The 2026 CAPANA Annual Conference Doctoral Consortium was held on June 30, 2026, at the School of Management and Economics (SME), The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen (CUHK-Shenzhen). The full-day consortium was designed to guide doctoral students through the core skills of an academic accounting career — research design, career planning, and the publication process — and was taught by four distinguished scholars:
• Prof. Tianyu Zhang — SFI Chair Professor & Area Head of Accounting, CUHK-Shenzhen — “Field Experiment Research in Accounting”
• Prof. Christopher R. Stewart — Associate Professor, University of Chicago Booth School of Business — “Building an Early-Career Research Agenda: Foundations and Future Directions”
• Prof. John Xuefeng Jiang — Eli Broad Endowed Professor, Michigan State University; incoming Editor, The Accounting Review (2026–2029) — “What I Wish I Had Known as a PhD Student”
• Prof. Daniel A. Cohen — Frances Hampton Currey Chair, Vanderbilt University; Editor, Contemporary Accounting Research — “The Editorial Peer Review Process and the Path to Tenure”
The day closed with a moderated Research Forum on impactful research and the publication process, giving attendees the chance to raise questions directly with the panel.
Building a research agenda (Prof. Stewart): This session was the most directly relevant to where we are now in our PhD studies. Prof. Stewart explained why an early-career researcher benefits from a coherent research agenda rather than a set of disconnected projects: a consistent thematic thread makes a scholar’s expertise recognizable to the field, gives job-market and tenure committees a clear narrative to evaluate, and compounds over time as each project builds on the credibility, data, and methodological depth of the last. He encouraged us to identify a small number of questions or methods we genuinely care about and let our papers accumulate around them, so that our work — and our professional identity — becomes easy for others to place and to trust. This framing gave us a much clearer way to think about how to plan our own dissertation and early publication pipeline around a consistent identity rather than chasing scattered topics.
Causal inference and field experiments (Prof. Zhang): Prof. Zhang’s session addressed how field experiments can be used to establish causal — rather than merely correlational — relationships in accounting research, for example around corporate transparency and investor information demand. This was a valuable complement to the more common observational and archival methods we typically encounter, and it gave us concrete ideas for how causal-inference designs could strengthen the identification strategy in our own work.
The remaining sessions — Prof. Jiang’s career reflections and Prof. Cohen’s overview of the editorial peer-review process — added practical, real-world context on how research is evaluated and published, rounding out a program that combined research design, career strategy, and publication know-how in a single day.
Overall, the Doctoral Consortium was a highly valuable use of our time, and the guidance on building a consistent research agenda in particular will directly inform how we plan and position our future research.