Staff profile

Dr John Hillier

Research Fellow

Faculty of Business, Economics and Law

La Trobe Business School
Department of Accounting

Social Sciences Building room 223, Melbourne (Bundoora)

 

Qualifications

BA (Macquarie), MCom(Hons) (UNSW), PhD (Otago), GDCompSc (UNE)

Membership of professional associations

CPA Australia: CPA

Area of study

Accounting
Finance

Brief profile

John Hillier joined La Trobe as of January 2008 as a Research Fellow. He has held posts at variously Associate through Senior Lecturer levels across several institutions including the Universities of New England and Southern Queensland and UNSW and has industry experience in accounting via significant engagements with the then Burroughs Ltd and the then BHP Co. Ltd.

John assists junior staff with their research, collaborates with senior staff in research projects and pursues his own individual lines of research activity. Collaborative work with La Trobe colleagues is currently underway on A-IFRS adoption's impact on Australian financial reporting, and corporate governance issues in the finance and accounting domains. Work with outside collaborators is currently in progress on managed smoothing's impact on earnings numbers' properties, fair values measurement and disclosure, and effects of  time series adjustments to earnings. Key interest is the statistical properties and economic interpretation of accounting numbers, including use of Monte Carlo simulation and agent-based computational modelling methods.     

Research interests

Corporate disclosure; corporate governance, financial accounting; auditing, and accounting policy choice

- Please contact me to discuss a topic.

Recent publications

  • 'R&D profitability, intensity and market-to-book: evidence from Australia' (with K Ahmed and E Tanusasmita), Accounting Research Journal, 24(2), 2011 
  • ‘Impact of depreciation-type adjustments on the distribution of accounting earnings’ (with R Willett), Accounting and Business Research, Vol. 36, Issue 4, 2006
  • ‘Fundamental determinants of the Australian price-earnings multiple’ (with A Shamsuddin), Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Vol. 12, Issue 5, 2004

Older publications

  • ‘The earnings smoothing potential of systematic depreciation’ (with M McCrae), Abacus, Vol. 34, No. 1, 1998
  • ‘The foundations of statistical activity cost theory with applications to some old accounting measurement issues: a simulation approach’ (with M Gibbins and R Willett), Kyushu University Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 64, No. 5-6, 1998
  • ‘The success and failure of Australian financial futures markets’ (with C Kearney) in Developments in Australian monetary economics, ed. C Kearney and R MacDonald, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1991
  • ‘The efficiency of the market for bank accepted bills’ (with C Kearney and R MacDonald), Economic Record, Vol. 65, No. 190, 1989

Research projects

Working papers in progress:   

  • 'Feasibility of managed earnings smoothing in the short and long' (with M McCrae),  SSRN #1460471 (early version with alternate title) 
  • 'Investment opportunity set, internal corporate governance and firm performance: evidence from South Africa' (with B Muniandy and S Naidu), SSRN #1578324

Currently underway or planned, all involving colleagues within or without La Trobe:

  • 'Impact of the adoption of IFRS on the quality of financial reporting in Australia ' (Faculty Research Assistance Grant)
  • 'Corporate governance, investment opportunity set and firm performance: evidence from the Malaysian capital market' (Faculty Research Assistance Grant)   
  • Effect of intertemporal adjustments on time series properties of earnings
  • Fair value accounting theory, development and statistical effects
  • Equity market rationality via offer-acceptance theory and agent-based modelling