A machine learning analysis of citation impact among selected Pacific Basin journals

This study uses a machine learning approach to identify and predict factors which influence citation impacts across five Pacific Basin journals: Abacus, Accounting & Finance, Australian Journal of Management, Australian Accounting Review and the Pacific Accounting Review from 2008 to 2018. The machine learning results indicate that citation impact is mostly influenced by: length of a journal article; the field of research (particularly environmental accounting), sample size; whether the sample is local or international; choice of research method (e.g., archival vs survey/interview); academic rank of the first author; institutional status of the first author; and number of authors of the article. The results may be useful for predicting future trends in citation impact as well as providing strategies for authors and editors to improve citation impact.     

Fifty years of finance research in the Asia Pacific Basin

In this paper, we review the history of scholarly finance research in the Asia Pacific Basin. We do this by analysing the four leading regional finance journals – Accounting and Finance, Australian Journal of Management, International Review of Finance and the Pacific‐Basin Finance Journal – along five dimensions. The five dimensions are the most cited papers, noted authors, impact in terms of practice, research areas and a breakdown in terms of the development of the field according to Kuhnian concepts of normal science, anomalies and extraordinary science. We show that the Asia Pacific journals make a crucial contribution to research and practice both in the region and internationally.     

吉林省农村金融发展现状研究

本文以2007年中国银监会实施调整后的农村金融政策为界点,阐述2007年以来吉林省农村地区各类涉农金融机构发展现状,分析各类涉农金融机构当前存在的问题,并对存在的问题提出相应的发展对策,以期通过浅显的研究,对吉林省农村金融业的发展提供一些有益参考。     

Author Affiliation Index, finance journal ranking, and the pattern of authorship

In this paper we use a new method to rank finance journals and study the pattern of authorship/co-authorship across journals. Defined as the ratio of articles authored by faculty at the world's top 80 finance programs to the total number of articles by all authors, the Author Affiliation Index is a cost-effective and intuitively easy-to-understand approach to journal rankings. Forty-one finance journals are ranked according to this index. If properly constructed, the Author Affiliation Index provides an easy and credible way to supplement the existing journal ranking methods. Our ranking system reveals the journal–researcher clientele, and we find that collaboration (co-authoring) between faculty within elite programs exists only in top-tier and near-top-tier journals. Publications in lower-tier journals by researchers of elite programs are driven by their co-authors. Collaboration between faculty in elite and non-elite programs, however, is more prevalent than that within elite programs across all tiers of journals. Co-authorship among top 80 programs, nevertheless, is more common in top-tier journals, while co-authorship between top 80 and other programs is more dominant in lower-ranked journals.     

Ethico-economic analysis of impact finance: The case of Green Bonds

This article aims to understand whether Green Bonds (GBs) can be considered an ethical action with a measurable impact, creating ethical and sustainable value beyond economic and financial value. To this end, we attempt to define an ethico-economic framework to understand whether GBs fit into the objectives of action, sociability, humanitarianism, and measurable ethical value, and assess their capacity to constitute a new and powerful instrument in a shared ethical framework.     

Student satisfaction and commitment towards a blended learning finance course: A new evidence from using the investment model

The present study uses an amended version of a well-known investment model to investigate the levels of satisfaction and commitment of finance students enrolled on a blended e-learning programme. First, it presents new empirical evidence for the validity of each construct and validates the proposed investment model. Second, it examines whether students’ grade point average (GPA) scores influence their levels of satisfaction and commitment the course. A random sample of 100 undergraduate students enrolled at King Khalid University in Saudi Arabia was surveyed using both qualitative and quantitative approaches. The proposed investment model was suitable for predicting the levels of student satisfaction and commitment in a blended learning environment, especially finance courses. However, the levels of satisfaction and commitment among students did not reach the proposed cut-off point for high commitment/satisfaction, which implied that levels of student satisfaction and commitment were only in the middle of the range. Specifically, the results showed a significant negative correlation between the level of satisfaction and GPA score, but a significant positive correlation between student commitment and GPA score. The study also highlights areas in which further research and analysis is recommended.     

