Blankespoor named ‘Outstanding Reviewer’ by preeminent accounting journal

Elizabeth Blankespoor, an associate professor of accounting and Reimers Endowed Faculty Fellow at the UW Foster School of Business, has been named an Outstanding Reviewer by The Accounting Review.

This award recognizes the top three percent of reviewers contributing to the accounting discipline’s preeminent academic journal, which promoted Blankespoor from reviewer to editor in 2020.

After earning her PhD in accounting from the University of Michigan and serving six years on the faculty of the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, Blankespoor joined the Foster School’s Department of Accounting in 2018.

She has established herself as a research powerhouse; the BYU Accounting Rankings index currently lists her #32 in the world for research productivity in the area of financial accounting over the past six years.

Blankespoor has achieved this standing through probing examinations of financial reporting, corporate disclosure, information processing costs and emerging technologies.

For instance, her 2019 Journal of Accounting paper (with Foster colleague Ed deHaan), confirmed that casual investors tend to trade on historic stock returns—old news—not because they lack access to new accounting information but because they lack the skill to evaluate and apply that new information toward reasoned trading decisions.

She won the 2017 FARS Best Paper Award for her 2014 study in The Accounting Review (with Gregory Miller and Hal White) demonstrating that the use of Twitter to disseminate firm disclosures to a wider swath of investors leads to greater market liquidity.

And her 2018 Review of Accounting Studies paper (with Ed deHaan and Christina Zhu), demonstrating that expanded publication of automated earnings articles in the financial media increases firms’ trading volume and market liquidity, earned the 2017 FARS Midyear Best Paper Award.

At the Foster School, Blankespoor received the 2020 William A. & Helen I. Fowler Award for Special Achievement in Accounting. And she received the 2018 Horizon Award from Dordt University, from which she earned a BA in accounting and information systems.

In addition to her service to The Accounting Review, Blankespoor also serves as an editorial board member of the Journal of Accounting and Economics, the Journal of Accounting Research and the Review of Accounting Studies. She earned the FARS Excellence in Reviewing Award in 2016.

But research isn’t Blankespoor’s only strength. She received the MBA Distinguished Teaching Award (2016) and the MSx Teaching Excellence Award (2015) at Stanford GSB.

At Foster, she teaches Financial Reporting & Analysis to Evening MBAs, Advanced Cases in Assurance Services to MPAcc students, and Introduction to Empirical Research to doctoral candidates.