Lab Working Paper Accepted at the Stanford (SITE) Conference 2026
Prof. Pierre Liang, a faculty member and lab director of the Accounting AI Research Lab, will present the lab's research at the 2026 Stanford Institute for Theoretical Economics (SITE), Session 17: "The Macroeconomics of Uncertainty and Volatility," held September 2–4, 2026, at Stanford University. The paper, Entropic Uncertainty: Measuring Firm and Aggregate Uncertainty from the Graph Structure of Financial Statements, is co-authored with Professor Bo Sun (Darden School of Business, University of Virginia) and doctoral student Ziyi Yang of the Accounting AI Research Lab at the Tepper School.
The paper introduces a new class of uncertainty measures built directly from the bookkeeping graph that double-entry accounting induces on a firm's audited financial statements. By summarizing the structure of a firm's internal resource flows each quarter and running that summary through a standard macro-econometric uncertainty filter, the measure reads firm-level and aggregate economic uncertainty from firms' own audited disclosures—insulated from the market-, survey-, and text-based signals on which existing measures rely. Professor Liang looks forward to presenting the work to the macroeconomics and uncertainty-measurement community and to discussing it with the academics and policymakers convened by the session, in keeping with the lab's aim of fostering innovation across accounting, economics, and the computational sciences.
About SITE
The Stanford Institute for Theoretical Economics (SITE) is an annual summer research conference convened by the Stanford University Department of Economics and organized into a series of topical, invitation-based sessions that bring together leading academics—and, for several sessions, policymakers—to present and discuss frontier research. Session 17, "The Macroeconomics of Uncertainty and Volatility," covers recent work on the causes and effects of changes in volatility and uncertainty in the aggregate economy, with emphasis on measuring changes in uncertainty, evaluating their impact on the U.S. and global economy, and discussing policy responses—topics made especially timely by current developments in trade, fiscal and regulatory policy, and geopolitics. The session aims to feature roughly twenty recent theoretical and empirical papers from a mix of junior and senior presenters, and is organized a team headed by Nicholas Bloom (Stanford University), Steven Davis (Stanford University). The 2026 sessions are held at the Landau Economics Building, 579 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305.