Shannon W. Anderson

Dr. Anderson is the inaugural Hurlston Presidential Chair and Professor of Management at the UC Davis Graduate School of Management, where she teaches courses in management accounting and internal management controls.

Her degrees are in business economics and engineering and her research spans these fields, covering topics such as cost accounting, performance measurement, incentive contracting, supply chain contracting, and operations management. She uses empirical analysis of firm-level accounting and operational data to test economic theories about firm performance. She also has experience designing, administering, and analyzing survey data. Her published work has employed data from many industries, including automotive, electronics manufacture, office furniture manufacture, commercial airlines, consumer retail, coal extraction, transportation, and warehousing and distribution.

Dr. Anderson’s research has been funded by professional and national research organizations such as the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, the National Science Foundation, and the Australian Research Council. She regularly presents at conferences worldwide and has won the “Notable Contribution to the Accounting Literature” award and thrice won the “Notable Contribution to the Management Accounting Literature Award” from the American Accounting Association. She has been an editor of The Accounting Review and an associate editor at Management Science, and is on the editorial board of numerous journals. Her work appears in leading journals, including The Accounting Review; Management Science; and Contemporary Accounting Research, and she is an author on the popular management accounting textbook, Fundamentals of Cost Accounting, which is in its fifth edition.

Previously, Dr. Anderson was on faculty at the University of Michigan and Rice University. She has held visiting faculty appointments at Harvard Business School and the University of Melbourne. Earlier Dr. Anderson worked as an engineer for General Motors Corporation.