Ball & Brown (1968) wins Wharton-Jacobs Levy Prize for 2019

The AFAANZ Board is very pleased to announce to its membership that Professors Ray Ball (Sidney Davidson Distinguished Service Professor of Accounting, The University of Chicago Booth School of Business) and Philip Brown (Emeritus Professor, UWA and AFAANZ Life Member) are the winners of the Wharton-Jacobs Levy Prize for Quantitative Financial Innovation in 2019. Specifically, ‘they are being recognized for their influential work linking stock prices to accounting data outlined in their paper “An Empirical Evaluation of Accounting Income Numbers” (Journal of Accounting Research, 1968).’ Awarded biennially, the Wharton-Jacobs Levy (WJL) Prize recognizes peer-reviewed articles that demonstrate outstanding quantitative research contributing to innovation in the practice of financial management. It is notable that the first two winners of the WJL Prize had previously won Nobel Prizes for earlier work: Harry Markowitz and William F. Sharpe, were joint winners, along with Merton H. Miller, of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1990. Harry Markowitz won the WJL Prize in 2013, and William F. Sharpe in 2015. The late Stephen Ross won the WJL Prize in 2017 for his celebrated work on arbitrage pricing.

Ray Ball and Philip Brown were Joint Presidential Scholars for the American Accounting Association in 2012 and both have been elected to the Australian Accounting Hall of Fame. While they have also received a number of accolades in accounting, it is particularly pleasing that this award recognises the significant and sustained influence that BB68 has had on practice in the finance industry, including investment analysis, portfolio management and the provision of financial data services. Continuing on this finance theme, the announcement of the Wharton-Jacobs Levy Prize for 2019 coincides with the publication of a virtual special issue (in progress) of the Pacific-Basin Finance Journal celebrating the 50th anniversary of BB68 [see: https://bit.ly/2GXPd7o].