Specializations

The main mission of the PhD program in Accounting at the Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary, is to prepare prospective faculty members for positions at reputable business schools in Canada and around the world. Our graduates teach and research in schools such as American University of Cairo, Concordia University, Mount Royal University, University of Ottawa, Royal Roads University. University of Texas-Pan American and York University.

Some of the factors that make our graduates successful include a rigorous admission process, training in core business, accounting, and statistics. In addition to five core seminars in business and research methodology, our students are required to complete four seminars in accounting research, one seminar in a minor area (Corporate Sustainability and Finance are popular choices) and two statistics courses. For their seminar courses students are required to take Managerial Accounting Seminar, Financial Accounting Seminar, and Paradigms, Issues, and Methods.  They may choose from other optional courses including Evaluating Environmental Performance, Tax, Advanced Financial, and Advanced Managerial or other Special Topics (as a directed study). Additionally, the Accounting Area holds a regular series of research presentations by our faculty members and well-known researchers from other universities, as part of or independently of these courses. With help from their professors, PhD students undertake their own research project through a summer research program at the end of their first year, which may be further developed for conference presentation and/or expanded into dissertation research. PhD students are frequently provided with opportunities to work with professors on accounting research projects.  

Financial aid is available to some of our students through the Chartered Accountants Education Foundation, and the Certified Management Accountants.  Please view their websites for specific requirements for applying.  PhD students, along with professors, can apply for small amounts of funding to support research projects through the Certified Management Accountants and Certified General Accountants internal research competitions.  Other competitive awards that may be of interest to support research are the Peter Valentine Corporate Governance Award and the Enbridge Corporate Sustainability Award Doctoral Scholarship, if doing research on these topics.

When ready, students are encouraged to attend and present papers at the Canadian Academic Accounting Association (CAAA), the American Accounting Association (AAA), the European Accounting Association (EAA), and the Administrative Sciences Association of Canada (ASAC).  Students can also attend the Contemporary Accounting Research (CAR) conference as a PhD participant.  Other conferences of regional or special interest, depending on the student’s area of research, may also be encouraged.  There are also a number of PhD doctoral consortiums that can be attended.

PhD students are free to select their own topic of interest for their dissertation research; however, most students choose a topic of interest they may share with one of the accounting professors. Some topics that have been investigated in the past include international accounting, capital markets, intellectual capital, public sector accounting, managerial performance systems, and corporate sustainability.  Methods include experimental, events studies using archival data, case studies, empirical analysis, and others.  Both qualitative and quantitative methods are used as well. Our graduates publish in such quality journals as Journal of Accounting Research (JAR), Contemporary Accounting Research (CAR), Accounting, Organization and Society (AOS), and Journal of Business Ethics. Many of our graduates serve as associate editors or in the editorial boards of reputable journals.

Area chair: Dr. Mark Anderson, Associate Professor

The Ph.D. Program in Management Information Systems (MIS), which also goes under the name Business Technology Management (BTM), at the Haskayne School of Business (HSB) is a research-based program designed to prepare candidates to become strong scholars at universities and other research-based institutions.

The focus of the Ph.D. program in MIS/BTM at HSB is on the economics of information systems, otherwise known as the “econ of IS”, and related areas. The course work, which covers about two years, is designed to prepare the candidates in economics, econometrics, research methods, quantitative methods, and state-of-the-art research in the econ of IS.

Active participation in research with one or more faculty members begins no later than the first summer. All research faculty in MIS/BTM have one or more publications in the field’s top journals, and this provides a strong basis for guidance and future prospects.