Empirical Research on the Legal Issues of County Financial Regulation in China

本文运用德尔菲法筛选变量,通过问卷调查,实地访谈的方式获取本研究的第一手资料,并运用李克特态度量表法,得到我国县域金融监管法律问题的具体参数,通过对参数的分析总结出我国县域金融监管存在的法律问题主要有：县域金融参与者对法律意识薄弱、县域金融监管法律体系不完善、县域金融监管主体法律问题突出、县域金融监管正规金融与非正规金融征信机制不畅、县域金融监管人员设置重复和专业人才匮乏并存。     

The non-linear market impact of large trades: evidence from buy-side order flow

We perform an empirical study of a set of large institutional orders executed in the US equity market. Our results validate the hidden order arbitrage theory proposed by Farmer et al. [How efficiency shapes market impact, 2013] of the market impact of large institutional orders. We find that large trades are drawn from a distribution with tail exponent of roughly 3/2 and that market impact approximately increases as the square root of trade duration. We examine price reversion after the completion of a trade, finding that permanent impact is also a square root function of trade duration and that its ratio to the total impact observed at the last fill is roughly 2/3. Additionally, we confirm empirically that the post-trade price reverts to a level consistent with a fair pricing condition of Farmer et al. (2013 Farmer, D., Gerig, A., Lillo, F. and Waelbroeck, H., How efficiency shapes market impact, 2013. Available online at: http://arxiv.org/abs/1102.5457 [Google Scholar]). We study the relaxation dynamics of market impact and find that impact decay is a multi-regime process, approximated by a power law in the first few minutes after order completion and subsequently by exponential decay.     

Making sense and transparency in finance literature: Evidence from trends in readability

Transparency continues to interest finance scholarship, as regards not just to financial reporting, but to a host of areas. Concomitantly, there is a growing emphasis on the transparency of the finance research process, with journals initiating requirements for uploading data and codes. However, little consideration is given to the transparency of finance scholarly texts, despite new emphasis by academic institutions and accreditation bodies on articles having an impact on practitioners. We use textual analysis to investigate the readability of articles in a selection of finance journals. Results evidence that academic articles are becoming less readable. Whether readability straightforwardly implies transparency is unclear, still, we consider these issues alongside our findings. Our study should be of great interest to those concerned with the state of finance scholarship.     

A longitudinal study of the research productivity of graduates of accounting doctoral programs

While the number of graduates from U.S. accounting doctoral programs has declined significantly since the early 1990s (thus producing a significant faculty shortage), many schools' research requirements to achieve promotion and tenure [P & T] have increased significantly—along with salary packages for new faculty. The purposes of the study reported here are to: (1) compare the research output of accounting doctoral graduates across time (1989–1993 period versus their 1999–2003 counterparts) to see if there is sufficiently enhanced output to justify today's higher entry level salaries; and (2) extract from productivity measures information relative to P & T decisions, thus providing benchmarks for promotion to associate and full professor. We examine research records for six and 12 years beyond graduation because these are frequently relevant to tenure and promotion decisions.     

论我国西部地区金融的发展:和谐金融视角的分析

和谐金融主要包括金融体系内部结构和谐、金融与经济和谐发展、金融与社会和谐,我国西部地区经济发展与金融发展不和谐集中表现在经济发展过程中存在严重的结构性资金缺口,原因是西部金融体系内部存在不和谐性,因此,我国西部地区金融发展模式应是建立金融中介体主导型的和谐金融体系.     

Network based evidence of the financial impact of Covid-19 pandemic

How much the largest worldwide companies, belonging to different sectors of the economy, are suffering from the pandemic? Are economic relations among them changing? In this paper, we address such issues by analyzing the top 50 S&P companies by means of market and textual data. Our work proposes a network analysis model that combines such two types of information to highlight the connections among companies with the purpose of investigating the relationships before and during the pandemic crisis. In doing so, we leverage a large amount of textual data through the employment of a sentiment score which is coupled with standard market data. Our results show that the COVID-19 pandemic has largely affected the US productive system, however differently sector by sector and with more impact during the second wave compared to the first.     

Sixty years of research leadership: contributing authors and institutions to the journal of finance

While corporate executives freely admit that they work in a jungle, faculty members in institutions of higher learning are supposed to pretend that they work in the relaxed atmosphere of an informal English garden (Alice Vandermeulen, 1975).

The Journal of Finance was the first pure finance journal to emphasize research, and it has been the undisputed “gold standard” in academic finance literature for the past 60 years. This study identifies the contributors to JF over these 60 years—the authors, the institutions employing the authors, and the institutions granting PhDs to the authors. The prolific authors listed in this article make it look easy, like Alice’s relaxed English garden, but the information reported herein suggests otherwise.

The impact of securitization on credit rationing: Empirical evidence

We study whether banks’ involvement into different types of securitization activity – asset backed securities (ABS) and covered bonds – in Spain influences credit supply before and during the financial crisis. While both ABS and covered bonds were hit by the crisis, the former were hit more severely. Employing a disequilibrium model to identify credit rationing, we find that firms with banks that were more involved in securitization see their credit constraints more relaxed in normal periods. In contrast, only greater covered bonds issuance reduces credit rationing during crisis periods whereas ABS aggravates these firms’ credit rationing in crisis periods. Our results are in line with the theoretical predictions that a securitization instrument that retains risk (covered bond) may induce a more prudent risk behavior of banks than an instrument that provides risk transferring (ABS).     

