Professor Michael J. Peel

It was with great sadness that colleagues at Cardiff Business School learned of the death of Professor Michael Peel following a short illness.

For more than three decades, Mike was a central figure in the research life of Cardiff Business School. An internationally respected scholar in accounting and financial management, he was also a particularly generous colleague and mentor, combining formidable technical ability with warmth, kindness and an exceptional capacity to support others.

Mike graduated with an LLB from the University of Leeds in 1976, and subsequently trained and qualified as a solicitor. After working in financial and business consultancy, he moved to the University of Liverpool. Here, from 1982, he conducted research at the intersection of law and economics with Patrick Minford, including on the impact of legislation on unemployment and housing. This early experience prefaced an academic career that was to remain interdisciplinary.

In 1986, Mike enrolled on the MBA programme at the Bradford Management Centre, and he was awarded the Dennis Bellamy Prize for all-round merit. It was at Bradford that Mike developed another area of his research at the University of Liverpool: understanding and predicting corporate failure. His Master’s research was developed into a book (The Liquidation/Merger Alternative: Theory and Evidence) in1990, and formed part of a large and enduring programme of work on corporate failure prediction and the role of financial and non-financial information in identifying firms at risk.

Mike joined Cardiff Business School in October 1987, and he progressed rapidly from Research Assistant to Research Associate, Lecturer and Senior Lecturer. In 1996, he became a Distinguished Senior Research Fellow, and was appointed Professor of Financial Management in 2000. This trajectory reflected an exceptional research record, as well as Mike’s contribution to the research of those around him.

Studying corporate failure and distress led Mike to study several related areas in accounting and finance, including the role of auditors’ going-concern opinions and audit markets, often employing sophisticated prediction methods. He went on to build a substantial body of research on audit fees, auditor concentration, auditor choice, the Big Four premium, audit quality and the economics of the audit market.

With Nick Wilson of the University of Leeds, and several colleagues at Cardiff University, Mike also examined financial management and reporting in smaller businesses, including working capital management, credit scoring, banking relationships, strategic planning and capital budgeting, and how these practices relate to firm performance. His work in this area became internationally influential.

Throughout his career and across various programmes of study, Mike remained at the forefront of empirical methods. His papers were among the earliest in accounting and finance employing multilogit (with David Peel), neural networks, fuzzy decision trees and rough-set methods (with Malcolm Beynon), and he later became particularly interested in the problems created by non-random selection effects and endogeneity (with Gerry Makepeace).

Reducing Mike’s interests to a few themes underlines the coherence of his research agenda, but risks understating the breadth of his contribution. He conducted important research on employee share ownership, profit sharing, absenteeism and employee participation, the time series properties of financial ratios, as well as work on foreign-owned manufacturing companies, corporate restructuring, governance and accounting education. In all these areas, Mike brought the same instincts: an interest in important economic and organisational problems, and a keenness for finding the right empirical approach with which to investigate them.

Research for Mike was a social as well as an intellectual activity. He was demanding about evidence and methods, but his attention to detail and seriousness about standards never diminished his enthusiasm for the process. This combination made Mike an outstanding mentor and educator. He was extraordinarily thoughtful and generous with his time and expertise, particularly to more junior colleagues. He read papers, discussed ideas, offered statistical and technical advice and encouraged people to publish.

Many academics collaborate with several colleagues over the course of their careers. Very few publish papers with their brother. Mike was exceptionally close to David, with whom he had a highly productive research partnership. They published many excellent papers together over more than four decades.

One could rarely talk to Mike for long without him mentioning his wife, Helga, and his nieces, Laura and Caroline, all of whom he treasured. Apart from his family and his work, conversations with Mike would also quickly turn to sport and music. As a teenager he swam competitively for Leeds, and he played rugby union at school. He also played drums in a band when he was younger and retained a passion for music - anything from Beethoven to the Beatles - throughout his life.

Those of us who were fortunate to know Mike as a colleague and friend will remember his warmth, kindness, humour, generosity and thoughtfulness. Cardiff Business School benefited enormously from Mike’s scholarship, but many of us benefited even more from knowing him. He will be very greatly missed.

Michael John Peel, born 11 May 1953, died 16th August 2026. He is survived by his wife, Helga.