Recent research areas include:

• Productivity impacts of Information technology (IT)
• E-commerce and channels of distribution
• Electronic retailing
• Platform-mediated networks
• Online data and reputations
• Economics of user-generated content
• Business process reengineering
• IT outsourcing
• Adaptive control in scheduling
• Price quotation in supply chains
• IT and organizational design
• IT applications in healthcare

Area chair: Dr. Raymond A. Patterson, Professor

Researchers:

• Dr. Barrie R. Nault
• Dr. Ray Patterson
• Dr. Hooman Hidaji
• Dr. Duy Dao
• Dr. Jian (Ray) Zhang

The Haskayne PhD in Entrepreneurship and Innovation offers students an opportunity to work with faculty who are committed to excellence in theoretical foundations and a variety of research methodologies, preparing them for academic careers.

Entrepreneurship and Innovation (ENTI) is an interdisciplinary domain that focuses on the activities, people and context involved in initiating, developing, and maintaining an enterprise or innovation. Among topics of interest are new venture opportunities, strategies, and resources; entrepreneurship ecosystems; the owner-manager; the relationship between entrepreneurship and economic development; family business; crowdfunding; start-up governance; social entrepreneurship; intrapreneurship; and international entrepreneurship and policy.

In addition, because entrepreneurship often involves technological innovations, the specialization includes scholarship and dialogue on the management of innovation and technological change, technology strategy, technology-based entrepreneurship, and the commercialization of scientific research.

We encourage students to examine the questions of the field from multiple perspectives and draw upon a wide range of foundational disciplines, including economics, mathematics, philosophy, psychology, and sociology.

Area chair: Dr. Olga Petricevic, Associate Professor

The PhD program in Finance at the Haskayne School of Business is a technical, rigorous, academic program designed to prepare you for a career as a researcher and scholar. You will get a solid education in the mainstreams of finance research and be trained in the professional skills that are necessary to pursue a successful career in academia. The program is intense and requires a lot of dedication and a positive work attitude. Our faculty will work with students in all major areas of finance research including: corporate finance, asset pricing, banking, corporate governance, mathematical finance, and entrepreneurship.
 
You will work with your advisor to select finance courses that will optimally prepare you for your chosen field of study. To augment the finance courses, students are often encouraged to take classes from mathematics and/or economics. Please visit our University of Calgary Calendar for a description of available courses and prerequisites.

Area chair: Dr. Kyoung Jin Choi, Associate Professor

The doctoral programs in SGMA and OBHR are closely aligned, and encourage students to adopt multi-disciplinary and multi-methodology approaches in their research.

The key question to be answered in any SGMA or OBHR thesis is always: how to increase the effectiveness and/or efficiency of a managerial practice with a view to contribute to the firm’s competitive advantage? 

There is considerable flexibility in choosing the thesis subject, i.e., the selected managerial practice’s nature and scope. Such practice may be observable at the level of the individual decision-maker, a team, a sub-unit within the firm, the firm, a strategic alliance or even an industry. 

Answering the key question in a SGMA or OBHR dissertation must build on solid conceptual foundations and take advantage of state-of-the-art empirical methodologies, both in the quantitative and qualitative sphere.

Students are encouraged to adopt an integrative approach, drawing conceptual insight from foundational disciplines such as applied psychology, micro-economics (especially the law, economics and organization branch of micro-economics) and other complementary disciplines with proven potential to answer in a rigorous fashion the key question considered.

The focus should be on gaining an in-depth understanding of the practice at hand in terms of its strengths (or benefits) and weaknesses (or costs), and on developing or evaluating a set of actionable paths towards improving the practice.

For example, work on non-market strategies of firms may require delving into political science, the institutional-theory strand of sociology, and law. As another example, work on designing effective human resources management practices in multinational enterprises may require a serious grounding in conceptual frameworks related to societal culture and organizational behaviour, and deep knowledge of the modern economics-based theory of the multinational enterprise.

All SGMA and OBHR students will be expected to master advanced statistics as used in the leading management journals (such as the Academy of Management Journal), and have an equivalent command of qualitative research methods.

The SGMA and OBHR doctoral programs will provide the PhD students with the multi-disciplinary and multi-methodology training required to examine issues of managerial effectiveness and efficiency in a large variety of organizational settings. 

