Meet Hristiana Vidinova

New Texas McCombs assistant professor of accounting finds her ‘home’ in academia

Assistant Professor Hristiana Vidinova, the Accounting Department’s first faculty member from Bulgaria, started teaching at Texas McCombs during Fall 2024. The Accounting Times sat down with her to learn more about her industry experience, her research interests, and how she spends her time outside the classroom.

Q: Where did you grow up?

A: I’m from Sofia, Bulgaria. As a teenager, I helped my accountant mother do bookkeeping for companies. In college, I studied economics. I was fascinated by big problems, what drives economic growth and development.

Q: What was your early work experience?

A: I worked as a macroeconomist at the Ministry of Finance’s Agency for Economic Analysis and Forecasting in Bulgaria, and then as an analytics consultant at Experian. I specialized in economic modeling, credit risk, and stress testing. Part of my job entailed consulting with banks on how to implement macroeconomics information into their models to meet new accounting standards.

Q: What brought you to the U.S.?

A: In 2017 I took a sabbatical from my job in Bulgaria to get my master’s degree in economics at the University of Chicago, enrolling in courses across departments. I found that the business school felt like home to me and realized the answers to some of these big macroeconomic questions actually lie in granular data. I became fascinated with how accounting decisions can shape decisions at a granular level. So, I left my job in Bulgaria and went on to earn my Ph.D. in accounting at the university.

Q: What research questions are you working on?

A: I’m exploring the impact of financial reporting rules on bank stability and credit cycles. I’m interested in accounting theory, standards and regulations, and the role of forward-looking information in accounting.

My dissertation examined potential biases in macroeconomic forecasts, and how they might impact bank provisions, lending decisions and risk in the financial sector. In an offshoot of that research, I’m studying sources of biases in the forecasts, how timely loan loss provisioning and increased reliance on macroeconomic information affect banks’ capital-raising decisions and cost of capital, and how competition and differing expectations among banks interact to shape banking sector outcomes.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I’m also pursuing Bulgaria-related research, trying to shed light on why more women are in managerial positions in Bulgaria than men. I find this intriguing, and it’s even more prominent in the finance sector. Another working paper looks at whether having Bulgarian students present their ranked high school choices to their parents helps reduce friction between parents and children during the high school application process.

Q: What do many people not know about you?

A: I’ve been an avid ballroom dancer since age 6. In Chicago, I danced and competed with a University of Chicago colleague. He’s now my co-author on my two economics projects. We went to national competitions together and even won some awards.

A wild coincidence: He’s Bulgarian, too. But when we first met and started dancing together, we had no idea!

By Deborah Blumberg