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taxPhD

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taxPhD last won the day on May 2 2018

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  1. Congrats! Welcome to the other side.
  2. For an older applicant, it is even more important to effectively signal to admissions committees why you want to pursue a PhD. Fair or not, I think older applicants always have a bit of an uphill battle, but that doesn't mean you cannot gain admission into a high quality program. You have a great GMAT score, I don't think getting it to 750 will make a huge difference in admissions. So I would focus on crafting a good statement of purpose to convince admissions committees that you are serious about having a successful research career and that this just isn't a midlife crisis to get our of the grind of the "real world."
  3. I'd say that's a very unrealistic expectation. RAs are not co-authors. In fact, if I received an application from a perspective PhD student who was listed as a co-author on a high quality publication, I would do a little digging to try and figure out what exact role the applicant had on the paper. I most years, I would say zero percent of finance PhD applicants already have a top-3 publication. It's not even that common for job market candidates to have a top-3 publication at the time of graduation. So having one 5 years earlier is extremely rare.
  4. I would strongly advise against accepting a flyout invitation just to "visit" somewhere for free. If the school is not a school you can realistically see yourself attending, then you should no apply.
  5. Given you can research similar questions in either area, then in my opinion it really comes down to teaching. Would you rather teach strategy or managerial accounting?
  6. In my opinion, if you get a PhD from a strong experimental program, you'll place just fine. So get a PhD focusing on experimental methods from Cornell, Illinois, Texas, Indiana, Pittsburgh, Emory, etc. and you'll likely place at one of those schools also. I am not sure it's considerably more difficult to publish experimental work in a top 3. Slightly more difficult, probably.
  7. I made it through on $19,700....all those sound like great offers to me.
  8. First of all, those are all good to very good programs. Depending on the exact topics within financial archival one wanted to research would determine, to some degree, which school would be the best fit. But broadly (in terms of thinking 5 years down the line about what an average placement would look like out of said school), I would probably group them as follows. This was not a super easy task, one could easily argue that this grouping is not "correct." It's just one persons take. Group 1: Penn, NYU, USC Group 2: Washington, UT-Austin, UNC, Penn State Group 3: TAMU, Georgia, Illinois, Florida Group 4: Oregon
  9. If you're considering audit or tax research, I would strongly recommend work experience. It is not as necessary for financial or managerial. If applying straight from undergrad, I would say you can typically expect to gain acceptance at a school a tier (maybe two) below what you could get accepted to with similar GPA and GMAT + work experience and CPA. The most successful applicants coming straight from undergrad seem to have a math/econ background.
  10. A few things. First, behavioral tax is probably an area that I would not pursue unless you are truly set on it. I say that because tax is already a small field, behavioral tax (within accounting) is extremely extremely small. There are more behavioral tax stuff in economics, mainly focusing on individual taxpayers. There is very little of it published in A accounting journals, and I don't think any of the programs you mentioned would be interested in a behavioral tax applicants. If you want to do behavioral tax, look at South Carolina. Second, you mention you don't think you will be competitive at Texas, TAMU, or Arizona. Your chances would be better at those programs than the likes of the ones you list: Stanford, Harvard, MIT, etc. Though I would note that Arizona isn't as attractive for tax applicants as it was just a few years ago. I know they rank very well in the BYU rankings, but the students that are factoring into those rankings were students of Dan Dhaliwal's. Arizona will remain a solid program, but I think they'll be better for financial and audit going forward, more so than tax. I agree that the fact that you've minored in accounting does make you a better applicant than some of the econ/math type applicants. Many of them have no accounting background. And the fact that you passed quals at a decent economics PhD program should be a positive signal. But given your economics background, why behavioral? The economics background would seemingly give you a leg up as an archival researcher.
  11. I remember getting something like this from the University of Alabama when I was applying to doctoral programs. I think they buy contact information from the GMAC based on filters on GMAT score, etc. Common in the MBA world, not so common in the PhD world. But it happens.
  12. Preeti was a PCAOB fellow, so she had access to data that most researchers cannot get their hands on.
  13. If you are interested in studying the dynamic between the client's management and the auditor, you may want to consider behavioral audit research. I say this because while in theory, the type of question you are interested in can be studied by an archival audit researcher, you have to think about how you would get data on the relationship. That is, how—as an outsider—would you observe whether management is more/less open to discussing accounting issues, etc.? Also, you cannot observe proposed audit adjustments, etc, so trying to get examine how managers and auditor reach an agreed upon final adjustment is difficult archivally. As far as your initial question, I believe you can find your way into a solid accounting PhD program with a 690. However, your list has a lot of variation in terms of quality. Schools like Kansas and Tennessee would probably acknowledge that they are decent, but non-elite. On the other hand, Iowa and Minnesota would not be particularly keen being labeled as such. In terms of audit, if you are thinking archival, then Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas, and Tennesee would certainly be places to consider. In terms of behavioral, look at Alabama, UMass, South Carolina.
  14. 1. You should be aiming for a GMAT of 700+. Many schools use 700 as a "magic" cut-off for whether applications will be looked at further. Having said that, there are many schools that accept students under 700 (think 650-690 range). You can signal your willingness to increase your quant knowledge by taking online courses and such before you apply to the PhD program, even if these are MOOCs, it signals that you recognize that your quant background is maybe a bit weak and that you are trying to remedy that. 2. Absolutely. Practice experience often influences the choice of research topics that particularly researchers work on. The bigger issue is data reliable data that can be used to research some of the topics you mentioned. But big picture, assuming data was not an issue, if you could provide insight into questions such as "Does use of AI in tax corporate tax compliance increase or decrease errors?" or "Does use of AI in the audit improve audit quality?" . . . journals would be interested. But finding the data and setting necessary to cleanly test such questions is difficult.
  15. Always good to see another tax person! Places I would consider as a tax applicant, in no particular order. I made a pretty broad list because target schools will largely depend on what sort of GMAT score you get. Texas A&M (John Robinson, Connie Weaver, Brad Hepfer) UNC (Ed Maydew, Doug Shackelford, Jeff Hoopes, and Scott Dyreng nearby at Duke) UC-Irvine (contingent on knowing Terry Shevlin's 5-year plan) Nebraska (Tom Omer) Oregon (Dave Guenther, Linda Krull, Ryan Wilson) Texas (Lil Mills and Brady Williams) Indiana (Casey Schwab, Sonja Rego, Bridget Stomberg, Brian Williams) Georgia (Ben Ayers, Erin Towery, Paul Demere, John Cambell also does some tax) MIT (Michelle Hanlon) UPenn (Jennifer Blouin) Tennessee (LeAnn Luna, James Chyz) Wisconsin (Stacie Laplante, Fabio Gaertner, Dan Lynch) Florida (Gary McGill, Mike Mayberry, Luke Watson) Michigan State (Ed Outslay, contingent on retirement plans) Arizona State (Jenny Brown and Dave Kenchington) Arizona (would probably want to wait to see what happens in terms of tenure decisions this year) Connecticut (George Plesko, Amy Dunbar, Frank Murphy, Steve Utke, Dave Weber) Illinois (Pete Lisowsky and Mike Donohoe) Iowa (Christi Gleason, Jaron Wilde, Kevin Markle) Waterloo (Ken Klassen and Andy Bauer) Texas Tech (Kirsten Cook, Robert Ricketts, Ryan Houston) Kansas (Tom Kubick) I don't think nine years of work experience will be viewed negatively. Many very successful researchers had significant careers in accounting before getting their PhD (e.g., Mary Barth, Jennifer Blouin, Lil Mills, etc.)
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