AFAANZ (pronounced as “A Fens” to this Canadian ear) Conference is the annual conference of the accounting and finance academics in Australia and NZ.

It has been six years since I last visited this happy crew and from what I can see the trajectory of accounting academia “down south” is still going strongly upward.

The doctoral students were amazing at the doctoral consortium held before the conference and discussed in my last post.  Doctoral students presented both their own work and discussed those of their classmates.  The presentations and discussions were both on par with any that I have seen around the world.

The most amazing thing I have seen is the changes in the finance part of the stream.  A senior full professor of finance at Sydney U has fully embraced qualitative research methods (he is still a postivist) including interviews, surveys etc as part of his research program on finance in retirement funds (known as super (as in superannuation or pension) here).   A big shout out to Professor Doug Foster who at a late (or “later” – no pejoratives intended here) stage in his career took the time to learn and apply new methods (as well as signing up knowledgable co-authors) at world class behavioral research standards levels.