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Geoffrey Whittington

Senior Research Associate, Centre for Financial Analysis and Policy (CFAP)
Emeritus Professor
Life Fellow of Fitzwilliam College

BSc (Univ. of London), MA, PhD (Univ. of Cambridge), Hon DSc (Edinburgh Univ.)

Download Geoffrey Whittington's CV (pdf, 13KB)

Professional experience

Chartered accountant. Past experience includes Consultant to the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth. Part-time Advisor to the Office of Fair Trading (on the Stock Exchange case). Part-time Member of the Monopolies and Mergers Commission. Academic Advisor and subsequently a part-time Member of the Accounting Standards Board (UK) (currently a member). Full-time Member of the International Accounting Standards Board. Consultant to leading national and international companies on competition policy, accounting and pricing issues.

Member of three RAE panels, Chair of one and Deputy Chair of another. Member of many editorial boards, advisor on many Chair appointments and member of many professional committees (Institutes of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales and of Scotland) relating to research, technical matters and accounting standards. Member of the Meade Committee on the reform of direct taxation, and subsequently of the IFS Tax Law Reform Committee. Member of the DTI Company Law Review panel on financial reporting.

Previous appointments

Professor Whittington trained as a Chartered Accountant and started his academic career as a researcher in the Department of Applied Economics at Cambridge and Director of Studies in Economics at Fitzwilliam College. He subsequently held the chairs of accounting and finance at Edinburgh and Bristol before returning to Cambridge as Price Waterhouse Professor of Financial Accounting in the Faculty of Economics (1988). He left in 2001 to take a five-year appointment as a full-time member of the International Accounting Standards Board, returning to Cambridge in 2006.

Awards and scholarships

• Awarded the Founding Societies' Centenary Award by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, 2003
• CBE in the New Year Honours list, 2001
• Honorary DSc, University of Edinburgh, 1997
• Elected Distinguished Academic of the Year by the British Accounting Association, 1994

Research interests

The theoretical underpinnings of accounting standards, including the current revision of the conceptual framework for financial reporting; measurement in accounting, particularly fair value and its relationship to other current value measures.

Geoffrey Whittington is a member of the Finance & Accounting subject group.