Empirical Accounting Seminars: Elephants in the Room

Ohlson James A. ()
Additional contact information
Ohlson James A.: HK Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China

Accounting, Economics, and Law: A Convivium, 2025, vol. 15, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Attendees of accounting empirical research seminars all too often come to view the conclusions presented in the papers as non-persuasive. This disappointing situation indicates that researchers employ data analysis methodologies which inherently support conclusions they are looking for. Such issues are rarely discussed because many participants have relied on the same methodologies – thus they have firsthand knowledge about the inherent deficiencies. The mantra becomes: “We are all aware of uncomfortable aspects of the methodologies used in our research, so why dwell on it?” Because these potential questions tend to be outside normal and acceptable bounds, I term them “elephants in the room”. Five such cases are delineated to illustrate incontrovertible problems therein. To sum it up, the elephants highlight that the purported substantive contents of most published papers will be taken with a grain of salt for the foreseeable future.

Keywords: research methodology; research politic; collective bias (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/ael-2021-0067 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:aelcon:v:15:y:2025:i:1:p:1-8:n:1002

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/ael/html

DOI: 10.1515/ael-2021-0067

Access Statistics for this article

Accounting, Economics, and Law: A Convivium is currently edited by Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Yuri Biondi and Shyam Sunder

More articles in Accounting, Economics, and Law: A Convivium from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().