Ray J. Ball
Ray J. Ball is an Australian-born economist who specializes in accounting and financial economics. He is the Sidney Davidson Distinguished Service Professor of Accounting at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Ball helped create the field of financial economics in accounting, showed how a company’s earnings relate to its stock price, and identified important anomalies in efficient market theory, including the post-earnings-announcement drift.
He grew up near Sydney and was the first in his family to finish high school. He studied accounting at the University of New South Wales, earning first-class honors and the university medal. He earned an MBA in 1968 and a PhD in economics in 1972 at the University of Chicago, where his supervisor was Eugene Fama. He is a CPA and Fellow of CPA Australia.
Ball’s 1968 paper with Philip Brown is a landmark that linked earnings to stock prices and helped launch modern financial accounting research. The work also showed that stock-price reactions to earnings announcements can continue beyond the day of the announcement. He has held major academic roles in Australia and the United States, built research programs at UNSW’s AGSM, and edited leading journals such as the Journal of Accounting and Economics and the Journal of Accounting Research. He taught at the University of Rochester and later returned to Chicago, where he edited Journal of Accounting Research until 2015.
His career includes teaching at the University of Chicago (1969–1972), a professorship at the University of Queensland, and the founding of the Australian Journal of Management. In 1986 he moved to the University of Rochester as Wesray Professor and edited the Journal of Accounting and Economics (1986–2000). He returned to Chicago in 2000 and edited the Journal of Accounting Research until 2015. Ball has been widely honored for his work, including election to the US Accounting Hall of Fame (2009) and the Australian Accounting Hall of Fame (2018); honorary degrees from several universities; and the Wharton Jacobs Levy Prize in 2019 for quantitative financial innovation.
He is ranked among the top 5% of economists worldwide by RePEc. He has held advisory roles with accounting standards bodies and other educational and research organizations. He is married to Janice since 1970; they have two children and four grandchildren. Janice holds a PhD and is a published poet.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 05:06 (CET).