Columbia Business School announces the launch of the Center for Excellence in Accounting and Security Analysis (CEASA). CEASA’s Advisory Board is led by former SEC chairman Arthur Levitt. Levitt, who is currently an adviser to the investment firm the Carlyle Group, said, "The center will bring together the best ideas in academia and practice to provide objective solutions to current and anticipated issues facing regulators and practitioners." CEASA will be codirected by Stephen Penman, the George O. May Professor of Accounting at Columbia Business School, and Trevor Harris, a former Columbia Business School faculty member and current managing director at and head of the Global Valuation and Accounting Team in Equity Research at Morgan Stanley.
CEASA’s Advisory Board members include Phil Ameen, vice president and controller of GE; Mark Anson, CIO of CalPERS; John Biggs, former CEO of TIAA-CREF; Richard Carroll, assistant controller of accounting at IBM; Michael Cook, former chair of Deloitte and Touche; Lee Cooperman, chairman and CEO of Omega Advisors; Stephen Crawford, executive vice president and CFO of Morgan Stanley; Sir Howard Davies, former chair of Finacial Services Authority in the U.K.; Peter Fisher, former under secretary for domestic finance, U.S. Department of Treasury; Glenn Hubbard, former chairman of President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors and professor of Finance and Economics, Columbia Business School; Sallie Krawcheck, chairman and CEO of Smith Barney; David F. Larcker, Ernst & Young Professor of Accounting, the Wharton School, UPenn; Carol Junge Loomis, editor-at-large, Fortune Magazine; James A. Ohlson, Leonard N. Stern Professor of Business and acting chair of the Accounting Department, Stern School of Business, NYU; and Robert J. Swieringa, dean of the S. C. Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University, and former member of the FASB.
The first meeting of the advisory board took place on Wednesday, October 8, 2003. At the inaugural meeting, the board selected specific topics to be analyzed by unbiased expert teams. White papers will be issued and presented to regulators responsible for the formation and implementation of public policy, as well as to business leaders whose companies are affected by legislative and regulatory actions.
"Columbia Business School is a natural home for the center," says the School’s Dean Meyer Feldberg. "With a rich history of fundamental analysis and access to talent unparalleled in the country, the center will be a powerful voice."
Generously funded through grants from the GE Foundation, IBM and Morgan Stanley, the center is being established at a time when financial reporting and security analysis is under unprecedented scrutiny and review.