Jo Lacy

Dr. Jo Lacy began her accounting career working for premier firms, Coopers & Lybrand (now PricewaterhouseCoopers or PwC) and Ernst & Young. She then decided to further her education and earn an MBA with a concentration in finance and an accounting Ph.D. Her business experience, teamed with her degrees from top-notch institutions, makes her a real asset for the PSB’s accounting and finance students. The PSB celebrated her arrival in August of 2014.

Dr. Lacy’s research interests lie largely in judgment and decision making for auditing and managerial accounting, as well as pedagogy. Topics of her research have included:

• an experimental study of disclosure perceptions for contingent liabilities
• evidence that MBA students are better prepared for corporate strategic planning than MSA students
• attention to depreciation’s effect on capital budgeting metrics
• the Masters of Accounting student and off-balance sheet accounting
• auditing and the sociopathic manager: critical reflections on current practices and standard setting processes
• perceived ambiguity of accounting information: an application of the Einhorn and Hogarth Ambiguity Model

Dr. Lacy’s professional affiliations and activities include the American Accounting Association, the National Association of Black Accountants, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, and the National Black MBA Association. She has been the recipient of the AICPA Doctoral Fellowship and the KPMG Peat Marwick Foundation Fellowship. Dr. Lacy was an American Accounting Association’s Doctoral Consortium Fellow.

At HPU, Dr. Lacy teaches MBA Managerial Accounting, Financial Management and Government/Not-for-Profit Accounting. She has also taught MBA Financial Management, Financial Accounting, and Managerial Accounting. She serves HPU as a Faculty Justice and as part of the Office of Student Life Committee. She previously worked as an assistant professor at Illinois Wesleyan University where she taught Professional Issues, Accounting and Auditing Concepts and Theory, Managerial Accounting, and Financial Accounting. As assistant professor at the University of Central Florida she taught Financial Accounting Concepts and Analysis and Intermediate Financial Accounting.

Dr. Lacy’s education and professional certifications include a Ph.D. in accounting from the School of Business and Public Management at The George Washington University, an MBA with a concentration in finance from The Darden Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia and a B.S. in accounting from Hampton University. She is a Certified Public Accountant in the state of Maryland.