The demise of the ARC journal ranking scheme: an ex post analysis of the accounting and finance journals

The recent abolition of the ARC journal ranking scheme is indicative of some problematical features of journal ranking in general and the ARC scheme in particular. An alternative citation‐based ranking scheme is applied to the accounting and finance journals to highlight some loopholes in the abandoned ARC scheme and provide some suggestions for how to proceed with ERA 2012. By re‐ranking journals according to their citation indices, it is demonstrated that the ARC ranking placed a large number of journals where they do not belong. As a result, the ARC scheme induced some adverse behavioural changes with respect to preferred publication outlets.     

Indigenous sustainable finance as a research field: A systematic literature review on indigenising ESG,sustainability and indigenous community practices

Sustainable finance research has come into its own as an established area in the finance literature. The increased awareness of sustainability and global concerns around environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues, particularly among institutional investors, has catalysed a shift towards greater research and publications in this area. Accompanying this is the emerging body of work being produced on indigenous investments and indigenous community practices. These nascent strands of literature tell a story of the shift that is taking place within the finance field. To chart this shift and create a harmonised view of these bodies of work, this paper conducts a systematic literature review of the significant nexus between sustainable investments and indigenous approaches to sustainability. We present a framework for conceptualising and characterising the various stands of literature and, in so doing, make the case for Indigenous Sustainable Finance (ISF) as a distinct disciplinary field. This paper argues that ISF is distinct from mainstream sustainable finance and other social and management sciences and constitutes a legitimate, well-defined sub-field of research in its own right.     

The distributional impact of access to finance on poverty: evidence from selected countries in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper uses pooled household-level data from thirteen Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries conducted between 2014 and 2018 to examine the impact of access to finance on household wealth. The few studies that investigated this relationship in the past apply a linear estimation, and thus inadvertently assume a uniformly distributed effect across all levels of poverty. This study examines the heterogeneous impact of access to finance along the entire wealth distribution line using a Re-centered Influence Function (RIF) regression model. We adopt a unique approach to this research problem by constructing an asset-based wealth-index for each country, and use it as a proxy for poverty, and thus get around the problem of non-reported and bracket income. Further, to eliminate potential endogeneity, an instrumental variable quantile approach is implemented. Results indicate that the unconditional effect of access to finance on poverty is non-homogenous. The effect is higher at higher quantiles of wealth and very low at the bottom of the wealth index, suggesting that the extension of formal financial services disproportionately benefits wealthier households more than the very-poor categories.     

Researcher perceptions and choices of interview media: the case of accounting research

This study offers foundational insights into the ways in which perceptions of different interview media—principally, face‐to‐face, telephone and videoconferencing channels of communication—may influence researcher choices and practices. Informed by the reflections of 23 senior accounting researchers, our evidence identifies a duality of practices in the usage of different interviewing media, influenced primarily through the role played by experience, which informs perceptions upon which practices are based. We discuss this duality of practices in terms of information richness theory and channel expansion theory and offer further insights into the factors that influence and shape researchers’ perceptions of the contextual suitability of particular media available to interview‐based accounting research.     

A possible explanation of the gender gap among accounting academics: evidence from the choice of research field

Despite the significant increase in the number of women in accounting research over past decades, the percentage of female full professors in accounting is still low. One of the problems may relate to the research area(s) they choose to specialize in. Is the relatively slow promotion of women due to their decision to concentrate in ‘nonmainstream’ fields of research? In this study, we collect data on 1,042 male and female accounting academics. Using the research interests declared on each academic web page, we find that accounting researchers show no significant gender differences in their choice of research fields. Hence, we conclude that the underpromotion of women cannot be attributed to their choice of ‘nonmainstream’ fields.     

Beyond the ticket and the brand: imagining an accounting research future

This paper presents a reflective critique of the current university environment and the state of accounting research with a view to envisaging the latter’s forward trajectory, particularly in terms of emerging subject areas, theoretical perspectives and methodological traditions. It considers the contemporary fixation upon research performance indicators and warns of their associated impact on the role and orientation of academic researchers. The emergence of specialist interdisciplinary and qualitative research communities within the accounting discipline are presented as opportunities for the invigoration of the accounting project. Nonetheless, the pursuit of research esteem indicators is argued to risk disengaging researchers from policy and practice concerns. Future roles, responsibilities and intentions of scholars are visited in the light of these observations.