Jessica Kim-Gina

Biography

Jessica Kim-Gina joined the UCLA Anderson faculty in 2018. Her primary research interests include the role of accounting in inter-firm contracts (e.g., supply/licensing contracts), information sharing in inter-firm relationships, and corporate intellectual properties (intangible assets).

Raised in a family of engineering professors, Kim-Gina takes a personal interest in innovation and technology as a driver of economic growth. While pursuing her Ph.D., she began to study the roles of accounting and taxes in intangible asset transactions. In addition, she pursued a joint law degree in intellectual property (IP) law to better understand how the legal treatment of IP rights differs from the accounting treatment of intangible assets.

Kim-Gina’s dissertation studies how accounting and auditing can facilitate contracting on intangible assets. “Markets for licensing IP are fast-growing worldwide,” she says. “While accounting-based royalties can mitigate many contractual hazards in licensing deals, they create misreporting problems, which directly hurt the bottom lines of royalty-holding companies.” Using a unique, hand-collected dataset of technology licensing agreements, Kim-Gina examines how contractual audit terms are designed to reduce potential misreporting. In particular, she finds that broad audit rights are used to mitigate concerns for unintentional misreporting, while penalties are imposed to alleviate the risk of intentional misreporting.

Her current research examines tax incentives in IP transfer and intangible asset valuations in M&A transactions. In the classroom, she encourages students to compare financial statements of their favorite companies. Prior to embarking on her academic career, she worked as a research assistant at Cornell University and as an intern at Goldman Sachs in New York City.

For more up-to-date information on her research, please visit www.kim-gina.com.