Haowei (Harvey) Ruan

Haowei (Harvey) is a PhD job market candidate in accounting at the University of Queensland Business School in Australia, under the supervision of Professor Kathleen Herbohn and Professor Peter Clarkson. He was the PhD student representative in the Accounting Discipline of UQ Business School. Prior to joining the PhD program in 2022, he worked for KPMG China on an IPO project. Harvey is a chartered accountant (ACCA, full member since 2022) in the UK and received his Master of Commerce with Distinction from the University of Queensland. Since 2022, he has been a casual lecturer and tutor, teaching more than 1,300 hours across undergraduate and postgraduate accounting courses at the UQ Business School, including financial accounting at all levels and auditing and assurance.

Harvey’s research interests lie in the intersection of corporate disclosure, sustainability reporting and assurance, and corporate social responsibility. His primary focus is on information disclosure in the capital markets, especially voluntary disclosure and non-financial information, such as climate change and sustainability reporting, which is concerned with how capital market participants value and use non-financial disclosures and how disclosures inform stakeholders about corporate performance. His research also encompasses governance and assurance issues related to corporate disclosures. He is interested in studying the role of governance mechanisms, voluntary assurance, and government regulation in corporate disclosure practices. His methodological expertise spans qualitative content analysis, computational text analysis and econometric modelling.

Harvey actively participated in doctoral training and international accounting doctoral symposia and conferences. He was selected by Judge Business School of the University of Cambridge to participate in a global PhD course - Organising the Climate Transition. His research has been presented at the Accounting and Finance Association Australia and New Zealand (AFAANZ) conference, the PhD consortium of the Illinois International Accounting Symposium jointly held with the Nanyang Business School Accounting Conference, the AFAANZ Doctoral Symposium, and the Early Career Colloquium of the Australasian Centre for Social and Environmental Accounting Research (A-CSEAR) Conference. Harvey is an ad hoc reviewer for the Australian Accounting Review, Accounting Research Journal, the AAA FARS Midyear Conferences and the AFAANZ Conferences.

His PhD thesis investigates the institutional development of Australian firms’ climate change disclosures and their economic consequences.