Empirical Research in Accounting: Tools and Methods

Course book for accounting research
Authors
Affiliation

Ian D. Gow

University of Melbourne

Tony Ding

Published

09 Aug 2023

Welcome

This is the on-line version of the work-in-progress edition of Empirical Research in Accounting: Tools and Methods.

The book is being written by Ian D. Gow and Tony Ding. On this page, we detail recent changes to the book (Section 1 below), as well as materials planned to be added in coming months (Section 2 below).

Recent changes

  • July 2023
    • Converted source code from bookdown to Quarto. One benefit is a much better search engine for this site
    • Switched from the magrittr pipe (%>%) to the native pipe (|>).
    • Updated references to “R for Data Science” given recent release of the second edition of that book
    • Switched to native form of anonymous functions (\(x))
    • Migrated from stargazer to modelsummary
    • Migrated from lfe to fixest
  • April 2023
    • Prepared templates for most of Parts I and II
    • Polished material on the efficient markets hypothesis
    • Polished chapter on event studies
  • February 2023
  • January 2023
  • September 2022
    • Added material on Zhang (2007) to event studies chapter
    • Refined chapter on matching
  • August 2022
    • Added material on Beaver (1968).
  • July 2022
    • Added more material to SQL primer (appendix)
  • June 2022
    • Organized book into parts. See Section 1.4 for more on how the book is structured.
    • Initial draft of second chapter on natural experiments
    • Added material on evaluating natural experiments and the parallel trends assumption to Chapter 19
  • April 2022
    • Filled out chapter on accrual anomaly (Sloan, 1996)
    • Added chapter on earnings management mostly focused on DSS (1995)
  • January 2022
    • Added separate chapter on FFJR (1969)
    • Added separate chapter on Ball and Brown (1968)
  • November 2021
    • Added chapter on RDD
    • Added simulation from Leone et al. (2019)
  • October 2021
    • Added chapter on natural experiments
  • July 2021
    • Added chapter on panel data
    • Extensive revisions to material on IV

Materials to come

Many distractions (teaching and so on) have kept us from making our previous timetable. We are currently teaching a course based on this book and thus needing to tidy up messy chapters and finish up incomplete chapters. Below is our current work plan.

Methods (Jun 2023)

  • Build up materials in “miscellaneous methods” chapter, perhaps making two chapters
  • Chapter on selection models and limited dependent variables

Accruals (June 2023)

  • Build up simulations using (somewhat) realistic models of actual business and accounting processes
  • Coverage of accrual quality models, including Dechow and Dichev (2002)

Structural models (July 2023)

  • Include material on structural models from Gow, Larcker and Reiss (2016)
  • Explicitly discuss weaknesses implicit in Gow, Larcker and Reiss (2016) material
  • Add an application, perhaps the one from Bertomeu, Beyer, and Taylor (“BBT”)
  • Examine a modification of BBT’s model

If you have suggestions for the book or requests, please feel free to contact either Ian or Tony. Alternatively, you may create a new issue describing your suggestion in the repository for the companion package for this course here.