Doctoral Student

Abigail McIntosh Allen

Abigail Allen is a doctoral candidate in the Accounting & Management unit at Harvard Business School.  Her dissertation research focuses on the financial accounting standard setting process. Specifically, her current projects investigate the impacts of regulator backgrounds, constituent preferences, and lobbying incentives in the determination of US GAAP.  Her job-market paper explores formation of the FASB's technical agenda and provides evidence on the influence of constituent preferences on project selection.   Abigail's other research interests include the economic consequences of accounting regulation, globalization of accounting standards, fair value accounting, and voluntary disclosure. 

Abigail graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of Southern California (USC) in 2006 with a BS and Masters of Accounting. While an undergraduatel Abigail worked part time as an internal auditor for Mattel Inc, helping with their first year implementation of Sarbanes Oxley. Subsequent to graduation, Abigail went to work for Deloitte and Touche LLP as an external auditor in Silicon Valley where she became licensed as a CPA.

Abigail is the proud mother of 1 (Alec Allen born 1/25/2011). In her free time, she enjoys hiking, snowboarding, scuba and chess.

 

Journal Articles

  1. Towards an Understanding of the Role of Standard Setters in Standard Setting

    We investigate the effect of standard setters in standard setting: we examine how certain professional and political characteristics of FASB members and SEC commissioners predict the accounting "reliability" and "relevance" of proposed standards. Notably, we find FASB members with backgrounds in financial services are more likely to propose standards that decrease "reliability" and increase "relevance," partly due to their tendency to propose fair-value methods. We find opposite results for FASB members affiliated with the Democratic Party, although only when excluding a financial-services background as an independent variable. Jackknife procedures show that results are robust to omitting any individual standard setter.

    Keywords: accounting; FASB; politics; relevance; reliability; standard setting; Accounting; Standards; Fair Value Accounting; Government and Politics; Personal Characteristics;

    Citation:

    Allen, Abigail M., and Karthik Ramanna. "Towards an Understanding of the Role of Standard Setters in Standard Setting." Journal of Accounting & Economics 55, no. 1 (February 2013).