Accountants use the equation Assets = Liabilities + Shareholders' Equity as the basis for their balance sheets. (Image courtesy of Matthew Palmer. Used with permission.)
Instructor(s)
Prof. George Plesko
Prof. Kin Lo
Prof. Richard Frankel
MIT Course Number
15.515
As Taught In
Fall 2003
Level
Graduate
Course Description
Course Features
Course Description
Our goal is to help you develop a framework for understanding financial, managerial, and tax reports. The course goal is divided into five subordinate challenges that can help you organize the way you learn accounting:
- The record keeping and reporting challenge
- The computation challenge
- The judgment challenge
- The usage challenge
- The search challenge
The course adopts a decision-maker perspective of accounting by emphasizing the relation between accounting data and the underlying economic events generating them. Restricted to first-year Sloan MBA students.
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgment is hereby given to Professor G. Peter Wilson for his authorship of the following content in this course:
- The Five Challenges (see Syllabus and Lecture 1)
- "What Do Intel and Accountants Have in Common?" (see Lecture 1)
- A Conceptual Framework for Financial Accounting (see Lecture 1)