People

“I’m lucky to end up here. A lot of schools only offer financial accounting, but HBS is the best place for managerial accounting, which is my primary interest. Managerial accounting has intelligent essence from both practice and academia.”

Yiwei Li (he/him) has come a long way. The globe-trotting HBS doctoral student grew up in China, went to the UK for his undergraduate degree, then to Canada for his master’s—both in economics. With his MS in hand, Yiwei next traveled back to China, where he worked for four years as a research assistant at China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) in Shanghai. Following that transformative experience, he made his way to the United States to attend Harvard Business School.

For Yiwei, even getting from economics to accounting was a journey. “I love economics and all those theoretical components along with it, but one day I feel like I am missing something practical,” he says. “That’s why I went to CEIBS in Shanghai: I had been in school a long time and I decided I needed to get real-world experience. I had the opportunity to interact with a lot of companies. This opened my eyes to managerial accounting—using data to solve an organization’s problems, which has very broad applications.”

Yiwei notes that he prefers management accounting to economics because it’s more practical and grounded in real-world experience. “I didn’t want to continue to do models all the time,” he says. “After all, humans are chaotic, they don’t always act according to your models.” His dedication to research is anything but chaotic, however. “I’m a very simple person,” says Yiwei. “I get up, get some coffee, go to the gym. The rest of the time I spend with research. It’s not just an academic or professional calling—it’s a lifestyle.” While he admits that his daily life sounds boring, it suits him to a tee. “I like doing research. I like my lifestyle. I hope to be a professor when I’ve completed this program.”

Research

Yiwei’s research focuses on quantifying things that on the surface don’t seem quantifiable, such as how to design a suitable incentive scheme that aligns with corporate goals and strategies. The numbers will show the extent to which they’ve succeeded or failed. Yiwei hopes to combine theoretical models with practical applications to objectively quantify the value of culture within organizations.