Students will be supervised by a select group of Haskayne faculty members, who have published in leading academic journals and whose expectation is that each thesis will consist of a set of high quality essays publishable in refereed journals. These faculty members have a history of co-publishing with their students on a wide variety of topics, ranging from the determinants of job satisfaction, to meta-analyses on a wide variety of organizational phenomena, and the strategy and structure of the world’s largest companies.  Take a look at the SGMA and OBHR faculty members’ research records to see if there is an overlap in interests.

OBHR Area chair: Dr. Nick Turner, Professor, Distinguished Research Chair, ABL

SGMA Area chair: Dr. Pengfei Li, Associate Professor

The Haskayne School of Business (HSB) doctoral degree in Marketing is a rigorous, research-based academic program designed to prepare you for a career as a marketing scholar.  This program is intensive and the expectations are high.  At graduation, you will have developed a solid theoretical foundation and strong analytical skills to prepare you for a career in university teaching and research. 

All HSB doctoral students are paired with a supervisor from the first day, and you will have opportunities very early in your program to develop close working relationships with faculty members as you become involved in faculty-led research projects (generally toward the end of your first year). These research projects reflect our faculty’s research interests, which are varied and include:

• Consumer Behaviour
• Decision Making
• Product Management/New Product Development
• Relationship Marketing
• Ethics/Social Responsibility
• Sustainability
• International & Global Marketing
• Services Marketing
• Cross-Cultural Marketing Research
• Methodological Issues

Marketing is an interdisciplinary field that draws theories and methodologies from a number of founding disciplines, including economics, psychology, sociology, strategy, and statistics. Depending on your research interests, you will be encouraged to take courses in the foundational disciplines to complement your marketing training. You will also be encouraged to take several courses in statistics and quantitative methods.  Please visit our University of Calgary Calendar for a description of available courses and prerequisites.

Area chair: Dr. Scott Radford, Associate Professor

As a doctoral student in the Operations and Supply Chain Management (OSCM) area, you will have the opportunity to work closely with faculty members who are dedicated to excellence in both research and teaching.  Two particular research strengths of our faculty are:

• Health care operations management, specifically health care delivery optimization through addressing problems of access to care and quality/safety, employing quantitative tools as well as qualitative and empirical studies of health services, and

• Supply chain management, encompassing all aspects, from operations strategy – maximizing responsiveness through flexibility, collaboration and logistics – through supply chain network design, including facility layout and location.

Coursework will be tailored to individual interests but will include a series of seminars to provide in-depth knowledge of research in operations management and exposure to a variety of management science techniques.

Area chair: Dr. Osman Alp, Professor

The Haskayne School of Business (HSB) doctoral degree in Risk Management and Insurance is a rigorous, research-based academic program.  This program is intensive and the expectations are high.  At graduation, you will have developed a solid theoretical foundation and strong analytical skills to prepare you for a career in university teaching and research. 

All HSB doctoral students are paired with a supervisor from the first day, and you will have opportunities very early in your program to develop close working relationships with faculty members as you become involved in faculty-led research projects (generally toward the end of your first year). These research projects reflect our faculty’s research interests, which are varied and include:

• Enterprise risk management
• Corporate governance
• Disaster resilience
• Distribution systems in insurance
• Merger and acquisition activity in the insurance industry
• Competitiveness and efficiency of the insurance industry
• Tort versus no-fault liability systems
• Public policy issues surrounding social insurance systems and pensions
• Risk communication

Risk management and insurance are interdisciplinary fields that draw theory and methodologies from a number of founding disciplines, including economics, law, psychology, and statistics. Depending on your research interests, you will be encouraged to take courses in the foundational disciplines to complement your marketing training. You will also be encouraged to take courses in both qualitative and quantitative methods.  Please visit our University of Calgary Calendar for a description of available courses and prerequisites.

Please note:  Applicants interested in financial risk management should visit the page for FINANCE.

Area chair: Dr. Anne Kleffner, Professor