Tim Baldenius, Professor of Accounting, has had a rich international educational experience, teaching and learning in Germany, Austria, and the United States. His research interests are in managerial accounting, decentralization, and performance evaluation. Currently, he is investigating the dual functions of Boards in providing strategic guidance and auditing to corporate managers. In the following interview, Professor Baldenius reflects on his academic background from a comparative perspective, the methods and impact of teaching accounting, and his participation in the Chazen Study Tour to Rwanda. The following is an excerpt from his interview.


Please tell us more about the [Chazen Study Tour to Rwanda].
Twelve students, an administrator from the Social Enterprise Program and I went on the trip, which was organized by the Social Enterprise Club and was focused on developmental economics. Most of the students probably knew more about developmental economics than I did, so I did some homework to read up on it beforehand. We visited Millennium Village, which is part of a UN initiative with which Columbia has been involved for some time. It's a holistic project built around agriculture, schooling and healthcare that aims to create self-sustaining villages. We also visited coffee cooperatives, some government officials and the minister of health in charge of AIDS prevention. I think it's a particularly worthy experience with us coming from the Business School to talk about the interaction between the public and private sectors.

One of the things that surprised most of us is that many of the mechanisms that we use in running private companies are often used by government officials and aid organizations in terms of providing behavioral incentives. The whole debate about microfinance as opposed to aid pervaded all of the discussions that we had. For instance, as part of the Millennium Village project, we can give farmers grain or we can provide the fertilizer as a loan, and the month they bring in the harvest, they have to pay us back with a small nominal interest fee. So it was really interesting to see that these are not mutually exclusive spheres of ways of thinking about incentives. At first, I wondered what I could bring to the table for development, coming from accounting, but I think the two are much closer than I ever thought before, and many of the students had a similar experience. I think it would be very nice to follow up with a case study or something similar.