He is the Sidney Davidson Distinguished Service Professor of Accounting in the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.
He obtained an MBA degree in 1968 and Ph.D. in economics in 1972 from the University of Chicago, where his doctoral supervisor was Eugene F. Fama.
He (with Philip Brown) was first to demonstrate the link between firms’ accounting earnings information and their market values.
Ball and Brown (1968) also reported the first anomalous evidence for the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, an important financial economics theory that had been introduced by Eugene F. Fama in 1965.
That realization eventually was published in a 1978 publication that used Thomas Kuhn’s concept of an anomaly to describe the phenomenon.
Other foundational research includes "The Effect of International Institutional Factors on Properties of Accounting Earnings," co-authored with S.P.
[14] In 1986 Ball returned to the U.S. as Wesray Professor of Business Administration in the Simon School at the University of Rochester.
[16] In 1986 Ball and Brown (1968) received academic recognition in the American Accounting Association's first Seminal Contributions to Accounting Literature Award, which stated: "No other paper has been cited as often or has played so important a role in the development of accounting research during the past thirty years.” In 2019 Ball and Brown (1968) received practitioner recognition in the 2019 Wharton-Jacobs Levy Prize for Quantitative Financial Innovation, “given biennially to recognize excellence in quantitative research that has contributed to a particular innovation in the practice of finance.” Ball was awarded honorary degrees by the Helsinki School of Economics, the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, the University of Queensland, the University of London, and the University of New South Wales.
Ball serves on the Advisory Group for the Financial Reporting Faculty of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW).