Researchers teaching the research.
Accounting Coding Camp is built and taught by working empirical researchers: professors of accounting at BYU's Marriott School of Business who use these tools, databases, and conventions in their own published work. We don't teach coding in the abstract; we teach the way research actually gets done.
A track record in the field's top journals
Our instructors' research appears in the most selective journals in accounting and finance, and is cited widely by other scholars. These are the same standards and methods we teach in the camp.
Journals include The Accounting Review, Contemporary Accounting Research, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Management Science, and Review of Accounting Studies.
Their research has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Bloomberg, Financial Times, and NPR, and presented to the IRS, the SEC, and a congressional subcommittee.
The professors behind the camp
Jake Thornock
Jake studies taxation, tax havens, the information content of earnings, and how information technologies shape financial markets. He earned his PhD at UNC's Kenan-Flagler Business School and joined BYU from the University of Washington. His work appears in the Journal of Accounting & Economics, Journal of Accounting Research, The Accounting Review, Journal of Finance, and Journal of Financial Economics, and he co-authored the McGraw-Hill textbook Financial Accounting for Managers. His research has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Bloomberg, and NPR, and presented to the IRS, the SEC, and a congressional subcommittee.
Mike Drake
Mike's research examines how financial information moves through and impacts capital markets, including investor attention, analyst forecasts, the business press, and the acquisition of SEC filings via EDGAR. He earned his PhD at Texas A&M and previously taught at Ohio State's Fisher College of Business. His work appears in the Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Accounting & Economics, The Accounting Review, and Management Science, and he has won the FARS Best Paper Award (2019) and the Accounting Horizons Best Paper Award (2018).
Josh Lee
Josh studies capital markets and voluntary disclosure, with an emphasis on textual analysis and machine learning applied to financial text. He earned his PhD at Washington University in St. Louis and previously taught at the University of Georgia and Florida State. His research appears in the Journal of Accounting & Economics, Journal of Accounting Research, The Accounting Review, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Accounting Studies, and Management Science, and has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and Financial Times.
We teach what we do.
Every technique in the camp comes from real research workflows: the same steps we run to take a question from raw data to a published paper. That's why the camp is more than coding. It's the data techniques and research conventions that empirical accounting and finance rely on, taught by the people who use them.
What we teach within Accounting Coding Camp
Foundational programming in Python, SAS, and STATA, applied to the tasks empirical research requires on the databases researchers use.
Programming foundations
The essentials of Python, SAS, and STATA for empirical research, from first principles to research-grade code.
WRDS, CRSP & Compustat
Access WRDS directly from Python and SAS with SQL; build common financial-statement variables and abnormal returns.
Data preparation & analysis
Import, merge, clean, winsorize, and explore data, plus descriptive statistics and regression analysis.
Web scraping
HTML structure and browser interaction, applied to scraping filings from EDGAR and prices from Yahoo! Finance.
Textual analysis
Regular expressions, tokenization, and pre-processing to measure disclosure tone and the Fog index.
Machine learning
Random forests, neural networks, support vector machines, and LDA applied to financial data.
Robotic process automation
Validate input, automate the keyboard and mouse, and manage files across the operating system.
AI for research code
Use Claude, Copilot, and ChatGPT to write, optimize, and debug code faster, grounded in the conventions that keep it correct.
Development environments
Get productive in the two most popular Python IDEs: VS Code and PyCharm.
See the teaching for yourself, for free.
Preview real lessons and code before you enroll. No credit card required.