Professor Radhika Lunawat’s research focus is on financial reporting and disclosure, and its effects on investment decisions and price formation. More specifically, she looks at the role information, particularly accounting information, plays in investment efficiency at the individual decision-making level and price efficiency and other trade characteristics at the aggregate level. There are several channels through which financial reporting and disclosure affect investment efficiency. The channel she primarily focuses on is trust and reputation-building. Similarly, there are several channels through which financial reporting and disclosure affect price efficiency and other trade characteristics such as trading volume and liquidity. The channels she focuses on are ambiguity in asset values and higher-order beliefs in financial markets. Methodologically, her research is part of a growing body of work in information economics that is driven by theory or theory-based experimentation but focused on accounting.

Professor Lunawat earned her PhD from the University of Minnesota in 2009 and joined UCI in 2013 after having taught at Chapman University, University of St Thomas and Carnegie Mellon University. She has published her research in top Accounting journals and top field journals in Economics. At UCI, she teaches Managerial Accounting (undergrad and grad), Ethics (MPAC) and Accounting Theory (PhD). She received the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant and the University of Minnesota Graduate School Fellowship for her doctoral dissertation. She was the US representative to the European Accounting Association Doctoral Colloquium and has been the recipient of a teaching award.