EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Financial distress is a persistent problem in U.S. hospitals, leading them to close at an alarming rate over the past two decades. Given the potential adverse effects of hospital closures on healthcare access and public health, interest is growing in understanding more about the financial health of U.S. hospitals. In this study, we set out to explore the extent to which relevant organizational and environmental factors potentially buffer financially distressed hospitals from closure, and even at the brink of closure, enable some to merge with other hospitals. We tested our hypotheses by first examining how factors such as slack resources, environmental munificence, and environmental complexity affect the likelihood of survival versus closing or merging with other organizations. We then tested how the same factors affect the likelihood of merging relative to closing for financially distressed hospitals that undergo one of these two events. We found that different types of slack resources and environmental forces impact different outcomes. In this article, we discuss the implications of our findings for hospital stakeholders.

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This study reveals themes and trends in accounting research over the past 20 years by utilizing natural language processing and text‐mining techniques. We generated a corpus consisting of over 40,000 articles through multiple searches in EBSCOhost Business Source Premier, Scopus, and ScienceDirect to gather data from 30 highly ranked (A* and A) journals that were listed and categorized by the Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) as the top accounting journals. Based upon predetermined inclusion and exclusion criteria, we eliminated 24,474 non‐empirical articles and those with no abstracts, resulting in 16,449 abstracts. The text‐mining analyses reveal 15 distinct clusters, with five clusters showing downward trends, six trending upward, and four maintaining stability. The downward trending clusters are: (1) capital markets; (2) financial reporting; (3) accounting education, careers, and diversity; (4) earnings/markets; and (5) accounting history and capitalism. Trending upward are: (1) critical accounting; (2) auditing; (3) corporate governance; (4) corporate social responsibility; (5) debt financing; and (6) financial markets and forecasting. Stable clusters are: (1) managerial accounting; (2) international accounting standards; (3) taxation; and (4) governmental accounting. This study introduces an innovative method for discerning themes and trends in accounting research and offers a guide to neophyte accounting faculty for determining publishing outlets for research. In utilizing our findings to drill down and provide more detailed knowledge, it also serves as a reference point for future text‐mining studies.

Summary The literature on corporate governance (CG) has been expanding at an unprecedented rate since major corporate scandals surfaced, such as Enron, WorldCom, and HealthSouth. Corresponding with accounting's important role in CG, accounting scholars increasingly have investigated CG in recent years, so the body of literature is growing. Although previous attempts have been made to summarize extant literature on CG via reviews, none of these attempts has utilized recent developments in text analyses and natural language processing. This study uses latent semantic and topic analyses to address this research gap by analysing abstracts from 1,399 articles in all accounting journals that the Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) has rated A and A*. The ABDC journal list is widely recognized as a journal‐quality indicator across many universities worldwide. The analyses revealed 10 distinct research topics on CG in the ABDC's top accounting journals. The results presented include the five most representative articles for each topic, as distinguished by topic scores. This study carries important practice and policy implications, as it reveals major research streams and exhibits how researchers respond to various CG problems.

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