We study changes in financial reporting around economic crises from a historical perspective through the lens of punctuated equilibrium evolution. Historical evidence and contemporary economic analyses indicate that corporate financial reporting plays a minor role in precipitating economic...

Hopwood and other senior scholars have suggested that accounting scholarship has become stagnant and lacks the spirit of innovation that previously motivated the discipline. In this essay I build on these authors' assertions to address two questions. First, what causal forces account for this...

I consider three questions about innovation in current accounting scholarship. First, what is “innovation” and how do we know that the level of innovation in accounting scholarship is low? Second, if innovation in accounting scholarship is low, how did this state of affairs come to exist?...

This essay is based on a keynote speech at the 2014 Journal of International Accounting Research (JIAR) Conference. That talk was built upon a 2009 American Accounting Association (AAA) annual meeting panel presentation titled “Is there any scientific legitimacy to what we teach in Accounting...