Anastasia Zakolyukina’s research focuses on linguistic-analysis of corporate disclosures, individual traits of corporate executives, and opportunistic accounting discretion and its interaction with firms’ investment choices. Her work, titled “How Common Are Intentional GAAP Violations? Estimates from a Dynamic Model”, evaluates the extent of undetected earnings misstatements. She finds that CEOs’ expected cost of misleading investors is low, which results in high misstatement rates; however, the magnitude of inflation of stock prices is small. Another paper, “Detecting Deceptive Discussions in Conference Calls’’, predicts earnings misstatements from conference call narratives of top executives. This study has been mentioned in The Economist, NPR, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, CBC, CNBC, and Bloomberg.
Recently, Zakolyukina has explored personality traits of corporate executives and their interaction with firms’ outcomes. The paper “CEO Personality and Firm Policies” measures CEO’s Big Five personality traits using CEOs’ narratives from conference calls.
Zakolyukina earned her Ph.D. in Business Administration from Stanford Graduate School of Business. Additionally, she holds an M.A. in Economics from the New Economic School. Before pursuing graduate studies, Zakolyukina studied at the Udmurt State University where she earned degrees in Information Systems and Law.