Faculty Profile

AMIN AMERSHI

Accounting and Financial Management Services

Professor

Area of Expertise
ON EXTENDED RESEARCH LEAVE

Dr Amershi is one of the two finance theorists who developed the theory of “supershares”. Professor Hakansson of Berkeley initiated the concept in seminal papers in the late 1970’s.Dr. Amershi, working independently on his doctoral thesis and later in three major papers in 1980-81, generalized the theory of supershares to include all risk sharing in any economy, with or without markets, and linked it to the theory of sufficient statistics in mathematics. Heterogeneous beliefs stemming from investor psychology and differences in knowledge and understanding are captured in sufficient statistics.

Dr. Amershi is an expert on risk-sharing (linear and non-linear) syndicates, financial markets structure, instruments and their design, the no-arbitrage pricing theory, and accounting and accountability structures. He also has expertise in many cognate areas such as game theory, decision theory, and agency theory. Over the last several years, Dr. Amershi has worked on a new paradigm for the Economics of Knowledge for valuation in knowledge-based economies. He co-authored a major paper that introduced abandoning the “common knowledge” assumption in accounting research, thereby providing the first internally consistent and robust solution to the long-standing LIFO-FIFO economic puzzle.

Professional Activities
In 1979, Dr. Amershi was the first Canadian accounting/finance Ph.D. to be aggressively recruited by two of the five top business schools in the world immediately after graduation. His "supershares" research, while at Stanford, triggered a major offer from Berkeley. In the last 25 years this distinction is unique among Canadian doctorates. In 1976, three years before Ph.D., he had professorial offers from the leading business schools in Canada, and from Duke and Columbia Universities in the US. He came to North America on one of numerous doctoral fellowships he was awarded while in Kenya. Dr. Amershi was for several years Distinguished Professor at the Conference of the Deans of Schools of Business of Canada. He has sole and jointly authored nearly fifty papers, two monographs. His papers have appeared in leading journals such as Econometrica, The Rand Journal of Economics, The Journal of Finance, Journal of Accounting Research, The Accounting Review, Contemporary Accounting Research and Management Science. He has served on various journal editorial boards. His Ph. D. students are leading academics at top schools in their own right. Dr. Amershi has delivered invited keynote lectures and written influential op-ed pieces on contemporary issues, and has consulted with government and professional organizations. He was an examiner and author for the Certified Management Accountants of Canada for many years. In 1993 he was awarded one of the largest textbook contracts in the recent history of accounting or finance disciplines. The textbook envisaged a novel pedagogy employing animated graphics and simulation that was far ahead of its time. In the last few years, a part has become technically feasible.

Education
Ph.D., Accounting, Economics of Information and Management Science, University of British Columbia
B.Sc., (Math; Summa cum Laude) Royal College Nairobi/Imperial College London University