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...

Ramanna (this issue) argues that the FASB’s new Conceptual Framework deemphasizes reliability in favor of representational faithfulness to facilitate the FASB’s promotion of an “asset-liability” approach measured at fair values. More importantly, Ramanna argues that this change is likely...

Braun (this issue) argues that the traditional accounting principles underlying the revenue-expense approach such as Historical Cost and Conservatism are ecologically rational in that they help organizations survive better in uncertain economic environments. More importantly, he argues that the...

Double-entry bookkeeping (DEB) is used by most large firms even though scholars do not understand why they chose DEB. We address three questions about DEB’s gradual displacement of single-entry bookkeeping (SEB): (1) What is the main benefit of DEB? (2) How did DEB emerge and evolve? and (3)...

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...