Philip G. Berger

About

Philip G. Berger is the Wallman Family Professor of Accounting at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He served on the faculty of the Wharton School from 1991 to 2002, including as a tenured Associate Professor, before joining Booth as a tenured Full Professor on July 1, 2002. His research focuses on financial reporting and corporate finance, and he has published in all the top peer-reviewed accounting and finance journals. Berger has been an editor of the Journal of Accounting Research for 23 years and has chaired or served on the dissertation committees of many top accounting students from Booth, who now work at leading institutions such as MIT, Wharton, Stanford, Columbia, Yale, NYU, Ohio State, Washington University, UCSD, among others. He was awarded the 2025 FARS Distinguished PhD Mentoring Award. Berger has held leadership roles including Deputy Dean for Booth’s part-time MBA programs and Director of Booth’s Chookaszian Accounting Research Center. His teaching interests encompass accounting for entrepreneurs, financial accounting, and empirical accounting research, with experience teaching undergraduate, MBA, executive, and Ph.D. courses. He has received numerous teaching awards, including the 2011 Phoenix Prize at Chicago Booth.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Business
• Accounting
• Actuarial science
• Economics
• Law
• Finance
• Management

Selected publications

• Segment Profitability and the Proprietary and Agency Costs of Disclosure

  The Accounting Review · 2007-07-01 · 494 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  We exploit the change in U.S. segment reporting rules (from SFAS No. 14 to SFAS No. 131) to examine two motives for managers to conceal segment profits: proprietary costs and agency costs. Managers face proprietary costs of segment disclosure if the revelation of a segment that earns high abnormal profits attracts more competition and, hence, reduces the abnormal profits. Managers face agency costs of segment disclosure if the revelation of a segment that earns low abnormal profits reveals unres…

  PublisherDOI

• Challenges and opportunities in disclosure research—A discussion of ‘the financial reporting environment: Review of the recent literature’

  Journal of Accounting and Economics · 2011-01-13 · 208 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Commercial lending concentration and bank expertise: Evidence from borrower financial statements

  Journal of Accounting and Economics · 2017-09-08 · 147 citations

  articleOpen access1st author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Did the Dodd–Frank Whistleblower Provision Deter Accounting Fraud?

  Journal of Accounting Research · 2022 · 81 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT We examine the deterrence effect of the Dodd–Frank whistleblower provision on accounting fraud. To facilitate causal inference, we use state False Claims Acts (FCAs), under which whistleblowing about accounting fraud at a firm invested in by a state's pension fund can result in monetary rewards from that state's government. We divide our sample into firms exposed and not exposed to whistleblowing risk from a state FCA during the 2008–2010 period that preceded the 2011 SEC implementation…

  PublisherDOI

• Discretionary Disclosure in Financial Reporting: An Examination Comparing Internal Firm Data to Externally Reported Segment Data

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2009-01-01 · 77 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Eli Ofek

  New York University

  13 shared

• Rebecca N. Hann

  University of Maryland, College Park

  8 shared

• Andrew W. Alford

  Goldman Sachs (United States)

  6 shared

• Jung Ho Choi

  Stanford University

  3 shared

• Steven J. Monahan

  University of Utah

  3 shared

• Sorabh Tomar

  Southern Methodist University

  3 shared

• Daniel A. Bens

  3 shared

• Charles Ham

  Indiana University Bloomington

  2 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  University of Chicago

• Other

  University of Chicago

• B.A.

  University of Saskatchewan

Awards & honors

• 2011 Phoenix Prize
• 2025 FARS Distinguished PhD Mentoring Award
• Honoree of the Distinguished Alumni Award

Similar researchers at University of Chicago

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• Hans B. Christensenh-35
• Anthony Leh-33