You are now leaving the Kelley School of Business' official website; the views and opinions expressed in the linked website are those of the author and do not reflect the views, opinions, or official policy or position of Indiana University or the Kelley School of Business.
You are now leaving the Kelley School of Business' official website; the views and opinions expressed in the linked website are those of the author and do not reflect the views, opinions, or official policy or position of Indiana University or the Kelley School of Business.
You are now leaving the Kelley School of Business' official website; the views and opinions expressed in the linked website are those of the author and do not reflect the views, opinions, or official policy or position of Indiana University or the Kelley School of Business.
I joined the Kelley School of Business in 2013 after completing my Ph.D. in Accounting at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business. Before graduate school I earned my MAcc and BS in Accounting at Brigham Young University.
My research examines how firms disclose information and how markets process it. Much of my work focuses on narrative disclosure—risk factors, footnotes, and the MD&A—and asks how the words in a financial report relate to the numbers, how courts and regulators evaluate disclosure adequacy, and how disclosure choices affect prices, litigation, and investment. A second stream studies price formation and information transfer across firms, using network methods and intraday data to trace how information moves through equity markets. I also work on research design for causal inference in archival accounting settings, including the use and limitations of entropy balancing.
My work has been published in The Accounting Review, Review of Accounting Studies, Journal of Business Finance & Accounting, Journal of Financial Reporting, and outlets in information science and physics. I review for the major accounting journals.
At Kelley my teaching responsibilities include Communicating Accounting with Analytics and AI (a course I developed), Statistics for Researchers I. I have taught Intermediate Financial Accounting II and Industry 4.0 in Mexico. I serve as the Accounting Department’s Faculty Director of Analytics and AI and have received the Indiana University Trustees Teaching Award twice and have received and been nominated other teaching awards.
Disclosure; financial reporting; risk disclosure; textual analysis; price formation; information transfer; earnings quality; research design for causal inference; networks
Academic Degrees
Ph.D., Accounting, University of Southern California, Marshall School of Business, 2014
MAcc, Accounting, Brigham Young University, Marriott School of Management, 2008
BS, Accounting, Brigham Young University, Marriott School of Management, 2008
Professional Experience
Associate Professor and Weimer Faculty Fellow, Indiana University, Kelley School of Business, 2023–present
Associate Professor, Indiana University, Kelley School of Business, 2021–2023
Assistant Professor, Indiana University, Kelley School of Business, 2014–2021
Acting Assistant Professor, Indiana University, Kelley School of Business, 2013–2014
Faculty Director, Accounting Analytics, Kelley School of Business, 2023–2024, 2025–present
Research Assistant, University of Southern California, Marshall School of Business, 2008–2013
Audit Intern, Ernst & Young, 2007
Awards, Honors & Certificates
Weimer Faculty Fellow, Kelley School of Business, 2023–present
Research Accelerator Fellowship, Kelley School of Business, 2024–2025
Indiana University Trustees Teaching Award, 2017 and 2023
Kelley School of Business Accounting Department Teaching Achievement Award, 2023
Kelley School of Business Innovative Teaching Award (with Brian Williams), 2022, for "Infusing Accounting Analytics throughout the Accounting Curriculum + Development and Introduction of A355, Communicating Accounting Analytics"
Excellence in Reviewing Award, AAA Financial Accounting and Reporting Section Midyear Meeting, 2022
Gies Business Research Lab Grant (Co-PI), Gies College of Business, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, $35,000, 2022
Outstanding Discussant, AAA Financial Accounting and Reporting Section Midyear Meeting, 2019 and 2021
Doctoral Consortium Fellow, AAA/Deloitte Foundation/J. Michael Cook Doctoral Consortium, 2012
Mary Pickford Foundation Doctoral Teaching Award, University of Southern California, 2012
Marriott School Graduate Scholarship, Brigham Young University, 2007–2008
Selected Publications
Cazier, R., Huang, J., McMullin, J., and Zhou, F. (2026). Media Sentiment and Shareholder Litigation. Journal of Business Finance & Accounting, 53(2), 998-1020. https://doi.org/10.1111/jbfa.70045
Drake, M., McMullin, J., Merkley, K., Potter, C., and Treu, J. (2026). Disclosure benchmarking by lawyers: evidence from the IPO setting. Journal of Business Finance & Accounting, 53(2), 646-680. https://doi.org/10.1111/jbfa.70029
Bracht, E., Brunner, R., and McMullin, J. (2025). Towards a unified approach to industry recovery: Insights from intraday stock data and advanced community detection methods. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and Its Applications, 669, 130501. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physa.2025.130501
McMullin, J., and Schonberger, B. (2022). When good balance goes bad: A discussion of common pitfalls when using entropy balancing. Journal of Financial Reporting, 7(1), 167–196. https://doi.org/10.2308/JFR-2021-007
Cazier, R., McMullin, J., and Treu, J. (2021). Are Lengthy and Boilerplate Risk Factor Disclosures Inadequate? An Examination of Judicial and Regulatory Assessments of Risk Factor Language. The Accounting Review, 96(4), 131–155. https://doi.org/10.2308/TAR-2018-0657
Madsen, J., and McMullin, J. (2020). Economic Consequences of Risk Disclosures: Evidence from Crowdfunding. The Accounting Review, 95(4), 331–363. https://doi.org/10.2308/accr-52641
Ikegwu, K., Trauger, J., McMullin, J., and Brunner, R. (2020). PyIF: A Fast and Light Weight Implementation to Estimate Bivariate Transfer Entropy for Big Data. Proceedings of IEEE SoutheastCon 2020. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9249650
McMullin, J,, Miller, B. P., and Twedt, B. (2019). Increased Mandated Disclosure Frequency and Price Formation: Evidence from the 8-K Expansion Regulation. The Review of Accounting Studies, 24(1), 1-33.
Abstract
Regulators claim that increased mandated disclosure frequency should lead to more efficient price formation. However, analytical models suggest that mandating disclosure may actually impede the price formation process, and prior empirical studies have been unable to document a relation between mandatory disclosure and improved price formation. We re-examine this relationship using a recent SEC regulation that increased the frequency of mandated event disclosures in form 8-K. We show that price formation improves after the mandate, where firms with the largest increases in mandatory disclosure experience the greatest improvements in price formation. Our evidence is consistent with the idea that mandating an increase in the frequency that material events must be disclosed is associated with improved price formation.
DeFond, M. L., Konchitchki, Y., McMullin, J. L., and O'Leary, D. E. (2013). Capital markets valuation and accounting performance of Most Admired Knowledge Enterprise (MAKE) award winners. Decision Support Systems, 56, 348–360. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11142-018-9462-2
Bracht, E., Sharma, A., Brunner, R., and McMullin, J. (2026). Learning from Structure, Not Sequences: Forecasting Equity Markets Using GNNs on Financial Correlation Networks. Kelley School of Business Working Paper. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7154273
