I rarely get besotted (a old English word) with a handbook even though I have contributed to three of them over the years.  But I must admit that for positivist behavioral accounting researchers, one should “bit the bullet” and purchase what I consider a somewhat overpriced product (especially if you want it in hard copy format and when the ebook option is more expensive than what a softcover should be).

What am I talking about? Libby and Thorne’s 2017 The Routledge Companion to Behavioural Accounting Research 1st Edition (available at https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Behavioural-Accounting-Research/Libby-Thorne/p/book/9781138890664 if the embedded hotlink does not work).  I cannot recall the last time I loaned a book to a PhD student and had to call it back to look up a reference – but I did with this book.

The book contains several chapters of interest including an elaboration on Bill Kinney Jr.’s most famous footnote (Footnote 23 of Kinney Jr. 1986) that talks about how to plan your research through a relatively straightforward mnemonic.  As a Doctoral Student Advisor/Supervisor and as an Editor for most of the last decade, it is so obvious to me that many of us teach this but it goes in one ear and out the other for our students!!  The quality of behavioral accounting research would improve immensely if BAR researchers followed its precepts.

The book also contains a reprint of Libby’s 1982 Chapter 1 explaining the predictive validity model.  The original is so much better than the echo of it that he published in AOS in 2002, not to mention the original does not focus on an example article that has been retracted as likely based on fake data.

This is truly a reference book that should stand the test of time.

PLEASE note this is an uncompensated endorsement but also note that I have a chapter in the book so there is a potential COI.  Now that I said that I have moral license to exaggerate but those who know me know that would not matter!