Incorporating Students’ Collaborative Research into the Advanced Accounting Classroom

• In Event: Accounting Education

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to share a students’ collaborative research project as a successful teaching method as part of the Advanced Accounting course. The lion share of the Advanced Accounting class addresses the topic of business combinations. The finance literature has documented different stock price reactions to the acquiring companies and target companies around announcements of business combinations. Students are challenged to offer explanations to the different market reactions phenomena and how it is related to the topics covered in the Advanced Accounting class. This yields insightful, interesting and stimulating class discussions. The class is then assigned a collaborative research project to test and confirm, or perhaps refute or adjust, many of the statements and claims made in those class discussions. Google Docs and Google Sheets are used as a medium to share information and to build a shared dataset that includes both numeric data and qualitative information. Each student/team selects a business combination to explore, including, among other things, the market reactions to the acquiring and targets companies, stated reasons for the business combination, “empire building” concerns, and benefits to shareholders, both ex-ante and ex-post. East student/team enters their specific business combination data and information into the shared spreadsheet, and a meaningful dataset is created for the entire class to work on and analyze. Students also prepare a class presentation in which they discuss their selected business combination, as well as findings and insights from the shared collected sample, and write a short paper.

Author

• Yoel Beniluz, William Patterson University