Voluntary Auditing: A Synthesis of the Literature

Voluntary auditing has received increased attention from researchers in recent decades. Empirical studies that have examined demand for voluntary audits have suggested that regulatory intervention may not always be necessary, though some argue that regulators protect society from market failure by demanding statutory audits [Barton, J., & Waymire, G. (2004). Investor protection under unregulated financial reporting. Journal of Accounting and Economics, 38, 65–116]. To date, there has been no review of the literature on determinants of voluntary audits. I provide a research framework to categorize the attributes that affect demand for voluntary audits and identify areas that need further examination. While the given compact body of literature has served different purposes, two major reasons for voluntary auditing are apparent: the importance of audited financial statements to lenders and the intention to further deregulate audits for smaller companies to relieve cost burdens. However, I contribute to the auditing literature by identifying the main attributes associated with the demand for voluntary audit. In doing so, I develop a framework consisting of firm attributes, separation of ownership and control attributes, agency relationship attributes, management attributes, and signalling attributes.     

Judgment and Decision‐Making Research in Auditing and Accounting: Future Research Implications of Person,Task, and Environment Perspective

The discipline of accounting and auditing has increasingly recognized judgment and decision making (JDM) as highly important attributes in the profession because individuals such as managers, auditors, financial analysts, accountants, and standard setters make pivotal judgments and decisions. Many studies undertaken in this domain of research also substantiate the significance of JDM in accounting and auditing. This study evaluates all the papers published in 10 accounting journals among the leading ones from 1980 to 2010 that fall within the domain of JDM research. The categorization of the studies reviewed in this paper is based on Bonner's ( 1999 ) three major determinants of JDM: Person, Task, and Environment variables. The review highlights the progress in the literature over the past three decades and also identifies the methodological limitations of previous research. The identified limitations will be useful for improving the research method of future JDM studies in accounting and auditing. The review also draws inferences on how JDM research in auditing, which is well established, could usefully guide future JDM research in financial accounting.     

Tweets and Trades: the Information Content of Stock Microblogs

Microblogging forums (e.g., Twitter) have become a vibrant online platform for exchanging stock‐related information. Using methods from computational linguistics, we analyse roughly 250,000 stock‐related messages (so‐called tweets) on a daily basis. We find an association between tweet sentiment and stock returns, message volume and trading volume, as well as disagreement and volatility. In contrast to previous related research, we also analyse the mechanism leading to an efficient aggregation of information in microblogging forums. Our results demonstrate that users providing above average investment advice are retweeted (i.e., quoted) more often and have more followers, which amplifies their share of voice.     

Accounting and Auditing at the Time of Blockchain Technology: A Research Agenda

Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology expected to have significant impacts on the accounting and auditing profession. This study, applicable and timely for both accounting and auditing scholars and practitioners, explores blockchain technology and its main implications for the accounting and auditing profession. The research question addressed in this study is: What are the major themes emerging from academic research and professional reports and websites debating blockchain technology in the accounting and auditing context? A literature review of academic literature and professional reports and websites is performed to identify a taxonomy of emerging themes. The study finds that the most discussed themes in scholarly works and professional sources are governance, transparency and trust issues in the blockchain ecosystem, blockchain‐enabled continuous audits, smart contract applications and the paradigmatic shift in accountants' and auditors' roles. Based on these four themes, practical implications for accountants and auditors on how to approach the blockchain development are provided. Moreover, this study offers suggestions for future research on accounting and auditing in the blockchain era.     

Islamic Banking Sustainability: A Review of Literature and Directions for Future Research

This study reviews literature on the Islamic banking sustainability and presents directions for future research. The article discourses scholars’ and practitioners’ views on the two perspectives of sustainability in relation to the objectives of Islamic banking and finance. That there are limited studies on Islamic banking sustainability is one of the major issues presented in the article. The study highlights essential issues on the sustainability without in-depth empirical analysis. The needs for long-term economic, social, and environmental sustainability are not a compromising issue. Therefore, Islamic banks must strike a balance between the institutional, societal, and environmental sustainability in order to achieve the objective of Sharia.     

Extractive Industries Reporting: A Review of Accounting Challenges and the Research Literature

While the extractive industries (EI) are of major significance economically, the reporting of their activities has been the subject of contentious debate posing dilemmas for regulators and standard setters over many decades. In order to ensure alignment with the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) research project on EI, we first identify some important economic characteristics of EI and associated accounting challenges together with an overview of how current accounting standards deal with these challenges using International Financial Reporting Standards as the focus. Second, we conduct a review of extant research on EI reporting analyzed around the key areas of: (a) international diversity of accounting practices and the challenges facing information users; (b) standard-setting processes and lobbying behaviour that deals with why the IASB (and other standard setters) have not succeeded in developing rigorous standards for extractive activities; (c) the reporting of oil, gas, and mineral reserves, given that large proportions of the assets of EI firms (the reserves) are off-balance sheet; (d) environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting dealing with how EI firms have increased their reporting of ESG information in response to regulatory demands and pressure for voluntary disclosures; and (e) other EI related topics such as earnings management, risk disclosures, and voluntary disclosure behaviour. Finally, we present some conclusions together with suggestions relating to key areas for future research on EI reporting.     

