Rick Mergenthaler
Associate Professor in Accounting
Department Accounting
Phone Number
814-863-7055
Email Address
rjm6979@psu.edu
Rick Mergenthaler
Associate Professor in Accounting
Department Accounting
Phone Number
814-863-7055
Email Address
rjm6979@psu.edu
Education
Ph.D., Accounting, The University of Washington, 2008
Masters of Accountancy, Audit, Brigham Young University, 2002
Bachelors of Science, Accounting, Brigham Young University, 2002
Courses Taught
ACCTG 481 – Fin Anal Eval Dec (3)
An accounting based evaluation and decision making approach to analyzing financial statements by studying business and firm valuation.ACCTG 481 Financial Statement Analysis (3) The proposed course in financial statement analysis is structured to improve the student's ability to extract and interpret information from actual financial statements and to expose the student to how financial statement information is integrated into equity valuation and credit analysis. The course would not only rely upon textbook-based and lecture-based learning, but also emphasize case-based learning.The course will consist of two main sections. The first will deal with accounting and business analysis. This part will explore the types of financial information data typically available for publicly traded companies and introduce a model of the economic drivers of company performance. It would incorporate some technical accounting as well as some standards business economics/strategy concepts. Students will be forced to recast financial statements that they believe do not reflect the underlying economic state of the company. Financial reporting issues relating to revenue and expense recognition, leases and consolidations will be discussed.The other section of the course will deal with firm valuation. Students would be exposed to some standard approaches to equity valuation and the analysis activities underlying these approaches. Aspects of valuation that would be covered in this section of the course are financial ratio analysis, forecasting, pro-forma statements, cost of capital and valuation methods.The course will rely on lectures and extensive use of case studies.
ACCTG 501 – Res Meth Acctg (3)
ACCTG 502 – Accounting Research (3)
This course prepares DBA students to consume and produce accounting research. Students will also be equipped with a solid understanding of the philosophy of science and know how to design a research study to avoid common threats to validity. Students will also be instructed on the proper etiquette they should employ when serving in the academic community-especially as it pertains to scholarly peer reviews.
Selected Publications
I note Heejin Ohn as a graduate student as he was a graduate student at the University of Iowa when he was added to the project. Ciao-Wei Chen was also my graduate student (I was his advisor), but he was not a graduate student when we started this project. Rather, he and Sam Melessa were assistant professors.
I was working on this paper with my two Ph.D. students, Spencer Young and Aaron Roeschley. We had a working draft and Paul approached me with the same idea as I'm the expert on the discretion afforded to managers via GAAP. Hence, I chose to team up with Paul as he is a good friend and colleague. Having five coauthors on this paper is an anomaly and is the exception in my published papers.
Ciao-Wei Chen was my graduate student (i.e., I was the co-chair of his dissertation committee) and this paper was started from his second year paper, for which I was his advisor.
David Folsom and I started this paper when I was an assistant professor and he was a graduate student at the University of Iowa. Hence, I marked him as a graduate student--meaning he was a grad student when the project started.