A prestigious dinner and conference were held recently to mark the 40th Anniversary of the publication of highly acclaimed research by Professors Ray Ball and Philip Brown, ‘An empirical evaluation of accounting income numbers’, which was published in the Journal of Accounting Research in 1968.

Professors Ray Ball and Phillip Brown, two of UNSW’s most academically distinguished graduates, were guests of honour at the conference, which attracted 120 leading academics in the field.

“The Ball and Brown paper has been widely acknowledged as the most influential piece of accounting research at that time. It truly represented the start of modern capital markets-based accounting research,” Professor Alec Cameron, Dean of the Australian School of Business, told the conference.

“Ray and Philip’s research transformed our understanding of the effect of corporate disclosure on share prices, and of earnings releases in particular,” he said

Conference papers