2019 Prize Winners

Ray Ball and Philip Brown

The 2019 Wharton-Jacobs Levy Prize for Quantitative Financial Innovation was awarded to Professors Ray Ball and Philip BrownThey were recognized for their influential work linking stock prices to accounting data, outlined in their paper An Empirical Evaluation of Accounting Income Numbers (Journal of Accounting Research, 1968).

The Prize was presented at the Jacobs Levy Center’s conference on September 27, 2019 at the New York Marriott Marquis.

Ball is the Sidney Davidson Distinguished Service Professor of Accounting at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Brown is a senior honorary research fellow in accounting and finance and emeritus professor at the University of Western Australia, and formerly was an honorary professor at the University of New South Wales and an honorary visiting professor at Lancaster University.

Read the 2019 replication by Ball and Brown, which describes the 1968 paper, provides some interpretation, and replicates the results in both recent U.S. data and 16 other countries.

2019 Prize Selection Committee
  • Bruce Jacobs (Committee Chair)
    Principal and Co-Founder, Jacobs Levy Equity Management
  • Andrew Ang
    Head of Factor Investing Strategies, BlackRock
  • Elroy Dimson
    Professor of Finance, Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge
  • Chris Geczy (Ex-Officio)
    Adjunct Professor of Finance and Academic Director, Jacobs Levy Equity Management Center for Quantitative Financial Research, The Wharton School
  • Richard Grinold
    Former Global Director of Research, Barclays Global Investors
  • David Hirshleifer
    Distinguished Professor, Paul Merage Chair in Business Growth, Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine