Jan Bouwens is full professor of accounting at the University of Amsterdam and is research fellow at the University of Cambridge.
He currently studies how audit firms design and use performance measurement systems to motivate their equity partners. He also studies how target setting is related to implicit contracting within firms. In another study he examines how the deployment of internal controls affect a bank’s loan decisions.
On behalf of the (Dutch Inter-University) Limperg Institute he organizes Ph.D. courses in accounting. He serves at the board of Contemporary Accounting Research and The Accounting Review and is head of the accounting department at the University of Amsterdam.
Jan has advised the Dutch parliament on education, finance, compensation/performance measure and auditing topics. He also advised the Dutch Ministry of Finance and the AFM (Dutch equivalent of the SEC) and the Dutch banking Association. He is an active member of the Dutch association of accountants. He writes editorials for newspapers in the UK and in the Netherlands on a regular basis. He -for instance- wrote an editorial on how media coverage affects the image of the audit profession. He is one of the managing directors of the Foundation of Auditing Research (FAR), a research institute that provides academics with data collected in audit firms.
His teaching experience extends from bachelor, to Ph.D. programs in business economics. During the academic year 2013-2014 he taught accounting in the MBA program at Harvard business School. He also taught accounting in various executive programs. He holds his doctorate degree from Tilburg University and has published in several top tier academic journals, including Management Science; the Journal of Accounting and Economics; Journal of Accounting Research; Contemporary Accounting Research; Accounting, Organizations and Society; and The Accounting Review. In his studies he tries to speak to the question of whether, how, and under what conditions accounting affects decision making of investors and managers. He collects archival and survey data from individual firms to examine the working of accounting and control systems in these firms to examine his research questions.
