Department of Accounting and Finance

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Kent Business School Department of Accounting and Finance

Head of Department | Professor Aydin Ozkan

The Accounting and Finance Department at Kent Business School engages in world-leading research that has a strong impact on academics and practitioners. The Department enjoys a significant international presence and reputation in several fields, including critical accounting, accounting history, sustainability accounting, corporate finance, banking and options pricing and performance.

The Department is open to a variety of themes and methodological approaches, which include quantitative analyses but also sociology and philosophy-based research. Consistently, impactful research developed in the Department spans issues ranging from the use of accounting information in the exercise of power to risk modelling for predicting hedge-fund returns. These researches are not limited to ‘traditional’ Western contexts, but embrace other areas of the World, including Africa and the Middle-East. The international profile of the Department means that its staff have developed enduring connections with over 100 different academic institutions across five continents. Academics in the Department have won several international prizes for their work and engage regularly with important organisations such as the World Bank, Oxfam and the Walton Foundation. 

The vast and diversified expertise of academics in the Department of Accounting and Finance ensures a world-class education in of all the numerous undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral programmes offered by the Department within Kent Business School, which are accredited by international professional bodies and are based on the use real-world technology, including Bloomberg trading platform. Recent graduates have taken up positions with a wide range of companies, including Big 4 accounting firms, but also Deutsche Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland, HSBC and ABN AMRO. Our PhD students have gone on to academia and industry, including prestigious institutions such as The London School of Economics, the University of Liverpool, the Bank of Greece and the European Central Bank.

Research conducted by the Accounting and Finance Department falls broadly into the following categories: 

  • Accounting History 
  • Asset Pricing 
  • Corporate Finance 
  • Corporate Governance 
  • Critical Accounting 
  • Derivatives Pricing and Performance 
  • Earnings Management 
  • Financial Econometrics 
  • FinTech 
  • Forecasting
  • International Banking 
  • Islamic Banking and Finance 
  • Public Sector Accounting 
  • Risk Management 
  • Sustainability and Environmental Accounting 

Our academics regularly publish in a wide array of highly ranked journals, including the ‘Journal of Corporate Finance’, the ‘British Journal of Management’, ‘Accounting, Organizations and Society’, ‘Annals of Tourism Research’, the ‘European Journal of Operational Research’, the ‘Journal of Environmental Management’, ‘Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal’, ‘Critical Perspectives on Accounting’, the ‘Financial Accountability & Management, the ‘Journal of International Accounting, Auditing and Taxation’, the ‘Journal of Banking and Finance’, the ‘Journal of Financial Research’, the ‘Journal of Futures Markets’, the ‘Journal of Business Finance and Accounting’, ‘Technological Forecasting and Social Change’, the ‘Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money’ and the ‘International Journal of Finance and Economics’. 

The Department also hosts the Centre for Quantitative Finance (CEQUFIN), a research centre that aims to fill the gap between academia and industry, carrying on independent studies on current issues that can serve the wider community better.