Issue Information ‐ Virtual Issue on Corporate Governance

• Date: 01 December 2019
• Published date: 01 December 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1475-679X.12295

DOI: 10.1111/1475-679X.12295

Journal of Accounting Research

Vol. 57 No. 5 December 2019

Printed in U.S.A.

JAR Virtual Issue on Corporate

Governance—When is Corporate

Governance Research Relevant to

Accounting? Evidence from JAR

2002–2018

YONCA ERTIMUR

∗AND FABRIZIO FERRI

†

1. Introduction

The separation of ownership and control at public firms results in agency

problems. Broadly speaking, all monitoring mechanisms aimed at reduc-

ing agency costs are part of a firm’s corporate governance structure. Thus,

it is not surprising that corporate governance topics have attracted the in-

terest of a wide group of scholars in accounting, economics, finance, man-

agement and law – an interest further fueled by the governance scandals of

2000–2002, the 2007–2008 financial crisis and the numerous policy reforms

surrounding these events. Among the top journals in accounting, JAR has

acted as one of the primary outlets for studies in corporate governance.

In this review, we focus on corporate governance-related research pub-

lished in JAR over the 2002–2018 period. We identify 48 such studies. Our

main objective is not to provide an in-depth critical review of these papers,

but rather to identify when and why corporate governance studies are rele-

vant to accounting research and thus of interest to accounting journals – a

question we and our colleagues often struggle with in our roles as authors,

editors and reviewers.

We group these 48 studies into two broad categories. The first category

(covered in Section 2) is comprised of papers on executive compensation, a

topic traditionally (and unambiguously) in the domain of accounting jour-

nals. Indeed, JAR has published several seminal papers in this category. The

second category (covered in Section 3) includes all other corporate gover-

nance studies. Within this category the question of relevance to accounting

∗University of Colorado †University of Miami.

1

CUniversity of Chicago on behalf of the Accounting Research Center, 2019