Accountancy professor wins prestigious research award

Arizona State University Professor Pablo Casas-Arce was recently recognized for his research with the prestigious 2019 Notable Contribution to Management Accounting Literature Award.

The associate professor of accountancy and his co-authorsF. Asís Martínez-Jerez, an associate accountancy professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, and Sofia M. Lourenço, senior assistant professor of accountancy at Lisbon School of Economics and Management. received the award from the American Accounting Association, the largest organization of accountants in academia. The award-winning research, “The performance effect of feedback frequency and detail: Evidence from a field experiment in customer satisfaction,” was published in the Journal of Accounting Research in December 2017.

The paper examines the effects of non-financial performance feedback on the behavior of professionals working for an insurance repair company. The researchers found that professionals perform better when they receive more detailed but less frequent feedback.

The award recognizes an outstanding contribution to the management accounting literature within the past five years (2015–2019), including books, monographs and journal articles on management accounting topics. The committee reviews submissions and determines award winners based on relevance to theory, practice or instruction of management accounting; broad appeal to those interested in management accounting; originality and potential contribution to knowledge; and impact or potential impact on other research.

Casas-Arce’s research focuses on compensation, control systems, the use of accounting information, organizational economics, and corporate governance. His work has been published in some of the top economics, management and accounting journals, such as the Journal of Political Economy, Management Science, Journal of Accounting Research and The Accounting Review, among others.

A native of Spain, Casas-Arce earned his undergraduate degree in economics at Pompeu Fabra University. He received his PhD from Harvard University. He has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Management Accounting Research, Decision Sciences, and European Accounting Review. He has received several fellowships, as well as research grants and awards for teaching. Prior to joining the W. P. Carey School of Business in 2012, Casas-Arce was on the faculty at Pompeu Fabra University and the University of Oxford.