ABSTRACT

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to assess the quality of doctoral programs in terms of their faculty auditing research output as well as their effectiveness in training future auditing faculty. Design/methodology/approach – This paper presents a retrospective analysis of auditing research that appeared in five premier accounting journals (AOS, TAR, CAR, JAE, and JAR) during the time period 1975-2009. Findings – The authors offer several new insights. First, the authors provide rankings of accounting programs based on their faculty's research output as well as their graduates' research output. The rankings of auditing research are significantly different from those that are based on aggregated accounting research output. Second, the rankings are found to be skewed; due to the display of high concentrations of auditing research among the top auditing research programs. Third, the rankings have exhibited considerable changes over time, which suggest extreme competitions in maintaining the relative positions of the doctoral programs. Fourth, the authors detect a noticeable change in auditing research methodologies. Practical implications – The findings are useful to: new and job-seeking auditing doctorates in selecting academic appointments; potential doctoral students in identifying auditing graduate programs that best fit their career goals; university administrators in assessing their auditing faculty; and auditing scholars in positioning their journal outlets. Originality/value – The study extends the findings of the previous studies by focusing on auditing research publications in top journals over a long sample period. The authors also provide evidence of changes in research methodologies in auditing research as well as changes in rankings among different institutions in recent years.

The rapid integration of international capital markets is apparent from the increasing number of foreign firms listed on the U.S. stock exchanges. A number of event studies have used stock returns of foreign firms listed on U.S. exchanges to examine the stock price reactions to various announcements. However, some researchers have raised concerns over the choice of event study models in the study of foreign firms. By employing actual stock return data in various simulation scenarios, this study compares the powers of alternative event study methods for foreign firms. The results show that all models and equity indexes perform equally well when there is no clustering of event dates, though there are high Type I and Type II errors when event dates cluster together.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a complementary analysis of finance journals that are often being overlooked in prior studies. Specifically, the authors examine the Australian Business Dean Council’s (ABDC’s) C-ranked journals in terms of their authors’ affiliations with US colleges, US colleges with Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) accreditations, and US colleges with AACSB doctoral program accreditations. Design/methodology/approach – A list of C-ranked journals is downloaded from the ABDC’s website. Full-text articles of these journals are downloaded from library databases for the five-year period of 2009-2013. Author affiliations are collected from the corresponding articles. Journal histories, journal editor locations, Cabell’s journal rankings, and acceptance rates are collected from the ABDC’s database, Cabell’s Directory, journal websites, and library databases. The final sample consists of 28 finance journals. Findings – The authors find that these journals have a substantial number and percentage of authors from US colleges. Among the US authors, about 92 percent of them are from AACSB accredited schools and most of them are from AACSB accredited schools with doctoral programs. The findings support the notion that these journals are important publication outlets for US researchers. The authors also find that journals with longer histories and US-based editors have a higher percentage of US authors. In addition, journals with better Cabell’s journal rankings and higher rejection rates have higher percentage of US authors from AACSB accredited schools with doctoral programs. Originality/value – C-ranked journals are often neglected in prior studies on journal characteristics because they are less well-known and less likely to be cited. However, these journals constitute as many as half of all finance journals in the ABDC database and can be important publication outlets for finance researchers. This study contributes to the literature by examining the author characteristics of these journals, namely, the proportions of authors who come from US colleges and authors who come from AACSB accredited US programs. Such an analysis will provide valuable insight into the value of these journals.