Welcome!
My name is Sebastian and I am an Assistant Professor in Accounting from the University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam Business School. You can find more information about me and my work on this site.
My research examines how the formatting and complexity of firm disclosure influences users, preparers and auditors of financial statements in their judgment and decision making. While my research projects involve several agents, they all relate to fundamental topics in financial accounting, such as disclosure credibility, investor learning, earnings management and fraud. Using mostly economics based experimental methods, I capitalize on the comparative advantage of experiments at disentangling the effect of disclosure on investment decisions, measuring intervening processes and drawing strong causal inferences.
Check out the section on research projects for an overview of my work and find more information about me in my CV.


Sebastian Stirnkorb
Assistant Professor in Accounting
University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam Business School
Email:
Address:
Plantage Moudergracht 12
Postbus 15953
1001 NL Amsterdam
EDUCATION
2016-2021
PhD in Accounting
ROTTERDAM SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT,
ERASMUS UNIVERSITY
PhD in Accounting and Control
Doctoral thesis:"Changes in the Information Landscape and Capital Market Communication"
2018
Research Visit
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
Research visit from August to December 2018
Invited by Jessen Hobson
2013-2016
Master's Degree
HUMBOLDT UNIVERSITY, BERLIN
Master in Economics and Management Studies
Master thesis: "Behavioral Approaches to Information Acquisition and Avoidance"
RESEARCH INTERESTS

INVESTOR JUDGMENT AND
DECISION MAKING
FRAUD DETECTION
VOLUNTARY DISCLOSURE
EXPERIMENTAL ACCOUNTING RESEARCH
EARNINGS MANAGEMENT
INVESTOR DISAGREEMENT
RESEARCH PROJECTS
MANAGING EARNINGS TO APPEAR TRUTHFUL: THE EFFECT OF PUBLIC SCRUTINY ON EXACTLY MEETING A THRESHOLD
with Jessen Hobson
The past two decades have not eliminated managers’ willingness to manage earnings to meet and beat thresholds but have increased investors’ skepticism of earnings that exactly meet those thresholds. This provides perverse incentives to not meet earnings expectations exactly. Using a low context experiment, we find that managers who are more sensitive to others’ scrutiny, misreport to avoid exactly meeting a benchmark when public scrutiny increases, even though they have no financial incentive to do so. Thus, we uncover a new incentive to manage earnings: misreporting to appear truthful. Further, we show that this scrutiny increases managers’ belief that the market will accept their reports, consistent with managers misreporting for self-presentational goals. These results are important as managers are increasingly scrutinized via more intimate forms of disclosure and communication, such as social media.