review, the Journal of Accounting and Economics, the Journal of Accounting Research, the Journal of Finance, and the Journal of Financial Economics. He is co-editor of the Journal of Accounting Research, and was previously co-editor of the Journal of Accounting and Economics.

Professor Skinner’s research has been prominently featured in the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The Economist, The New York Times, and BusinessWeek.

In 2010, Professor Skinner was named one of the top business school professors in the world in the Financial Times Global MBA Rankings. His teaching has included courses taught to undergraduate upper-classmen, full-time and part-time MBA students, executive MBA students, executives, consultants, and Ph.D. students. His teaching covers topics that include introductory financial accounting, intermediate financial accounting, corporate financial reporting and analysis, financial statement analysis, managerial accounting, corporate finance, and empirical methods in accounting research.

Prior to his appointment at Chicago in 2005, he was KPMG Professor of Accounting at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, where he had been on the faculty since 1989.

He holds a bachelor's degree in Economics with first class honors in Accounting and Finance from Macquarie University in Sydney and a master's degree and PhD in Applied Economics: Accounting and Finance from the University of Rochester. He has been a tenured full professor at Chicago Booth.