Annual Conference 2018 Speakers

Three very exciting key speakers are already in place for the 2018 BAFA Annual Conference with Doctoral Masterclasses in London.

Professor Werner De Bondt is Professor of Finance and Founding Director of the Richard H. Driehaus Center for Behavioral Finance at DePaul University in Chicago. He holds a PhD in Business Administration from Cornell University (1985). Werner De Bondt studies the rationality and irrationality of investors, markets, and organisations. In past years, he was a member of the faculty at universities in Belgium, Switzerland and The Netherlands. Between 1992 and 2003, Werner De Bondt was the Frank Graner Professor of Investment Management at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Professor De Bondt's subject will be ' Under no illusions. The downfall of rational choice theory. What is means for accounting and finance'.

Luciano Floridi is Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford, where he directs the Digital Ethics Lab (DELab) of the Oxford Internet Institute. He is also Faculty Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute and Chair of its Data Ethics research Group, and Chairman of the Ethics Advisory Board of the European Medical Information Framework. He sits on the EU's Ethics Advisory Group on Ethical Dimensions of Data Protection, on the Royal Society and British Academy Working Group on Data Governance, and on Google Advisory Board on “the right to be forgotten”. His areas of expertise include the philosophy of information, digital ethics, and the philosophy of technology. Among his recent books, all published by Oxford University Press: The Fourth Revolution—How the infosphere is reshaping human reality (2014), The Ethics of Information (2013), The Philosophy of Information (2011).

Professor Floridi will be speaking on the topic of ' Why the digital causes new challenges and how to cope with them'.

Jeffrey Unerman is Professor of Accounting and Corporate Accountability in the School of Management at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is also a co-opted member of the ICAEW Council and vice-chair of the ICAEW Research Advisory Board, a member of the Expert Panel of the Prince of Wales’s Accounting for Sustainability Project, and an honorary member of CPA Australia. His research and public policy work focuses on the use of accounting in making the social and ecological impacts of organizational activities more transparent and in encouraging the embedding of sustainability within organizational decision-making.

Jeffrey’s plenary address at BAFA’s 2018 Annual Conference will explore some of the implications of the Brexit debate and Trump’s election for accounting and finance academics.

Sharon Witherspoon is Head of Policy at the Academy of Social Sciences. She also currently sits on the Senior Salaries Review Board, where she is involved in a major review of judicial salaries, and is a Trustee of Full Fact.

Sharon worked for several years in applied social science research, designing and carrying out evaluations of government programmes in the 1980s, and serving as part of the original research team on the British Social Attitudes survey. She was at the Nuffield Foundation, a grant-giving endowed charitable trust, for 19 years, first heading its programmes of social research and social policy, and then for three years as Director. While there, she led the development of the £19.5m Q-Step programme, funded jointly by the Nuffield Foundation, the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), to improve quantitative research skills for UK social science undergraduates.

She was awarded an MBE for services to social science in 2008, received the British Academy President’s Medal in 2011, and was awarded an honorary doctorate by University College London in 2015 for services to social sciences and law