Search results

This research provides accounting-ethics authors and administrators with a benchmark for accounting-ethics research. While Bernardi and Bean (2010) considered publications in business-ethics and accounting’s top-40 journals this study considers research in eight accounting-ethics and public-interest journals, as well as, 34 business-ethics journals. We analyzed the contents of our 42 journals for the 25-year period between 1991 through 2015. This research documents the continued growth (Bernardi & Bean, 2007) of accounting-ethics research in both accounting-ethics and business-ethics journals. We provide data on the top-10 ethics authors in each doctoral year group, the top-50 ethics authors over the most recent 10, 20, and 25 years, and a distribution among ethics scholars for these periods. For the 25-year timeframe, our data indicate that only 665 (274) of the 5,125 accounting PhDs/DBAs (13.0% and 5.4% respectively) in Canada and the United States had authored or co-authored one (more than one) ethics article.

In crafting Auditing Standard No.3 (AS3), a primary objective of the PCAOB was to reduce auditors' exposure to litigation by raising the standard of care for audit documentation. We examine whether the increased documentation requirements of AS3 affect legal professionals' perceptions of audit quality and auditor responsibility in the event of an audit failure. Our experiment consists of a 3 × 2 between-participants design with law students serving as proxies for legal professionals. The results of our experiment indicate that when an audit procedure, namely the investigation of inconsistent evidence, is not required to be documented, legal professionals perceive the performance of the work itself but not its documentation to significantly increase audit quality and reduce the auditor's responsibility for an audit failure. When documentation of the procedure is required, as per AS3, legal professionals perceive enhanced audit quality and reduced auditor responsibility only if the performance of the work is documented.

The explosion of accounting ethics research in the past decade has been fuelled by the availability of the Defining Issues Test (DIT: Rest 1979–1993). Despite existing criticisms regarding the DIT (Emler et al., 1983) and research indicating that the measure is a biased reflection of accountants' moral reasoning (Sweeney & Fisher, 1998,(Sweeney & Fisher,1999), the validity of the instrument is rarely questioned. This paper discusses the evolution of the political attitude-moral reasoning debate. A between-subjects experiment provides further support for the existence of political bias, implying that ethics researchers may have confounded political ideology with moral reasoning when interpreting results.

This study models auditors’ professional commitment as the product of socialization forces operating within the public accounting profession. The results of a structural equation analysis from a sample of 349 auditors representing international, national and regional firms indicate that firm size is inversely related to professional commitment. Furthermore, the findings indicate that a strong relationship exists between an auditor’s political ideology and professional commitment. Politically conservative auditors, reflecting the dominant ideology in public accounting, reported significantly higher professional commitment than politically liberal auditors.

Despite its widespread acceptance and application in the psychology literature, exhaustion, the core dimension of job burnout, has only recently been examined in the domain of public accounting. These studies highlighted the problem of exhaustion within the profession and examined its causes relative to the environment of public accounting. Another factor, not previously addressed in the context of public accounting, is the role personality plays on public accountants’ exhaustion. The current study addressed this void by examining how the personality traits of hardiness, workaholism, neuroticism, and Type-A behavior in public accountants affect exhaustion. The results indicated that public accountants who were high in hardiness experienced significantly less exhaustion. The role stressors of overload and conflict were also significant contributors to public accountants’ exhaustion.

This study investigates how disclosure of the board of directors’ leadership and role in risk oversight (BODs oversight disclosure) influences investors’ judgments when information on risk exposures is disclosed. The theoretical lens through which we examine this issue involves negativity bias. Sixty-two stock market investors who engage in the evaluation and/or investment of stocks on a regular or professional basis participated in our study. Our results reveal that the addition of BODs oversight disclosure (positive information) does not carry significant weight on investor judgments (i.e., attractiveness and investment) when financial statement disclosures indicate a high level of operational and financial risk exposures (negative information). In contrast, under the condition of a low level of risk exposures, BODs oversight disclosure causes investors to assess higher risk in terms of worry, catastrophic potentials and unfamiliarity about risk information and, in turn, make less favorable investor judgments. Our findings add to the literature on negativity bias and contribute to the debate on the usefulness of disclosures about risk.

This paper ranks university faculties, accounting doctoral programs, individual behavioral accounting researchers, and the most influential articles based on Google Scholar citations to publications in Advances in Accounting Behavioral Research (AABR). All articles published in AABR in its first 15 volumes are included and four citation metrics are used. The paper identifies the articles, authors, faculties, and doctoral programs that made the greatest contribution to the development of AABR. Such an analysis provides a useful basis for understanding the direction the journal has taken and how it has contributed to the literature (Meyer & Rigsby, 2001). The h-index and m-index for AABR indicates it compares favorably among its peers. Potential doctoral students with an interest in behavioral accounting research, “new” accounting faculty with an interest in behavioral accounting research, current behavioral accounting research faculty, department chairs, deans, and other administrators will find these results informative.