Robson is a former university professor and auditor. He has taught a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses including auditing, oil and gas accounting, and financial statement analysis. Robson has published academic research in leading journals including Accounting Horizons, Issues in Accounting Education, Oil Gas & Energy Quarterly, Petroleum Accounting and Financial Management Journal, and Research in Accounting Regulation.
He holds a PhD in Accounting from Virginia Commonwealth University, an MS in Accountancy from the University of Denver, and a BBA in Accounting from Texas State University. During the doctoral program, he supplemented the required coursework with additional courses in econometrics, mathematics, mathematical statistics, and finance. Robson is a frequently invited speaker for data science and analytics topics including machine learning, anomaly detection, and forecasting. He also has experience teaching CPA exam review courses for the AUD section of the CPA exam and has served as a committee member on accounting doctoral dissertations and master’s theses for both economics and finance.
Robson was a Senior Associate in KPMG’s oil and gas practice and has peer-reviewed publications which study the stock market’s pricing of suspended well costs, the use of derivatives by energy companies, and the relative weights investors placed on cash vs. accrual measures during the 2008 financial crisis. His research areas of interest are fair value accounting, earnings management, audit quality, and the application of econometrics to accounting. Robson’s dissertation examined mark-to-market adjustments for securities and derivatives without readily observable market prices, and he has a working paper which uses mathematical proofs and Monte Carlo simulations to show that commonly used empirical models in finance and accounting research induce spurious correlations between variables of interest.