The emergence of journal quality lists such as that issued by the UK’s Association of Business Schools (ABS) has instigated a wave of ‘journal list fetishism’ throughout the business school sector. ...Business school deans and research managers have become fixated on whether the publication records of current staff and new applicants include the requisite number of ‘hits’ in the best ranked journals. Little attention is paid to additional measures of research quality, or to the broader context within which the research has been produced. This paper examines the current fetishizing of the ABS guide in general, and the magical ‘4’ rating in particular (the symbolic token for top journals). It begins by looking at how ‘trust in numbers’ may have assisted the uptake of the ABS guide through developing a perception of ‘trustworthiness’ and then raises questions regarding the current fetishizing of ‘4’ ratings using additional data within the ABS guide.
This article examines the rise of a professional rating for financial analysts - the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) award. The development of a professional rating is explained here as a need to ...brand and distinguish those analysts who had undertaken a formal training and achieved the necessary skill-sets. Three themes are used to trace this development: the emergence of regional communities of analysts, leading to a national federation and the CFA institute in the post-war years; the development of a formal body of knowledge which could be examined formally; and the need for a code of ethics, as existed for established professions. This study applies elements of a technological deterministic model, augmented with the concept of epistemic communities, to the emergence of the CFA.
We examine the importance of multiple agents’ reputations on the market's reaction to analysts’ stock recommendation revisions (analyst revisions), individually and interactively, in the UK and ...Japanese stock markets. We find some notable variations in reputation effects between the two markets. In the UK, analyst reputation amplifies the market's reaction to analyst revisions, while in Japan, analyst reputation has no significant impact. Firm reputation diminishes (amplifies) the market's reaction to analyst revisions in the UK (Japan). Only CEO reputation generates similar effects in the UK and Japan, dampening the market's reaction to analyst revisions. We also find that reputations interact in different ways in the two markets. Specifically, firm reputation and CEO reputation tend to moderate the positive effect of analyst reputation in the UK; however, in Japan, CEO reputation tends to moderate the positive effect of firm reputation, but there is no significant interaction effect between analyst reputation and CEO/firm reputation. Our findings are explained using insights both from formal economic models and from various cultural and institutional characteristics.
This paper discusses issues relating to the use of the Association of Business Schools' (ABS) Academic Journal Quality Guide within UK business schools. It also looks at several specific issues ...raised by the Chair of the British Accounting Association/British Accounting and Finance Association regarding the ratings for top international journals, and for accounting education and accounting history journals. The increasing use of this guide by business school deans/heads as a tool for staffing and research resource allocation has significant implications both for individuals and specialist areas of research.
This study aims to look behind the quality ratings for accounting journals, listed in the ABS
Academic Journal Quality Guide (
Kelly, Morris, Rowlinson and Harvey, 2009). Significant variations exist ...in the perceptions of journal quality across the six UK business schools that contribute ratings to the ABS guide, with the most optimistic perceptions tending to come from those schools whose ratings are more highly correlated with quality scores for critical and interpretive research, as reported in
Lowe and Locke's (2005) article in
Accounting,
Organizations and Society (30:1, 81–98). Pessimistic perceptions are more likely to exist in those schools whose ratings are more highly correlated with Lowe & Locke's scores for functional and capital markets research paradigms. There are also notable variations in journal ratings across time. Given that perceptions vary so much across schools, paradigms and time, how much credence can be given to any single rating system for journal quality? This study concludes that if the ABS guide is to be used by university decision-makers or heads of school then the ABS ratings for any given year need to be treated with extreme caution and with an appropriate recognition of their intrinsic limitations.
This paper examines earnings management by dividend-paying firms in cases where pre-managed earnings would fall below the expected dividend, and by non-dividend paying firms aiming to avoid reporting ...losses. We find that within the UK market the likelihood of upward earnings management is significantly greater in the former case than the latter, though both are drivers for earnings management. Large firms are less likely to upwardly manage earnings to reach dividend thresholds, consistent with prior UK evidence on the ability of the largest firms to avoid restrictive debt covenants. We also find that earnings management is more clearly observable through examining working capital discretionary accruals than through examining total discretionary accruals.
This paper replies to points raised by the editors of the ABS Guide, Huw Morris, Charles Harvey, Aidan Kelly and Michael Rowlinson (2011) Accounting Education: an international journal, 20(6), pp. ...561-573) in response to a paper published in a previous issue of Accounting Education (Hussain, S. (2011) Accounting Education: an international journal, 20(6), pp. 545-559). It also makes reference to a paper by Alan Sangster (2011) Accounting Education: an international journal, 20(6), pp. 575-580), which appeared in that same issue of the journal, detailing the personal experiences of an accounting researcher working in the specialisms of both accounting education and accounting history.
•Positivist papers draw from a narrower range of sources than do critical papers.•Positivist papers rely more heavily on ‘elite’ sources than do critical papers.•The use of books as reference sources ...has fallen significantly across 2002–2013.•Trends in referencing may reflect the growing influence of journal ranking lists.
Academic research in accounting has often been characterised as exhibiting a dichotomy between the positivist approach and the critical, interpretive and interdisciplinary (CII) approaches. Our paper examines the extent of this dichotomy by presenting empirical evidence on the different source materials which the two communities use to construct their research papers. Across all articles published in six leading journals between 2002 and 2013, we find that positivist papers tend to be constructed from a narrower set of references drawn mostly from elite business journals while CII papers draw from a much more diverse range of sources, including non-elite journals, non-business journals and books. There is also evidence of the growing impact of journal ranking lists, with notable upward (downward) trends in the usage of high-ranked (unranked) reference sources. We suggest a link here with recent research on signalling within the publication process.
This paper reveals the important role played by brokerage house size in determining the utility of segment data to financial analysts. Brokerage house size is a proxy both for analysts’ access to ...company managers and for their access to in-house expertise. Using data for large UK firms, we reveal that the shift to International Financial Reporting Standard 8 (IFRS8) led to significant improvements in forecast accuracy for analysts in large brokerage houses but not for those in small brokerage houses. In addition, the forecasting ability of analysts in smaller brokerage houses was impaired when segments represented lines-of-business. No such effect was evident in the case of large brokers’ analysts. We link these findings to the improved insight which analysts in large brokerages obtained from their superior access to managers and in-house support.
This is the first study to examine forecasting ability and the impact of UK analysts' idiosyncratic factors (experience, firm coverage and resources). The focus is on a sample of 21 084 annual ...earnings-per-share forecasts made by UK analysts for FTSE-100 companies between 1993 and 1998, derived from the I/B/E/S International database. Consistent with experimental expectations, this study finds that UK analysts' forecasting abilities are a positive function of experience and brokerage house resources, and are negatively related to extreme firm coverage. It also appears that analysts working for larger brokerage houses have greater prior experience and are less likely to have extreme firm-coverage requirements.
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