Linda Bamber, professor emerita of accounting at Terry, has received the 2017 Distinguished Contributions to Accounting Literature Award from the American Accounting Association.
Bamber received the recognition for the paper, “What’s My Style? The Influence of Top Managers on Voluntary Corporate Financial Disclosure,” which she published in 2010 with two UGA doctoral students who are now on tenured accounting faculty at Michigan State University: Xuefeng (John) Jian and Isabel Yanyan Wang.
“I’ve had the great fortune to know Linda Bamber for a long time, and I am truly blessed to count her as a friend, mentor, and colleague. Her contributions to research, teaching and service at the Terry College cannot be overstated,” said Terry College Dean Benjamin C. Ayers. “This is a well-deserved honor for Linda as well as for John and Isabel.”
This paper introduces a novel concept to accounting research, said Ted Christensen, director of the J.M. Tull School of Accounting.
“In the past, researchers have assumed that firms have a corporate culture that determines transparency and disclosure policy. However, this paper finds that managers’ individual personalities and backgrounds play an important role in determining companies’ disclosure choices,” he said. “I’m so excited for Linda, John and Isabel.”
The award is also a reflection of the kind of attention and mentorship that Bamber provided to graduate students, said Michael Bamber, Linda’s husband and emeritus professor at Terry (formerly the Heckman Chair of Public Accounting).
“Linda’s work with graduate students was always an important part of her academic career. Her Ph.D. students became the children we did not have,” he said. “Linda took a personal interest in their careers and successes, helping them however she could, both during their time at Georgia and after they graduated. All of her students have had success publishing in top accounting research journals. Winning this award with her co-authors Isabel Wang, whose dissertation Linda chaired, and John Jiang, for whom she was a dissertation committee member, provides an appropriate capstone to Linda’s career.”
Linda and Michael Bamber retired in 2016, following 26 years on the J.M. Tull School of Accounting faculty. Linda Bamber held the Tull Chair of Accounting. Her many honors included the Outstanding Accounting Educator Award, given by the AAA in 2009. Additionally, she served as editor of The Accounting Review, the field’s top research journal, from 1999 to 2002.
This latest honor was presented to Bamber and her co-authors Aug. 9 in San Diego at the annual meeting of the AAA.