Niklas is a post-doctoral researcher at the Chair of International Accounting at WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management of Prof. Martin Glaum. He is also a regular Visiting Scholar at the Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill at the invitation of Prof. Wayne Landsman. Niklas joined the Ph.D. program at WHU in September 2017 and finished his dissertation titled “CEO discretion, earnings management, and compensation across countries” in June 2022. He was awarded the highest honor, summa cum laude (1.0). During his Ph.D., Niklas was the Doctoral Representative for the doctoral student body at WHU from 2018 to 2021. Before starting his Ph.D. program, Niklas was an undergraduate and graduate student at WHU, and spent exchange semesters at Gies College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in 2014, and at Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, in 2016.

Niklas’ engages in international accounting research and focuses on the country-level environments that shape CEOs’ discretion to engage in opportunistic actions, e.g., through earnings management and regarding executive compensation. His research is based on archival data and involves quantitative research methods, but he also uses large-scale questionnaire survey tools with experts from practice. In his dissertation, Niklas develops a cross-country measure of managerial discretion and uses it to explain cross-country differences in firm outcomes, such as performance variability and executive compensation. In his Job Market Paper, specifically, he shows that the more discretion CEOs have available across countries, the “deeper” is the accounting “big bath” that newly incoming CEOs take following a CEO turnover. In further research, Niklas is interested in compensation disclosure, the use of financial accounting information by different firm stakeholders, and the role of the CFO in a digitalized finance function.

Niklas has taught several courses in the undergraduate and graduate programs at WHU. These include the core lecture “Financial Statements” in the first semester of the undergraduate program and the elective lecture “International Accounting” in the fifth semester of the undergraduate program, as well as the elective lecture “Financial Reporting and Capital Markets” that is required to obtain a Major in Accounting in the graduate program. Students evaluated his teaching as “Excellent” (1.1 in 2022).

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