We consider accounting from an evolutionary perspective. Accounting encompasses the creation of transactional records, the summarization of records in t-accounts, and the preparation of audited financial statements. Accounting's history spans at least 10,000 years dating back to the first human...

This essay is based on a keynote speech at the 2014 Journal of International Accounting Research (JIAR) Conference. That talk was built upon a 2009 American Accounting Association (AAA) annual meeting panel presentation titled “Is there any scientific legitimacy to what we teach in Accounting...

We theorize that accounting systems affect analysts' forecast accuracy through changes in earnings variability. We argue that the matching and historical cost principles reduce earnings variability, and hence, reduce analysts' earnings forecast errors. We also argue that restricting the choice...

Sivakumar and Waymire examine differences in the properties of US railroads' reported earnings before and after concurrent changes in accounting rules and rate regulations. Although the accounting rules were intended to combat income smoothing, Sivakumar and Waymire find little evidence that...

We analyze p-values in empirical papers published in the “top three” accounting journals in 2011. We estimate average Type I error and Type II error rates to be 11% and 22% respectively. The p-value distribution is strongly concentrated near zero and the frequencies of p-values just below...

Skewness-based proxies are widely used in accounting and finance research. To study how the skewness of a dependent variable Y varies with conditioning variables X, researchers typically compute firm-specific skewness measures over a short rolling window and regress them on X. However, we show...