Fresh off completing her PhD from the University of Connecticut, Kangkang Zhang is beginning her full-time teaching career at Gies College of Business while continuing to investigate securities regulation, public finance, and government-related research.

“I want to build myself as an expert in this area, but I will probably also expand into other topics,” said Zhang, an assistant professor of accountancy at Gies Business.

In addition to its reputation as a top business school, Zhang was attracted to Gies’ collaborative environment.

“I noticed a lot of collaborative research papers out of Gies,” Zhang said. “They are involved in a diverse set of topics, including archival research, experimental research, tax, and financial areas, among others, which I can learn from.”

Inspired by her mom’s role as a government worker in China, Zhang has taken a strong interest in research involving the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

“My mom specialized in setting securities policies for companies and developing programs to support small business growth, so I became interested in this topic,” Zhang said. “It is beneficial to understand how regulation shapes behavior and outcomes in both the public and private sectors.”

Her doctoral dissertation at the University of Connecticut studied the effect of SEC investigations of public pensions.

“We normally think about public pensions related to state government and don’t always think about the SEC looking into public entities, like the public pensions,” Zhang noted.

It’s no secret that pensions are under a lot of stress because of underfunding and, in some cases, bankruptcy looms. 

“Public pensions are facing a lot of troubles,” Zhang said. “When the SEC investigates them, they often find mismanagement and corruption, and other governance issues. I found that when the SEC gets involved, public pensions improve their investment, make accounting choices less discretionary, and increase their cash contributions.” 

Zhang has two other working papers involving the SEC that she hopes to publish in her first few years at Illinois: “SEC Scrutiny and Corporate Risk-Taking” and “Earnings Conference Calls and the SEC Comment Letter Process.” She hopes to expand her interests and find other faculty collaborators as well.

“Gies has an assorted set of offerings for undergraduate, graduate, and PhD students,” she said. “They also come from diverse backgrounds. It’s exciting to be engaged in a school with such vibrancy and an exemplary reputation.”

Zhang originally pursued a career in law but found that to understand some of the financial securities litigation-related cases, a business background would be beneficial. She ultimately achieved not only a Bachelor of Laws degree but also a Bachelor of Management in Accounting from Sun Yat-sen University of Guangzhou, China.

She came to the United States and earned a Master of Accounting from the University of Michigan and passed her CPA exam. That led her to a job in accounting at the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China in New York City. Looking for something a little more “creative,” she ultimately decided to enroll in the PhD program at UConn.

In addition to her research at UConn, she also taught a course in data analytics, which she plans to also do during the fall semester at Gies. Her early goals include attracting more students to her courses, publishing in top journals, and collaborating with others.

Zhang has become familiar with Illinois and the surrounding area from a fellow PhD student at UConn who is a Gies graduate and has met a few of its faculty at various conferences.

“Champaign-Urbana is a very welcoming place for people from diverse cultural backgrounds,” Zhang said. “For instance, there are a lot of Chinese restaurants and other ethnic restaurants that I don’t think I’ll need to cook.”

Zhang also loves that there is much to do here and that it is so close to larger metropolitan cities. In her free time, she plans to explore the Japan House and the Krannert Art Museum and is thinking about taking up golf.

“You can see why Gies was one of my dream schools,” Zhang said.