Yinghua Li

I am Yinghua Li, a full professor of accountancy at Arizona State University. Before joining ASU, I served on the faculties of Purdue University and Baruch College. I study how accounting information, corporate incentives, legal rules, and market intermediaries shape the decisions of firms and the people around them. My research treats accounting as part of the economic system rather than simply a record of it: institutions determine what managers reveal and how credible it is, and that information influences governance, risk, production, and the allocation of talent.

My most influential work shows that hidden bad news accumulates into stock-price crashes. The risk is higher when firms use opaque tax strategies, is more strongly associated with CFO option incentives than CEO incentives, and falls when reporting standards become more credible. These studies have received more than 5,000 Google Scholar citations as of August 2026. A related line establishes the dual effects of external monitoring: institutional plaintiffs and sustained hedge fund interventions can improve governance, tax efficiency, and reporting discipline, but intense market pressure can also lead managers to obscure bad news or substitute toward costly real operating actions. My recent work broadens this agenda, showing that general analyst coverage can harm product quality while product-specialist analysts improve it, that accounting disclosure improves CEO-firm matching, that audit-partner characteristics shape reporting comparability, and that capital-market regulation changes the supply of accounting human capital.

My research has appeared or is forthcoming in leading accounting, finance, and management journals, including the Journal of Financial Economics, The Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting Research, Management Science, Review of Accounting Studies, and Contemporary Accounting Research. It has been featured by the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment and the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance. I served on the editorial board of The Accounting Review from 2016 to 2022; I have served on the editorial board of the Journal of International Accounting Research since 2017 and the editorial review board of the Journal of International Business Studies since 2025. My Google Scholar profile (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=7lgotecAAAAJ&hl=en) provides current citation and impact data.