SYNOPSIS: In response to concerns over the viability of the academic discipline of accounting, we investigate trends in accounting research by examining papers published in six top accounting journals from 1960 to 2007. We use citations made by accounting papers as a proxy for their antecedent ideas and examine trends in citations, topics, and methodologies, in aggregate and by journal. Our results suggest that the growing body of accounting research draws increasingly from both finance and economics. Financial accounting topics and archival methodologies are becoming more dominant over time relative to other topics and methodologies, although these trends vary by journal. Though most concerns we discuss are recent, we find that the situation today is the result of trends set in motion decades ago with an explicit decision by influential researchers to move the discipline from a normative perspective to a positive perspective. Given its current state, accounting research may be broadly characterized as research into the effect of economic events on the process of summarizing, analyzing, verifying, and reporting standardized financial information, and on the effects of reported information on economic events.

The American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 was signed into law on October 22, 2004. One of the most significant aspects of this legislation is a temporary tax holiday for dividend repatriations from foreign subsidiaries. U.S. multinational corporations may elect during a one-year window to deduct 85 percent of extraordinary cash dividends received from foreign subsidiaries. In this study, we model the impact that this legislation has on a firm's decision to either repatriate or reinvest foreign earnings from abroad. We then examine investors' assessment of how U.S. multinational corporations will respond to the temporary tax holiday. Our results indicate that investors repriced the tax liability consistent with investors anticipating that U.S. multinational corporations will repatriate a significant portion of their permanently reinvested foreign earnings during the tax holiday.

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Increasing financial statement complexity along with an intense focus on audit quality has created challenges for today's auditors. As a result, audit firms are increasingly relying on various specialists to help them perform their audits. To better understand why and how audit firms are using forensic specialists on their audits, we conduct an exploratory survey of experienced audit and forensic professionals. Our results suggest auditors are largely relying on forensic specialists to provide them with additional comfort beyond that obtained from traditional audit procedures. Furthermore, our results demonstrate that the usage of forensic specialists occurs primarily on riskier engagements, such as those involving restatements, initial public offerings, and investigations by regulators or law enforcement agencies. Although their involvement varies, forensic specialists assist audit teams by providing both guidance and direct assistance across the audit in areas including fraud brainstorming, design of procedures to test for fraud, and review of results of fraud‐related testing. In addition, our findings indicate forensic specialist involvement may lead to greater comfort as evidenced by the perceived identification by forensic specialists of additional audit findings related to material misstatements, financial reporting fraud, misappropriation of assets, and internal control deficiencies. Our results also reveal the majority of auditor and forensic specialist participants believe the value of forensic involvement on audits outweighs the associated costs, even in the absence of such additional audit findings. We conclude our paper by offering a theoretical discussion of our findings based on the audit comfort framework and suggestions for future research. In summary, our findings suggest that the discomfort some auditors feel in the contemporary auditing environment is leading to changes in the rituals that underlie traditional audits such that they seek comfort afforded them through forensic specialist involvement.

SYNOPSIS Prior work has found high levels of concentration in top academic accounting journals relative to finance, management, and marketing. Moreover, concentration has been increasing in accounting while concentration in other disciplines has been decreasing or remaining about the same. We investigate whether recent efforts by the American Accounting Association, among others, have altered these trends. We examine concentration trends in top accounting journals from 1990 to 2014 and compare these trends with those in other major business school disciplines. Ratios of publications to faculty are lowest for accounting across all years, suggesting that accounting has relatively fewer “slots” available for top journal publications than other disciplines. In addition, our results suggest that concentration has decreased in accounting journals in recent years but that concentration has also decreased in other business disciplines. Thus, accounting has retained its position as a discipline where publications in top journals seem more difficult to attain relative to other business disciplines.