As part of the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of AFAANZ, we consider the breadth of judgment and decision-making (JDM) experimental research in accounting over that 50-year period. Our review is divided by decade and between auditing, financial accounting and management accounting. In four major journals, we found 5745 papers between 1970 and 2009, which we consider impressive and strong support for the opportunity to publish in this field. Our aim is to encourage more JDM research from Australians and New Zealanders, and to allow researchers in particular specialisations to get a better understanding of the JDM research in other specialisations.

This paper investigates the response of equity analysts following Australian and US listed stocks to the onset of the 2007 Global Financial Crisis. Both groups of analysts reacted quickly by adjusting their forecasts downwards, and initially tending towards being overly pessimistic. Relative to pre‐crisis data, the authors identify sharp declines in earnings forecasts, an increase (decrease) in downward (upward) revisions, and a downward (upward) trend in sell (buy) recommendations. Forecast errors are larger, and dispersion of earnings forecasts is higher. Finally, the most accurate analysts in the pre‐crisis period continue to be significantly more accurate during the crisis period than their peers.

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Previous research shows that analysts' forecasts of earnings do not fully incorporate information contained in reported earnings variability. This study investigates whether the inefficient forecast is because of a failure to incorporate observable information on two components of earnings variability: variability in operating performance and income smoothing. Our results show that analysts' forecasts fully incorporate information contained in earnings variability for firms with high income smoothing and for firms with low operating variability. A smaller serial correlation of forecast errors is observed for firms with low operating variability, which suggests that analysts recognize the permanence in earnings for such firms.