March 21, 2008

Research on Accounting Should Learn From the Past

By MICHAEL H. GRANOF and STEPHEN A. ZEFF

Starting in the 1960s, academic research on accounting became methodologically supercharged — far more quantitative and analytical than in previous decades. The results, however, have been paradoxical. The new paradigms have greatly increased our understanding of how financial information affects the decisions of investors as well as managers. At the same time, those models have crowded out other forms of investigation. The result is that professors of accounting have contributed