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?...

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...

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...

In a competitive information market, a single information source can only dominate other sources individually, not collectively. We explore whether earnings announcements constitute such a dominant source using Ball and Shivakumar's (2008) [How much new information is there in earnings?, <italic>Journal...</italic>