Harm Schütt
Assistant professor of accounting at the Tilburg School of Economics and Management.
Can you introduce yourself?
My name is Harm and I am an assistant professor of accounting at the Tilburg School of Economics and Management. My area of expertise is financial information analysis and valuation. I’m part of the research community that examine how financial information influences belief formation and in financial markets. I grew up in Germany and lived in various places around the world (one of my favorite parts was the 5 years in the bay area during my Ph.D.) before joining the great group of scholars TiSEM.
Research and education are two important pillars of academia. What do they mean to you?
One of my mentors always called it the “academic triathlon”: research, education, and practice dialogue. I always thought this is a nice analogy for business schools. Just as with triathlons, you might enjoy cycling the most, but you won’t get to the goal line if you can’t swim. If the goal for a business school is to be useful to society, then I think we need to be good at research, education, and practice dialogue. Personally, I draw a lot of motivation and strength via the interplay of these three pillars. Researching how information is processed in markets, helps me in teaching how to analyse companies. Teaching our enthusiastic students how to forecast earnings in turn always helps me in getting new ideas and revisiting core principles (as the saying goes, you really only understand a topic once you taught it for a few years). And the dialogue with industry experts (and former students who are becoming such experts) is a nice source of motivation and inspiration.
You are now one of the initial members of the TYA. How is that like?
It’s an honor to be part of TYA. For me this is about helping our large community of young academics in Tilburg to have another platform where we can discuss and promote the issues important to us. Since our community is so diverse in background and insights, there are also many diverse issues. And I find the discourse around these issues at TYA especially inspiring and motivating.
I am sure you all have topics that are important to you. What is your main focus in the TYA?
There are many, but two things are particularly important to me. The first is that I think that an especially nice part about academic life is the interaction and discourse with like-minded, intellectually curious people from different feels. I feel like TYA is a great place for making such a discourse happen. The second is related to what I wrote about the academic triathlon. I think the discussion about Recognition and Rewards is crucial for setting future expectations and incentives for our community. I think it is great how TYA participates in the steering group to have a say on the important issues for early-career researchers.