Jan Bouwens’s research and teaching centre on how accounting helps organisations take decisions. In particular, he is interested in how they motivate employees to create value for their firms, looking for example at how quantitative targets can help employees make choices in their day-to-day work. He is also interested in how accounting influences collaboration between employees. At present, he is investigating the criteria used to measure performance and remunerations for top accountants. Within the banking sector, Bouwens examines how information sharing helps bank staff take better decisions about the credit banks extend. In addition, he studies what impact varying levels of targets have in the extent to which managers learn over time. In recent years, Bouwens has focused increasingly on the question whether and how the value companies create also translates into value for society.

Bouwens will be appointed as the head of the Accounting Department at the UvA's Faculty of Economics and Business, where he teaches management accounting and control in the Bachelor's level Economics & Business Economics and Business Administration programmes, and in the Accountancy and Control Master's programme. He also contributes to the Accountancy post-Master's programme, the Executive Master's in Finance & Control, the Amsterdam IT-Audit Programme and the Executive Auditing Programme.

About Jan Bouwens

In 2017 Bouwens was appointed as professor of Management Accounting at the Judge Business School of the University of Cambridge. From 2015 to 2017 he was professor of Accounting at the UvA. Before this, he was at Tilburg University for many years, as professor of Financial and Management Accounting and head of the Accountancy Department.

Bouwens is a board member and managing director of the Foundation for Auditing Research, which he co-founded. He will continue to teach at Cambridge as visiting professor, a post he has previously also held at the Harvard Business School and the University of Melbourne.

Bouwens is a member of the editorial board of Contemporary Accounting Research and associate editor of the Journal of Contemporary Accounting and Economics. He regularly writes for national dailies including The Financial Times, Het Financieele Dagblad, NRC Handelsblad and de Volkskrant on a wide spectrum of topics related to economics, and is opinions editor for De Accountant. His scientific research has often led him to draw conclusions and make recommendations that upend prevailing political and public thinking, and he is regularly consulted by organisations such as the Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM) and the Dutch parliament.