Accounting Professor Wins Fulbright Grant for Research in Austria
The regulatory environment and accounting practices surrounding corporate social resposnsibilities are at the center of Victoria Krivogorsky's work.
For most public corporations, the days of concentrating solely on their shareholders' interests in maximizing profits are long gone.
As San Diego State University accounting professor Victoria Krivogorsky notes, companies and their managers nowadays are expected to create value for society as a whole, paying heed to broader concerns that range from environmental pollution and carbon footprints to overcrowded highways and impacts on residents of surrounding communities.
“For a long time, all those responsibilities were neglected,” Krivogorsky said.
These modern-day obligations, known in the business world as corporate social responsibilities (CSR), impose costs of enormous concern to their investors — and the accountants who need to report them. Krivogorsky has researched this issue in other European nations and is now turning to Austria, with her work supported by a 2021-22 Fulbright Scholar Program award announced in April.
It was actually the second consecutive year Krivogorsky received an endorsement from the American Institute of International Education for the award. The first approval had to be withdrawn amid COVID-19 travel restrictions, and she’s prepared for the possibility of changes to her schedule this time around as well if conditions worsen.
Krivogorsky tentatively plans to leave in March for an entire semester of study, ending in July, at Vienna University of Business and Economic, where she will teach an international seminar course. She plans to meet with business representatives and other faculty researchers in Austria to go over their CSR practices in great detail.
“My research aims to provide policy-makers with results relevant to developing a CSR regulatory environment rooted in consistent theoretical background,” Krivogorsky said. “It also aspires to elevate the interest in CSR among investors and corporate managers.”
Krivogorsky’s own interest in CSR emerged from previous studies of corporate governance. Her research will focus on a unique dimension of the issue of sustainable resource consumption pertaining to small economies. What's true for the United States or even France and Germany may not apply to a smaller, stable economy such as Austria’s, where there are fewer capital sources. “Utilizing an Austrian sample gives a unique opportunity to analyze the current global trend toward new accounting practices, including the use of non-financial measures of corporate performance, in a small but highly developed economy,” she said.
She was born and raised in Ukraine and received her first Ph.D. at what was then the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. Krivogorsky received another doctorate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, then taught Ph.D. and graduate students at Morgan State University in Baltimore, a historically black college and prominent research university. She was recruited to SDSU in 2005 and currently teaches a graduate course in U.S. GAAP/International Financial Reporting Standards and 500-level courses on advanced and international accounting.
The U.S. Fulbright Scholar Program awards grants to university and college faculty and other professionals to conduct research and teach in more than 125 countries. The U.S. State Department supports it through its Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs; Krivogorsky's grant is also supported by the Austrian-American Educational Commission in Austria.
