Tepper School Hosts Stephen Penman for 2025 Yuji Ijiri Lectures on Accounting and Investors

The Carnegie Mellon University Yuji Ijiri Lectures for 2025 featured Stephen Penman, the George O. May Professor at the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University. Professor Penman, who also holds leadership roles as co-director of Columbia's Center for Excellence in Accounting and Security Analysis and director of the Masters Program in Accounting and Fundamental Analysis, delivered a series of workshops from October 13 to 17, 2025. These lectures were primarily designed to convey the current state of research on financial statement analysis and to explore and plot the path for future research in the field.

The central mission of the lectures was to examine what makes accounting useful to stock-market investors. Professor Penman underscored that financial statement analysis sits at the core of the accounting research endeavor because it involves identifying the extractable, useful information from accounting reports. This analysis inherently leads to normative accounting questions, like determining what constitutes "good accounting" versus "bad accounting." The seminar series focused specifically on reporting to shareholders or investors, as this is the operational foundation of the accounting system today, which tracks and updates shareholders' equity. While this focus was practical, the discussion was also broadened to include accounting for emerging, high-interest areas like carbon and sustainability.

Professor Penman made it clear that a discussion of the "state of the art" also exposes what remains unknown. His aim wasn't just to review current research but to uncover  our collective ignorance of certain open issues and invite attendees, particularly the Tepper School doctoral students the series was originally designed for, to work on them together. He encouraged a disposition of active engagement, urging participants to take the loosely framed ideas presented and develop them into more formal theories or rigorous empirical designs for the future. 

The lecture series itself continues a long-standing tradition; initiated in 2000 and renamed in 2011 to honor long-time faculty member Yuji Ijiri, the series ensures that Tepper School students are exposed to leading accounting scholarship from outside the school.