Brandon Gipper

Brandon Gipper is an Associate Professor of Accounting at Stanford University Graduate School of Business. He has been at Stanford since 2016. Prior to that, he completed his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He earned a MAcc from the University of Michigan Ross School of Business and a BS in economics and mathematics from the University of Michigan. He was a Research Fellow at the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board and worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers in auditing, focused on the engineering and construction industry.

His research focuses on empirical accounting topics. He examines the effects of auditing, oversight in the audit industry, corporate governance, disclosure, and the interaction between auditing, accounting, and human capital. As examples, his research shows that audit firms carefully manage audit partner assignments to avoid disruption from partner rotations, and if partners are rotated unexpectedly, these switches usually follow auditing failures and have negative career consequences for partners. His research also shows that oversight from a public enforcement body in the audit industry enhances the credibility of companies’ earnings news. In more recent research, he examines the characteristics of ESG audits; these audits are on the rise and appear to complement reporting standards, such as greenhouse gas measurements.

His other research shows that governance disclosures about executive pay can influence pay plans in unexpected ways, such as raising the level of executive pay, and that performance measures used in these newly disclosed plans are targeted to address agency issues at companies. In other projects, he finds that overhiring of workers accompany financial frauds and that when frauds are revealed, these workers are displaced, job hunting in distressed labor markets. Workers, anticipating these risks, require higher wages when accounting quality is low, including when the auditor is disreputable.