Financial Forecasting,Risk and Valuation: Accounting for the Future

Valuation involves forecasting payoffs and discounting expected payoffs for risk. Forecasting is often seen as the province of the statistician, risk determination the province of asset pricing. This paper elaborates on the idea that financial forecasting, risk determination and valuation are a matter of accounting. Accounting not only provides information to forecast payoffs but also specifies the payoffs to be forecasted. Further, accounting determines the transition from the present to the future and thus implicitly the evolutionary parameters that a statistician might estimate for forecasting. Accounting also bears on risk determination in the way it handles uncertainty. Accordingly, accounting is involved in both the numerator and the denominator of a valuation model. Indeed, a valuation model is a model of accounting for the future, and the effectiveness of a valuation model rides on the accounting principles employed.     

Endogeneity in Accounting and Finance Research: Natural Experiments as a State‐of‐the‐Art Solution

This paper provides a discussion of endogeneity as it relates to finance and accounting research. We discuss the textbook solutions: two‐stage least squares, instrumental variables, differenced generalized method of moments (GMM) and system GMM and provide a unifying framework showing how they are related. We consider the limitations of these techniques and then detail a state‐of‐the‐art solution, utilizing a natural experiment as a way of mitigating endogeneity and building stronger theory.     

Accounting narratives and the narrative turn in accounting research: Issues,theory, methodology,methods and a research framework

This plenary address paper traces the development of accounting narratives in external reporting practice and research, focussing on corporate-sourced financial communications to shareholders and analysts. It is written from the personal perspective of a researcher who began in the positivist tradition of disclosure research and is increasingly engaging with the more interpretive/critical tradition of socially-constructed narratives. Whereas early accounting narratives research existed at the margins, modern content-analytic work on disclosures rose to a position of prominence, alongside the rise of non-financial information in the practice domain. In recent years, large-scale linguistic studies have entered the mainstream positivist North American literature, supported by computerised natural language processing. Outside this community, accounting research has witnessed a ‘narrative turn’, similar to many other social science disciplines, marking a shift away from realism and positivism. This paper argues for the importance of both lines of research. Participants' actions in relation to accounting narratives may be understood in terms of, inter alia, both economic explanations based on utility maximisation and behavioural explanations based on psychology and the embeddedness of narrative in social practice. In terms of methodology and methods, the weakening of the deep-surface divide is exemplified by the common combination of corpus linguistics approaches with (critical) discourse analysis in other disciplines. Based on a discussion of key issues, theory, methodology and methods, a framework for thinking about research in accounting narratives is offered. The challenge is to better understand the role of narratives in the increasingly rich, complex information environment of external reporting.     

审计职业怀疑研究综述

职业怀疑是注册会计师从事审计工作应有的重要素质,也是影响审计质量的重要因素,尤其是审计职业界日益强调在审计计划和执行工作中应该保持职业怀疑态度的今天,这一问题就显得更为重要。然而,国内外关于这一问题的研究都相对比较薄弱。本文首先对已有的关于审计职业怀疑内涵的不同观点进行了分析,按照时间脉络介绍和分析了在发展过程中逐步形成的四个审计职业怀疑模型,在此基础上从审计职业怀疑与审计人员的个体特征、审计职业怀疑与职业怀疑行为两个方面,梳理和评述了目前国外对审计职业怀疑的研究成果,最后结合上述研究成果和审计实践,指出了这一领域未来可能的研究方向,以期为我国审计职业怀疑的理论研究和实践活动提供借鉴和参考。     

Patterns of Research Output in the Accounting Literature: A Study of the Bibliometric Distributions

This study examines whether any regularity exists in the publication pattern among accounting researchers. The empirical results reveal that a strong bibliometric regularity exists in the accounting literature: the number of authors publishing in papers is approximately 1/ n ^c of those publishing one paper. It is shown that the accounting literature conforms very well to the model with c=1.872 if data are taken from a large collection of journals. When applied to individual journals, the result shows that values of c range from 2.220 to 4.368. The graduates of seven graduate programs are found to account for more than one-third of the most prolific authors, indicating strong institutional dominance in the production of accounting literature.     

