Marc J. Epstein

Marc J. Epstein is presently Research Professor of Management at Jones Graduate School of Management at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Prior to joining Rice, he was a professor at Stanford Business School, Harvard Business School, and INSEAD (European Institute of Business Administration).

Epstein has completed extensive academic research and has extensive practical experience in the implementation of corporate strategies and the development of performance metrics for use in these implementations. In several recent articles he shows how the use of balanced scorecards help companies focus strategy and can be linked directly to performance measures.

Epstein’s just completed book, Counting What Counts: Turning Corporate Accountability to Competitive Advantage, was released in April. It integrates his work into a model of corporate accountability based on improving 1) corporate governance 2) management systems 3) internal and external reporting, and 4) financial, operational, and social measures of performance.

Epstein’s book, Measuring Corporate Environmental Performance: Best Practices for Costing and Managing an Effective Environmental Strategy, won numerous academic, professional, and business awards and was published in 1996. It was the largest field based research study in this area with extensive work with the senior executives of leading multinational companies. Another recent book, The Usefulness of Corporate Annual Reports to Shareholders, was his third book on the subject and a summary of his research more than 20 years on how shareholders use corporate annual reports to make investment decisions. This work has had significant impacts on the design and content of corporate annual reports.

The author of a dozen books and monographs, Epstein is currently Editor-in-Chief of a top academic journal, Advances in Management Accounting. He is also Series Editor of the research book series, Studies in Managerial and Financial Accounting. Epstein has also written more than 100 professional articles for academic (such as Academy of Management Review; Accounting, Organizations, and Society), practitioner (such as Financial Executive; Strategic Finance; Management Accounting), and the popular press (such as The New York Times). He has extensive industry experience and has been a senior consultant and lecturer to businesses and governments throughout the world for more than 25 years.