Integrating Practice into Accounting Research

Abstract

I argue that academic research in accounting has strayed from producing work that is useful to either practitioners or policy makers. I use three criteria to arrive at that assessment: (i) how many products and processes has accounting research produced in the last 50 years? (ii) how much overlap do we observe between issues that CFOs and CEOs worry about and our published research; and (iii) is the science or the know-how in academe in a particular area ahead of that in practice? I conjecture that tuition-funded research drives this problem. I review several initiatives that have been tried at Columbia and elsewhere (i) to better integrate academic research and practice; and (ii) to disseminate our findings to practitioners. I suggest that Management Science set up a forum to encourage submissions of papers that use rigorous methods to address pressing applied problems.

Keywords: research-practice gap, Columbia, tuition funded research, Management Science, policy

JEL Classification: A20, M4