A Real Effects Perspective to Accounting Measurement and Disclosure: Implications and Insights for Future Research

Accounting measurement and disclosure rules have a significant impact on the real decisions that firms make. In this essay, we provide an analytical framework to illustrate how such real effects arise. Using this framework, we examine three specific measurement issues that remain controversial: (1) How does the measurement of investments affect a firm's investment efficiency? (2) How does the measurement and disclosure of a firm's derivative transactions affect a firm's choice of intrinsic risk exposures, risk management strategy, and the incentive to speculate? (3) How could marking‐to‐market the asset portfolios of financial institutions generate procyclical real effects? We draw upon these real effects studies to generate sharper and novel insights that we believe are useful not only for the development of accounting standards, but also for guiding future empirical research.     

Research Misconduct in Accounting Literature: A Survey of the Most Prolific Researchers' Actions and Beliefs

Incidents of research misconduct, especially falsification, in the hard sciences and medicine have been widely reported. Motives for misconduct include professional advancement and personal recognition. Accounting academics are under the same tenure, promotion and recognition pressures as other academics; and, without the life-and-death issues of medical research, rationalizing misconduct in accounting research seems much easier. It is reasonable to assume that dishonesty has occurred, even if little evidence exists about its prevalence. Further, accounting research can influence tax policy and market conditions, affecting people's lives. This study is, to our knowledge, the first attempt to survey accounting researchers directly as to their ethical practices; it uses the randomized response technique of addressing sensitive questions. To maximize its relevance to the most respected accounting research, this questionnaire was sent only to the most prolific researchers at U.S. colleges and universities—those who have published in the 'top thirty' accounting journals. The results indicate that serious misconduct has occurred among these established accounting researchers. The estimated percentage of seriously tainted articles in the top thirty accounting journals, based on self-reporting, is about 4 per cent, while the respondents on average believe that about 21 per cent of the literature is tainted. Faculty who were tenured more recently provide higher estimates of the falsification rate, and attribute more of the cause to external factors like tenure pressure. The article concludes by discussing implications and offering policy recommendations.     

Cointegration,error correction representation and the import demand function with implications in International Finance and Accounting Research

This paper uses the relatively new procedures of cointegration and error-correction modeling to examine the import demand function of three developing economies. The empirical results suggest that the error-correction model performs well and that the poor results of previous studies are attributable to the inappropriate use of the Cochrane-Orcutt procedure and the complete absence of diagnostic testing, especially with respect to parameters stability, autocorrelation, and variable omission.     

The Role of Auditing in Corporate Governance in Australia and New Zealand: A Research Synthesis

Corporate governance is of growing importance in Australia, New Zealand and all over the world. Corporate governance interacts with auditing and it is useful to understand how corporate governance and auditing affect companies. A related issue is whether better governance is a substitute for auditing or a complement. Previous studies of that issue have had mixed results. This review article provides a synthesis of Australian and New Zealand research about corporate governance and auditing that assesses what has been found and examines issues that can be explored using multiple studies. We conclude that despite extensive research, there is still considerable uncertainty about how corporate governance mechanisms are related to auditing and how auditing is associated with corporate governance. We conclude that recommendations for better governance (beyond a minimum level) are not yet supported by evidence. The results are intended to be helpful in providing advice about policy in Australia and New Zealand, and in determining directions for new research.     

In search of meaning: Lessons,resources and next steps for computational analysis of financial discourse

We critically assess mainstream accounting and finance research applying methods from computational linguistics (CL) to study financial discourse. We also review common themes and innovations in the literature and assess the incremental contributions of studies applying CL methods over manual content analysis. Key conclusions emerging from our analysis are: (a) accounting and finance research is behind the curve in terms of CL methods generally and word sense disambiguation in particular; (b) implementation issues mean the proposed benefits of CL are often less pronounced than proponents suggest; (c) structural issues limit practical relevance; and (d) CL methods and high quality manual analysis represent complementary approaches to analyzing financial discourse. We describe four CL tools that have yet to gain traction in mainstream AF research but which we believe offer promising ways to enhance the study of meaning in financial discourse. The four tools are named entity recognition (NER), summarization, semantics and corpus linguistics.     

“一带一路”视角下语言的经济价值研究

语言作为人类文明交流的载体,是推进"一带一路"建设的纽带和桥梁。自1492年地理大发现开始,经济贸易带动文明的互通,而语言作为贸易实现的必要条件从一开始便与经济发展紧密相连。"一带一路"成为当今全球化实现转型升级的重要抓手,也是中国积极融入全球体系贡献中国智慧的有效途径。语言作为全球互联互通的重要纽带,其对"一带一路"建设的经济价值日益凸显。主要体现在劳动力可通过加强语言技能从而提高人力资本进而提升收入水平,以及推动语言产业实现其经济效益,成为新的经济增长点。同时,"一带一路"框架下的互联互通建设将为语言人才就业及语言产业化发展提供新的机遇,进一步助力语言经济价值的实现。