مسیرهای آینده برای پژوهش حسابداری چینی

This paper is based on Katherine Schipper’s presentation at Xiamen University in July 2007. We thank Charles Jie Ping Chen and the editors of the China Journal of Accounting Research for the opportunity to write this paper.

Capital-markets based accounting research in China has a relatively short history; the two principal stock exchanges in Shanghai and Shenzhen have operated for less than 20 years. Recent accounting research has tended to adopt techniques, research designs and even topics that were developed in North America and apply them to the Chinese setting. This paper describes several aspects of the current empirical-archival focus of accounting research in China and offers some suggestions for expanding that focus to include analytical modeling and judgment-decision making experimentation. The paper also suggests there is a need to adjust existing research designs and methods for special features of the Chinese economy and its institutional arrangements. Finally, the paper puts forward some examples of research areas where Chinese accounting researchers can make useful contributions. In this discussion of possible research areas, we distinguish between the motivating question, which establishes the importance of the research inquiry, and the research question itself, which is relatively narrow and specifically focused on one aspect of the motivating question.

We have described our sense of the current focus of accounting research in China, particularly the emphasis on the use of empirical-archival methods to address questions that are more closely related to corporation finance than to asset pricing. We have suggested that this emphasis could be broadened to include the application of analytical modeling and behavioral experimentation, and that within the empirical-archival paradigm, one possibly fruitful avenue is to explore how best to adjust research designs and research questions to fit China's specific institutional and economic features. In the second portion of this paper, we described the distinction between a motivating question and a research question, and linked this distinction to several areas that researchers may wish to explore for possible motivating questions. This portion of the paper concludes with a discussion of three examples of motivating questions and related research questions.