Faculty
Logan Steele
Associate Professor, Associate School Head, and Mary Ellen Phillips Professor in Financial Accounting
Accounting

Logan Steele

541-737-8659

logan.steele@oregonstate.edu

Faculty
Logan Steele
Overview
Overview
Publications

Overview

Career Interests

Logan Steele is the Associate School Head for the School of Accounting, Finance, and Information Systems, and an Associate Professor of Accounting at the Oregon State University College of Business. 

Prof. Steele received his Ph.D. in accounting from the University of Arizona's Eller College of Management in 2011. Prior to his doctoral studies, he worked for two years at Moss Adams LLC auditing public clients in the banking sector. Prof. Steele has previously worked as a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of Connecticut. Steele has taught introductory and intermediate financial reporting courses, cost accounting courses, and doctoral seminars on capital markets research. 

Prof. Steele's research focuses on how to use accounting information to predict macroeconomic outcomes, as well as the relationship between accounting information and risk. He is particularly interested in how the nature of accounting information affects its' usefulness in predicting future outcomes.

Accepted Papers:

"Aggregate Tone and Gross Domestic Product" with Elizabeth Demers, Fabio Gaertner, Asad Kausar, and Heather Li. Accepted for publication at Contemporary Accounting Research.

"Demand Uncertainty and Tax-Motivated Outbound Income Shifting" with Junfang Deng and Haimeng Teng. Conditionally accepted for publication at the Journal of the American Taxation Association. 

“The Determinants of Segment-level Tax Expense Disclosure” with Junfang Deng, Fabio Gaertner and Dan Lynch. 2021. Published in the Journal of the American Taxation Association 43 (1), 1–26.

“Express yourself: Why managers’ disclosure tone varies across time and what investors learn from it” with John L. Campbell, Hye-Seung “Grace” Lee and Hsin-Min Lu. 2020. Published in Contemporary Accounting Research 37 (2), 1140-1171.

 “The Usefulness of Negative Aggregate Earnings Changes in Predicting Future Gross Domestic Product Growth” with Fabio Gaertner and Asad Kausar. 2020. Published in the Review of Accounting Studies 25 (4), 1328-1409. 

“Debt Structure and Conditional Conservatism” with Hye-Seung “Grace” Lee. 2019. Published in the Journal of Financial Reporting 4 (2), 115-140.

“The Effect of Aggregation of Accounting Information via Segment Reporting on Accounting Conservatism” with Daniel Bens and Steven Monahan. 2018. Published in the European Accounting Review 27 (2), 237-262

 “The Risk Relevance of Taxable Income” with Dan Dhaliwal, Hye-Seung “Grace” Lee and Morton Pincus. 2017. Published in the Journal of the American Taxation Association 39 (1), 1-24

 “The Information Content of Mandatory Risk Factor Disclosures in Corporate Filings” with John Campbell, Hsinchun Chen, Dan Dhaliwal and Hsin-Min Lu. 2014. Published in the Review of Accounting Studies 19 (1), 396-455.

Publications

Academic Journal
Accounting

“Proprietary Costs and the Reporting of Segment-level Tax Expense”

We examine whether proprietary costs of disclosure affect the reporting of segment-level tax expense. Current accounting rules for segment-level reporting afford managers significant discretion in what line items to report. We predict and find firms with higher proprietary costs of disclosure (i.e., higher tax avoidance) are less likely to disclose segment-level tax information. These results are stronger for firms that define business segments on a geographic basis, where disclosure could reveal tax expense information about specific tax jurisdictions, consistent with the proprietary cost hypothesis. Overall, our results suggest some managers potentially use discretion in current guidance to avoid segment-level disclosure of taxes when these disclosures have the potential to be detrimental to the firm.
Details

1-26 pages 2021 American Accounting Association Junfang Deng Logan Steele Dan Lynch Fabio Gaertner View on: Google Scholar

Academic Journal
Accounting

“The Effect of Aggregation of Accounting Information via Segment Reporting on Accounting Conservatism"”

In a sample of US multiple-segment firms, we document a negative association between aggregation via segment reporting and timely loss recognition. A higher level of aggregation, as reflected in a firm’s reported organizational structure (the definition and characteristics of its segments), causes a multiple-segment firm to exhibit less cross-segment variation in profitability than a matched control portfolio of single-segment firms. We find that firms that engage in more aggregation report accounting numbers that provide less timely information about economic losses. We also observe that firms that provide more disaggregated segment data subsequent to adopting SFAS 131 experienced an increase in timely loss recognition. This result implies that higher quality segment reporting leads to an increase in timely loss recognition, which, per extant research, is associated with better governance.
Details

237-262 pages 2018 Logan Steele Daniel Bens Steven Monahan View on: Google Scholar