“Proprietary Information Cost of Contracting with the Government,” a study PhD student Jiapeng He co-authored with Dr. Ningzhong Li and others won the Best Paper Award from the 2021 Government and Nonprofit Section at the American Accounting Association Annual Meeting in August.

Currently under revision for submission to the Journal of Accounting Research, the work argues “that contracting with the federal government involves significant proprietary information cost due to regulations requiring contractors to provide confidential information, which may then become available to outsiders via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.”

The Government and Nonprofit Section’s best paper award goes to the study that “has the potential to significantly influence government and non-profit accounting research.”

He is a student in the Accounting Concentration of the Management Science PhD program. Li is an associate professor of accounting.