Costello Research Private Funds

What is the role of professional judgment and oversight in AI-assisted audits? How is private equity investment altering the management and strategic direction of accounting firms? Can regulators close the tax gap for cryptocurrencies and borderless digital assets and ensure enforcement? The 2026 Accounting Horizons Conference, hosted by the Costello College of Business at George Mason University, provided a platform to examine answers to questions shaping the accounting industry’s future.

Co-owned companies are more likely to use the same audit firm. This has positive implications for institutional investors and the market as a whole, according to Young Hoon Kim, assistant professor of accounting at Costello.

Since 2008, the meteoric rise of index funds has produced extreme consolidation of corporate ownership. So far, the outcomes for firms are a mixed bag.

Artificial intelligence can perform peer firm selection—a key task for investors—at least as accurately as well-established alternative algorithms and human experts, according to research by Costello profs Long Chen and Yi Cao.

In churchgoing counties, financial advisors are more likely to remember their ethical training and resist the temptation to misbehave.

You can tell a lot about a hedge fund’s quality—and long-term performance—from the market climate in which it was launched.
Lin Sun, assistant professor of finance, recently published a paper in Review of Finance that compares hedge funds formed in high-demand, or “hot,” markets to those produced in a “cold” market climate.

Measuring risk in private equity is notoriously difficult. New research by Mason assistant professor of accounting, Mariia Nykyforovych, suggests that metric-based myopia, and the distorted incentives it creates, are partly responsible. 

The economic balance is shifting toward private equity. But accounting scholars are still working from an outdated playbook.

New research by Serdar Aldatmaz, assistant professor of finance, benefits organizations that are seeking to move operations overseas.