Biography

Kristy L. Towry is John and Lucy Cook Chair and Professor of Accounting at Emory University's Goizueta Business School. Professor Towry joined the Goizueta Business School faculty in 2002, after receiving her PhD from The University of Texas at Austin. She has extensive experience in managerial accounting and finance, including a number of positions at Exxon and Compaq. Professor Towry's research relates to the use of accounting information for managerial decision making, with a focus on managerial control systems and financial incentives. Her research, based on the experimental method, blends theory from economics, psychology, and other social sciences to provide insights into accounting issues. She has published in The Accounting Review, Contemporary Accounting Research, Review of Accounting Studies, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and other accounting and economics journals.

Education

  • PhD in Accounting
    The University of Texas at Austin
  • MBA in Accounting and Finance
    Texas A&M University
  • BSc in Mathematics and Computer Science
    Northwestern State University of Louisiana

Ambiguous Sticks and Carrots: The Effect of Contract Framing and Payoff Amiguity on Employee Effort.

The Accounting Review
June 17, 2025
2023

The Impact of Knowledge Transfer on Investments in Knowledge Creation in Firms

Contemporary Accounting Research
June 17, 2025
2022

Leading by Example: The Effect of Contract Design on the Ability to Lead

The Accounting Review
June 17, 2025
2021

Bring the Noise, but Not the Funk

The Accounting Review
June 17, 2025
2020

Vicarious Learning Under Implicit Contracts

The Accounting Review
June 17, 2025
2016

Turning Up the Volume: An Experimental Investigation of the Role of Mutual Monitoring in Tournaments

Contemporary Accounting Research
June 17, 2025
2013

Framing Sticks as Carrots: An Experimental Investigation of Contract Frame and Effort in Agency Relationships

The Accounting Review
June 17, 2025
2012

Does the Communication of Causal Linkages Improve Effort Allocations?

Journal of Management Accounting Research
June 17, 2025
2012

Performance Spillover in a Multi-Task Environment

Contemporary Accounting Research
June 17, 2025
2012

In Search of Informed Discretion: An Experimental Investigation of Fairness and Trust Reciprocity

The Accounting Review
June 17, 2025
2012

Dividing the Pie: The Influence of Managerial Discretion Extent on Bonus Pool Allocation

Contemporary Accounting Research
June 17, 2025
2011

Flattening the Organization: The Effect of Organizational Reporting Structure on Honesty in Managerial Reporting

Review of Accounting Studies
June 17, 2025
2010

Recordkeeping Alters Economic History by Promoting Reciprocity

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
June 17, 2025
2009

Contracting on Contemporaneous vs. Forward-Looking Measures: An Experimental Investigation

Contemporary Accounting Research
June 17, 2025
2008

The effect of information systems on honesty in managerial reporting: A behavioral perspective

Contemporary Accounting Research
June 17, 2025
2006

This study examines the behavioral impact of an information system, and how that impact varies with the information system's precision, in an internal reporting environment. We propose that a manager's reporting decisions are affected by his or her trade-off of the ...

Quantification and Persuasion in Managerial Judgement

Contemporary Accounting Research
June 17, 2025
2005

Accounting involves assigning numbers to events—quantifying them. Conventional wisdom holds that putting numbers to an argument enhances its persuasive power. There is, however, little scholarly evidence to support or refute this claim, in accounting or ...

The effect of control systems on trust and cooperation in collaborative environments

The Accounting Review
June 17, 2025
2005

Because of conflicting incentives among participants, collaborations (eg, strategic alliances, joint ventures, and work teams) present a significant control challenge to managerial accountants. On the one hand, formal controls such as sanctioning and monitoring ...

Control in a teamwork environment - The impact of social ties on the effectiveness of mutual monitoring contracts

The Accounting Review
June 17, 2025
2003

This study examines control in a teamwork setting, experimentally investigating two financial incentive systems that have been proposed in the agency-theory-based analytic literature. Both systems rely on mutual monitoring-the ability of team members to observe each ...

Negotiated transfer pricing: Is fairness easier said than done?

The Accounting Review
June 17, 2025
2002

Questionnaire responses reported by Luft and Libby (1997) reveal that transfer price negotiators expect fairness-based price concessions that moderate the influence of an outside market price when the outside market price strongly favors one of the parties. We ...