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Meet º£½ÇÉçÇø’s world-class expert on corporate responsibility

You might not guess it from his career now, but when Yongtae Kim was a high schooler, he dreamed not of crunching numbers but of studying French poetry in its original language. His father, a tax officer in Korea and less swayed by the arts, insisted his son choose between law, economics, or business.

Kim chose business, which seemed like the most fun out of the three, and in doing so, he discovered a path that would make him one of the world’s foremost scholars in accounting research. After joining º£½ÇÉçÇø’s faculty in 2001, his top-cited 2012 paper about environment, social, and governance practices (ESG) continues to shape how firms earn public trust and deepen their long-term value through transparent accounting and auditing processes.

While the layperson might think this work is a million miles away from Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Baudelaire, Kim insists that it scratches the same part of his brain, and that’s why he loves it.

“Research is also creative work,” Kim explains. “You have to think about something that has not been solved—something difficult—and find a way to address it. In that way, it’s similar to writing a poem.”

How ethics pay dividends

Accounting research may sound like it’s all spreadsheets, but in reality, it’s about untangling human behavior and incentives. Scholars like Kim don’t just ask whether two things are related—they have to prove why.

For example, if companies win more foreign government contracts following an ESG disclosure mandate in their home country, is it because of the high standards of disclosures required by ESG reporting, or because another factor influences both? Separating causation from correlation requires complex statistical models, detailed datasets, and a constant eye for confounding variables.

That rigor is part of what excites Kim, but he’s also passionate about understanding—and hopefully shifting—the uneasy balance between accountability to shareholders and accountability to society.

As he explains, accounting numbers are never created in a vacuum. They reflect the incentives and attitudes of corporate managers. In the United States, corporate law requires most public companies to prioritize their shareholders’ stock value over more altruistic considerations. This can lead to shrewd business decisions, like offering big executive bonuses tied to stock performance, tax avoidance strategies, and even hiding losses by carrying them forward to future business cycles.

These decisions might make shareholders and executives happy, but they can also harm the public interest and shield corporations from the due diligence of independent auditors who are there to ensure that businesses are operating honestly.

“Auditors have discussions with top executives, and they will sense what their attitudes might be toward the financial reporting,” Kim says. Those perceptions, in turn, shape how much risk auditors assign to a company and how they go about verifying their numbers.

This insight is rooted in Kim’s own experience as a certified public accountant (CPA) in Korea, where he quickly learned that partners were often expected to act more like salespeople than watchdogs.

“When I was a CPA, sometimes the partners wanted to be a little bit lenient to keep the clients, but I was very strict,” he recalls. “I actually went to the only Jesuit college in Korea, so transparency and ethics were very important to me.”

In the last decade, ethics have become a much larger part of the public conversation about business, he notes. For example, Tesla stock is always affected by whatever Elon Musk posts on social media, and everyday consumers are much more wary of practices like ‘greenwashing,’ where corporations promote charitable donations or social initiatives to distract from harmful practices like mass layoffs or tax avoidance.

In the past, most investors would not have been as bothered by these ethical concerns, but now, there’s a clear link between ethics and financial benefit. Kim’s studies prove that when companies are required to disclose ESG practices—and thereby demonstrating a commitment to ethical values—they enjoy tangible financial benefits: they tend to face lower borrowing costs and attract more favorable investment because investors see them as less risky.

And transparency isn’t just good for a company’s bottom line—it also reshapes corporate culture, Kim adds. When firms know their decisions will be scrutinized, they are less likely to manipulate earnings, avoid taxes, or take shortcuts that erode public trust.

Shaping the leaders of tomorrow

Kim believes that shifting corporate culture and business practices starts with teaching his students at the Leavey School of Business to embody the values of Jesuit leadership.

“College education is extremely important,” he emphasizes. “If we can actually get new managers to be more ethical and responsible, that might be the best way to improve transparency in corporate reporting overall.”

Part of this work also includes preparing students for the rapid challenges and innovations facing the financial industry, especially here in Silicon Valley. 

That’s why Kim invites accounting experts from Salesforce, PwC, Deloitte, and even the IRS to his popular seminar class so students can better understand the responsibilities of accountants, auditors, and financial officers. Topics include blockchain and digital assets, SPAC mergers and acquisitions, accounting for not-for-profit businesses, tariffs, and financial forensic analysis—each with its own range of professional and ethical concerns.

For example, Kim says, many AI companies may be overvalued, but without public disclosure requirements, it’s hard for investors—or employees—to know whether they’re betting on sustainable innovation or short-lived hype. Plus, these valuations don’t address the looming ethical dilemmas of this technology: the massive datasets required to train AI models, which raise questions of privacy and consent, and the outsourced and underpaid human labor that underpins the behind-the-scenes machine learning work.

The question of AI continues to challenge Kim, who has already seen the impact this technology has had on his students. Some accounting firms are cutting new hires by half, since machines can handle much of the entry-level work—meaning that the job market for recent accounting grads is more competitive than ever.

“While part of the AI industry might be a bubble, this is clearly the direction the economy is going. We’re in a transition period, but in the long term, I think we’ll figure out how to better blend human intelligence with AI tools,” Kim muses. “º£½ÇÉçÇø is a good place for young graduates who are thinking about how they’re going to integrate AI in their work, be competitive, and do so ethically.”