Rate My Professor Philip Brown

Emeritus Professor Philip Brown AM serves as Senior Honorary Research Fellow in Accounting and Finance at the University of Western Australia Business School. He holds a BCom from the University of New South Wales, an MBA and PhD from the University of Chicago, and an honorary Doctor of Science from Lancaster University. Appointed Professor of Accounting at UWA in July 1970—one of the youngest such appointments—he developed the university's MBA program first offered in 1973 and was Inaugural Director of the Australian Graduate School of Management from 1975. Upon returning to UWA as professor in 1980, he headed the Department of Accounting and Finance from 1980-1981 and 1985-1990, and also served as Deputy Chair of the Mathews Committee inquiring into accounting education in Australian universities (1989-1990). Prior to retirement in February 2013, Brown held concurrent professorial appointments at UWA and UNSW, with visiting professorships at the University of Chicago, Stanford University, and Lancaster University.

Brown pioneered capital markets-based research in accounting, most notably through his seminal 1968 paper with Ray Ball, 'An Empirical Evaluation of Accounting Income Numbers,' published in the Journal of Accounting Research, which demonstrated accounting earnings' role in share price formation and earned the American Accounting Association's inaugural Seminal Contribution to Accounting Literature Award in 1986. Key publications include 'Corporate governance, accounting and finance: A review' (2011), 'International Financial Reporting Standards: what are the benefits?' (2011), 'Do better-governed Australian firms make more informative disclosures?' (2013), and 'Ball and Brown (1968) after fifty years' (2019). His research focuses on corporate governance, accounting standards, equity markets, share market microstructure, and disclosure effects on analysts and markets. Honors include Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (1979), Fellow of CPA Australia, life member of the Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand (2000), Australian Accounting Hall of Fame inductee (2010), Member of the Order of Australia (2012), and Wharton-Jacobs Levy Prize for Quantitative Financial Innovation (2019, shared with Ray Ball).