Principal Consultant
Roman L. Weil is an emeritus faculty member at the Chicago Booth School of Business. Weil studies financial literacy and corporate governance, an issue that arose from accounting scandals. His preliminary work suggested, correctly it turned out, that the financial literacy that corporate board audit committee members have is surprisingly weak and that the gains in shareholder wealth accompanying improvement in such financial literacy are both significant and large.
Weil co-founded and directed the Chicago/Stanford Directors’ Consortium. The Consortium, a five-day program, met twice a year 2002-2015. In brief, the Consortium taught corporate directors how to do their jobs better. In addition to co-directing the entire program, Weil taught the audit committee material, which typically is a half day.
He has also designed and implemented continuing education programs for partners at the accounting firms of Andersen and PwC as well as for employees at Goldman Sachs, Montgomery Wards, Merck, and William Blair and for business executives in Great Britain, Singapore, and Hong Kong. In recent years, he has been visiting professor at University of California at San Diego, Johns Hopkins Carey School, Stanford Law School, Harvard Law School, Princeton Economics Department, NYU Stern School, and Georgetown University. His teaching activities in academic year 2020-21 are in Osher programs at various universities.
Weil has been a CPA in Illinois since 1973 and a CMA from 1974 until his retirement from Chicago Booth in 2008. In 2010 he received certification as a Certified Forensic Accountant. The coauthor of more than 12 textbooks, Weil is the senior editor of, and contributor to, the Litigation Services Handbook, now in its sixth edition. He has published more than 100 articles in academic and professional journals and has served as the principal investigator on various research projects of the National Science Foundation. He has served as editor or associate editor of the Accounting Review, Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, Management Science, the Journal of Accounting and Economics, and the Financial Analysts Journal.
He has consulted to governmental agencies, including the U.S. Treasury Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission. In private industry, Weil has served as a consultant to Amazon, Bethlehem Steel, British Petroleum, Chevron, Cisco Systems, Ford Motor Company, Genentech, General Dynamics, General Foods, IBM, McDonnell Douglas, Pepsico, Pillsbury, Polaroid, PwC, and VISA USA. In addition, he has served on several boards.
Weil has served on the Securities and Exchange Commission Advisory Committee on Replacement Cost Accounting. At the Financial Accounting Standards Board, he has served on two task forces – one on consolidations and the other on interest methods – and on the Financial Accounting Standards Advisory Council. He served on the Standing Advisory Group of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board and on a Consultative Group of the IFRS Foundation.
He received a bachelor’s degree in economics and mathematics from Yale University in 1962, master’s degree in industrial administration in 1965, and a Ph.D. in economics in 1966 from GSIA/Tepper of Carnegie Mellon University. He joined the Chicago Booth faculty in 1965.
Outside of academia, Weil is a grandfather whose interests include sabermetrics [particularly as applied in the NFL], oenometrics, and oenonomy. He has recently become interested in catering to the cravings of eclipsomaniacs. He served with the 2017 Solar Eclipse Action Committee of the City of Madras, OR.
