Faculty Directory | Joshua Ronen

Joshua Ronen is Professor of Accounting at New York University's Stern School of Business, where he has taught since 1973 — service that NYU and Stern each recognized with a 50-Year Service Award in 2023. He holds a PhD from Stanford University and began his academic career at the University of Chicago. He teaches financial accounting, financial statement analysis, and doctoral seminars, and has supervised more than thirty completed PhD dissertations.

Professor Ronen helped shape the foundations of modern financial reporting. As Associate Director of Research for the AICPA Study Group on the Objectives of Financial Statements — the Trueblood Committee — he was centrally involved in formulating the objectives that were later incorporated into the FASB's Conceptual Framework. His 1981 book with Simcha Sadan, Smoothing Income Numbers, opened what became the earnings management literature, a field he surveyed and extended in Earnings Management: Emerging Insights in Theory, Practice, and Research (Springer, 2008), since translated into Chinese and Japanese.

His research spans disclosure, capital markets, transfer pricing, agency theory, auditing economics, fair value, and the welfare effects of regulation, and has appeared in the Journal of Accounting Research, The Accounting Review, the Journal of Economic Perspectives, the Journal of Public Economics, the Journal of Financial Markets, the Review of Accounting Studies, and Abacus, among others. He twice received the Abacus award for best paper (2008, 2013) and, in 2020, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Indian Institute of Finance. He is best known publicly for proposing financial statements insurance, a market-based reform of the audit function that The Economist described as the most elegant solution to the auditor-independence problem. Also, the Wall Street Journal dubbed it the ‘next best thing to a silver bullet.’ His current work examines how visual information — images in annual reports, ESG disclosures, IPO prospectuses, and earnings calls — shapes investor judgment, including research forthcoming in the Review of Accounting Studies.

Professor Ronen founded the Journal of Accounting, Auditing and Finance, serving as its Editor-in-Chief, and co-launched the Journal of Law, Finance, and Accounting in 2016, which he continues to co-edit. He is also a co-founder and continuing co-organizer of the Conference on Financial Economics and Accounting, a fixture of the field since 1991. At Stern he directed the Vincent C. Ross Institute of Accounting Research and the doctoral program in accounting, and served as President of the Price Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies. He has held visiting appointments at the London School of Economics, the University of Chicago, the University of Toronto, Tel-Aviv University, and the University of Canterbury, where he was Distinguished Erskine Visiting Professor.

Beyond the academy, his commentary on auditing reform, fair value, credit regulation, and ESG has appeared in The New York Times, the Financial Times, CNBC, MarketWatch, Bloomberg Tax, and American Banker, and he has served as an expert witness in roughly two hundred securities and accounting litigation matters. He has advised and briefed regulators and policy audiences from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to the Financial Supervisory Commission of Taiwan, and has repeatedly served on the international panels that evaluate the research output of Hong Kong's universities, chairing the panel for the University of Hong Kong's business school.