We consider accounting from an evolutionary perspective. Accounting encompasses the creation of transactional records, the summarization of records in t-accounts, and the preparation of audited financial statements. Accounting's history spans at least 10,000 years dating back to the first human...

Ramanna (this issue) argues that the FASB’s new Conceptual Framework deemphasizes reliability in favor of representational faithfulness to facilitate the FASB’s promotion of an “asset-liability” approach measured at fair values. More importantly, Ramanna argues that this change is likely...

Braun (this issue) argues that the traditional accounting principles underlying the revenue-expense approach such as Historical Cost and Conservatism are ecologically rational in that they help organizations survive better in uncertain economic environments. More importantly, he argues that the...

Smith and Wilson (2019) posit that we self-regulate our actions to conform with what we believe is socially appropriate. The mechanism is Adam Smith's “Impartial Spectator,” a fictitious individual constructed in the mind who helps us predict whether our actions and motivations will earn...

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 supplement is a companion piece to NeuroAccounting: Consilience Between the Biologically-Evolved Brain and Culturally-Evolved Accounting Principles. We provide brief summaries of five studies from neuroscience along with key aspects of the findings that are cited in the NeuroAccounting paper

Double-entry bookkeeping (DEB) is used by most large firms even though scholars do not understand why they chose DEB. We address three questions about DEB’s gradual displacement of single-entry bookkeeping (SEB): (1) What is the main benefit of DEB? (2) How did DEB emerge and evolve? and (3)...