Thomas Z. Lys is the Eric L. Kohler Chair in Accounting at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
He received his PhD in 1982 from the University of Rochester in Accounting and Finance and a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Bern (Switzerland) in Economics in 1976 (summa cum laude).
He has published thirty five research articles in refereed journals, including The Journal of Accounting and Economics, The Accounting Review, The Journal of Accounting Research, The Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Monetary Economics, and the Journal of Business. His research investigates analyst earnings forecasts and stock valuations; efficiency of analysts’ earnings forecasts; ability of security analysts’ to learn from experience; stock price behavior following earnings announcements; properties of estimators of auto-correlation coefficients; the impact of transaction costs for market efficiency; and the investors’ interpretation of corporate social responsibility initiatives.
In addition to those refereed publications, he has edited two volumes of Karl Brunner’s work and two book chapters in edited volumes. He has served as one of the editors of the Journal of Accounting and Economics from 1999 to 2011 and has served on the editorial board of The Accounting Review. He has received the Outstanding Professor of the Year Award six times from Kellogg’s Executive MBA Program and was twice awarded the Sidney J. Levy Teaching Award from Kellogg’s full-time MBA program. In addition, he has supervised 34 Kellogg dissertations (of which he chaired 20).
His consulting practice involves valuation and disclosure issues in merger and acquisitions, anti-trust, and contract disputes. His past clients include the US Department of Justice, the US Department of the Treasury, the Russian Federation, the Commonwealth of Australia, and numerous corporate clients including Sound Exchange, Rural Metro, Royal Bank of Canada, Moelis & Company, the bankruptcy trustee in Enron, Ventas Inc., AIG, Casino, Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy, BB&T, Santander, Walgreens, Kavlico, Checkwell, Eastman Chemicals, Ciba Specialty Chemicals, IBM, GE Capital, and many more.