Caspar David Peter
Associate Professor at the Accounting Department
Most of my research starts from one question: does reporting transparency actually change how firms and investors behave? I study how disclosure feeds into corporate misconduct, industry coordination, and mergers and acquisitions, with work published in the Journal of Financial Economics, The Accounting Review, and The Review of Financial Studies. More recently I have taken up a second question that feels just as pressing: how AI is reshaping the economy and the way we learn. As a Senior Fellow at Microsoft Research’s AI Economy Institute I study historical analogues to technological disruption, and I build tools that put AI to work in teaching, including Mattie, which supports students through their master’s thesis.
Open Projects
Teaching materials and tools, publicly available on GitHub
PhD Lecture Quarto
Earnings Management Then and Now: Revisiting Jones (1991)
An interactive PhD lecture that walks through the seminal Jones (1991) model, its evolution, and modern applications. Designed for doctoral students in accounting and finance.
MSc Course R
Data Analytics for Finance
Public-facing materials for the MSc Data Analytics for Finance course at RSM. Covers data wrangling, visualization, and applied econometrics using Stata.
Research Highlights
Owner exposure through firm disclosure
We show that companies named after their owners tend to be more opaque in their financial disclosures, particularly when revealing such information might expose sensitive owner details and attract social stigma. We also show that when disclosure is forced, these owners are more likely to change their firms’ names, and new firms are less frequently named after their founding owners.
Mandatory Financial Disclosure and M&A Activity
We investigate the impact of mandatory financial disclosure on mergers and acquisitions. We find that required disclosure boosts M&A activity by reducing information frictions, as evidenced by an increase in both the number and volume of private firms becoming targets.
News & Updates
July 2026
Named a Senior Fellow in the third cohort of Microsoft Research’s AI Economy Institute, working on historical analogues to technological disruption. Read the announcement →
June 2026
Served as a jury member at Falling Walls Lab Amsterdam, where early-career researchers pitch groundbreaking ideas in three minutes. Read more →
May 2026
Awarded a CLI Innovation Projects grant for the AI-Powered Personalized Learning Assistant (“Mattie”), which gives feedback and provides a dashboard for students to track their MSc thesis progress. In active development, more updates soon.
May 2026
MSc AI Dashboard released: an interactive pipeline that tracks signs of AI-generated text in master’s theses, using the ChatGPT launch as a soft pre/post cutoff. Explore it →
November 2025
New PhD lecture on “Earnings Management Then and Now: Revisiting Jones (1991)” available. Feedback welcome. Check it out →
February 2025
Interactive teaching materials on financial statement analysis released. Check it out →
February 2025
Seminar at LMU Munich presenting research on union office closures and corporate misconduct.
January 2025
Honored to be part of the Economenparade, among the best published economists in the Netherlands. Read more →
Current Teaching
Data & Coding
MSc Program, 2025 Coordinator and content creator
Financial Reporting & Analysis
BSc Program, 2021-2025 Coordinator and instructor
Accounting Analysis & Governance
MSc Program, 2025 Coordinator and instructor