Caroline Sprecher

I am a 5th year Accounting PhD Candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. My research interests lie at the intersection of accounting and innovation.

My expected graduation date is May 2022, and I will be interviewing at the Miami Rookie Camp in December 2021.
My path to accounting academia began when I served as a research assistant to the head biostatistician in UNC’s Center of Excellence for Eating Disorders (CEED) my junior and senior years of college. Simultaneously, I was taking my first business classes at UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School. While I enjoyed the creativity and critical thinking required to answer a research question rigorously, my accounting classes really piqued my interest. As a result, I traded my internship with CEED for an internship in EY’s Indirect Tax department and enrolled in UNC’s Masters of Accounting program immediately after graduation. However, I found myself missing the opportunity to satisfy my intellectual curiosity by asking and answering important questions through rigorous empirical study. In UNC’s accounting PhD program, I have had the opportunity to marry these interests by asking and answering important questions such as “How does patent disclosure effect follow-on innovation?”, “Are state-level R&D tax credits effective at increasing firms’ total R&D expenditures?”, and “Do employee production targets have spillover effects on co-workers’ productivity?” I have also immensely enjoyed contributing to our field by teaching an undergraduate financial accounting course and serving as a teaching assistant for MBA courses in both financial and managerial accounting during my time at UNC. I look forward to continuing both of these responsibilities as an Assistant Professor in the coming years.

Outside of research, I enjoy reading, playing board games, and traveling. I am also actively involved in a local animal rescue in several capacities including as a cat foster.