Empirical Research in Accounting: Tools and Methods

Course book for accounting research
Authors
Affiliation

Ian D. Gow

University of Melbourne

Tony Ding

Published

25 Mar 2024

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 as well as materials planned to be added in coming months.

Recent changes

  • February 2024
    • Many changes to increase consistency of code
    • Switch to use of stringr functions throughout
    • Improved adherence to R style guidelines
    • Added many index entries (PDF version)
  • January 2024
  • November 2023
    • Added chapter on GLMs
    • Added appendix on parquet data
  • October 2023
    • Added material on extreme values and matching
    • Prepared templates for Part III
  • 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 Part I and Part 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 13  Event studies (event studies)
    • Refined chapter on matching
  • August 2022
    • Added material on Beaver (1968).
  • July 2022
    • Added more material to SQL primer (appendix)
  • June 2022
  • 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

Below is our current work plan.

Econometrics (January 2024)

  • Replace discussion of history of econometrics

Methods (January 2024)

  • Finalize chapter on matching

Methods (online 2024)

  • Complete chapter on selection models

More accruals (online 2024)

  • 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 (online 2024)

  • 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.