Joseph Piotroski Receives First Ernest R. Wish Accounting Research Award Joseph D. Piotroski, assistant professor of accounting at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, has been named the first recipient of the school's Ernest R. Wish Accounting Research Award. The award will be given annually for the best paper written by a junior member of the Chicago GSB Accounting faculty. Ernest R. Wish, chairman of WRM, Inc., and a former managing partner of PricewaterhouseCoopers, established the award through a joint gift with his former firm. Wish received his MBA from Chicago GSB in 1971. In his paper, Piotroski applies basic financial statement analysis to portfolios with book values that are higher than their market values.
Analysts often consider such firms bad investments.
Yet some of these firms are strong and, as his research shows, can outperform the overall market. I hope that the award will stimulate additional meaningful research in years to come. Piotroski joined the GSB faculty in 1999 after receiving a Ph.D. in accounting from the University of Michigan and an MBA with a concentration in finance from Indiana University. He earned a B.A. in accounting from the University of Illinois.