Matthew Shaffer

Education: BA, Yale University; Doctorate, Harvard Business School

Matthew Shaffer is an Associate Professor in the Accounting area at the Darden School of Business. His research centers on the role and use of financial-statement information in valuation practice and major financial transactions, particularly mergers and acquisitions. Shaffer’s research has been published in leading academic journals, including the Journal of Financial Economics, Management Science and Review of Accounting Studies.

Going forward, and in his current working papers, Shaffer is focused on building our understanding of the implications of large language models (LLMs), as a new class of artificial intelligence, for how practitioners and researchers can make sense of financial reports. His goal is, he says, to understand what is distinctive and useful about these models, in order to address two practical questions for his field: "What can these models do for us that wasn’t previously possible (their upside), and when, how, and why might they mislead (their risks)?""

His work has drawn interest from the business press and practitioners, having been featured in Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and the AICPA’s Forensic and Valuation Services podcast. He was the keynote speake for the International Valuation Standards Council's (IVSC) recent annual meeting focusing on the economic foundations of appraisal practice and its future with AI systems based on LLMs. 

Shaffer earned his Doctorate in Business Administration from Harvard Business School and his B.A. from Yale University. Prior to joining Darden in 2025, he was an Assistant Professor of Accounting at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business.