تاثیر پژوهش حسابداری بر امور مالی

This paper assesses the impact of accounting research on finance using citational methods and content analysis. The data are 715 articles published in seven finance journals. In contrast to previous research of the influence of finance research on accounting, the results show relatively little impact of accounting research on finance. The limited impact of accounting on finance is principally provided by four accounting journals and a small group of accounting authors. The impact found is often the result of bridging papers, in which either finance articles have accounting authors, or vice versa. These results suggest a substantial disregard of ostensibly pertinent capital-markets accounting research by finance scholars. The reasons for finance’s disregard of this work, whether for reasons of perceived value, quality, or for other reasons, is unclear. However, it is apparent that accounting capital-markets research is not as influential in finance as might be expected.

One of the widely acknowledged goals of science-like disciplines is the accumulation and communication of knowledge. It can be argued that the development and accumulation of knowledge in a discipline can be fostered by borrowing and importing pertinent models, theories, and methods from other disciplines, particularly between related fields. Many accounting scholars perceive a close relationship between accounting and finance, and particularly between accounting and financial capital markets research. Prior research by Bricker (1993) has suggested that research from the field of finance has been important in the development of accounting thought. If capital-markets accounting research is perceived to have value, then it might similarly be expected to be influential in and adopted by financial research and thought. In this paper, we report the results of a study of the impact of accounting research on academic finance research using citational data from over 700 articles published in seven finance journals. The selection of this time period corresponds to the publication of the Dopuch and Ronen (1991) “State of Accounting Research” white paper, which summarised the concerns of several high-profile accounting academics and raised the issue of the progress and relevance of accounting research. This research in part addresses that issue in terms of the relevance of accounting research to finance. First, we use our data to: (1) quantify the reliance of finance research on accounting research, and (2) identify particular accounting articles and journals that have been relatively influential in finance. Second, we select a subset of finance articles that rely most heavily on accounting research and explore the qualitative characteristics of the reliance of finance on accounting research. Our results show, first, that finance relies on accounting research to a limited extent in the time period studied. Furthermore, much of this reliance occurs as a result of accounting faculty with finance-related research interests publishing articles in finance journals, or finance faculty publishing in accounting journals. We refer to the corresponding articles as bridging papers. Second, finance journals’ reliance on accounting research is principally associated with four accounting journals and accounting faculty with doctorates from a set of elite doctoral programmes. Third, very few accounting articles are cited frequently by finance studies. Fourth, the topic areas of financial research most impacted by accounting are asset and financial restructurings and, to a far smaller extent, financial variables and performance, finance distress, executive compensation, corporate control, and the effects of legislation on firm value. The finance studies in these areas draw theoretical motivations, testable hypotheses, methods, and empirical evidence from the accounting literature.

This study examined the impact of accounting literature on a set of 715 articles published in seven finance journals in 1990–1991. Perhaps a more appropriate title would have been “The Insignificance of Accounting Research to Finance”. Indeed, it was surprising to us to find the apparent disregard of finance for accounting research; less than 2% of finance’s citations are to accounting documents, compared with a 9% citation of finance by accounting. These results are similar to those we found using data from Zivney and Reichenstein (1994). Clearly the interdisciplinary borrowing between the disciplines is unequal. But is the citation rate of accounting documents by finance articles disproportionately small. It is true that even a cursory examination of finance article bibliographies suggests that research of few disciplines other than economics is frequently cited. Indeed it appears that finance may be more insular in its outlook than accounting. However, the high rate of citation of economics by finance suggests that finance does not discount research that is useful and relevant. Therefore, we find it striking that so little reference is apparent to accounting research that is so similar to (and indeed sometimes indistinguishable from) finance. The Journal of Economics and the Journal of Accounting Research are the most highly cited accounting journals, and the citation rates of even these journals are surprisingly low (around 0.5%). Only two other accounting journals are cited more than once, and yet two more cited exactly once each. Many other accounting journals were not cited at all. Furthermore, most individual accounting documents are cited only once; only 19 are cited three or more times. We found that most of the accounting authors of these papers had earned doctoral degrees at Rodgers and Williams’ (1996) “elite” schools, not surprising given the high publication rates of the graduates of these programmes, and this pattern was echoed in the finance papers found to most frequently cite accounting. The domination of publication by graduates of elite accounting doctoral programme in leading accounting journals may be a factor in the low overall impact of accounting on finance. This is a conjecture that needs further study. Overall, much of the citation of the accounting literature occurs in bridging papers, that is, by finance papers having accounting authors. This finding is reinforced by studying accounting papers cited. Nearly one-third are also bridging papers, that is, papers published in accounting journals having one or more finance authors. These findings suggest that the impact of accounting on finance beyond such scholars is even more dismal than indicated by our other results. Using content analysis, we developed a set of categories of financial research and comprehensively determined the specific contribution of a set of frequently cited accounting studies to these categories. Corporate restructurings is the finance area most impacted by accounting. Other areas of accounting impact are financial variables, corporate control, financial distress, executive compensation, and legislation. We note that the influence of accounting on finance, limited though it may be, is not limited to methodological borrowing, but also extends to theory development and findings. Our results might have differed using other time periods or other sets of journals. Similarly, our exploration of the qualitative characteristics of the reliance by financial research on accounting employed only the finance studies most impacted by accounting research. Therefore, we did not comprehensively study the specific influence of accounting (if any) on each of the 715 finance studies3. Also, we classified articles as “finance” based upon their source journal, although some of these articles had bridging authors. It can be argued that distinguishing between finance and accounting documents in this way is somewhat arbitrary, given the closely related nature of the two discipline’s subject matter. Finally, future-related research might explore the extent to which finance research is influenced by other disciplines, and the extent to which accounting research influences disciplines other than finance. These caveats aside, our results may give pause to some accounting scholars. Whether finance scholars find accounting capital markets research to be uninformative or for some reason generally not useful, or whether finance research simply has not developed a tradition of using accounting research, the only conclusion that can be drawn is that the impact of accounting research on finance is very slight indeed.