Overall I was very pleased with both the diversity and quality of the accounting research on display at the CAAA Annual Conference. From my sampling it appears that there is a strong managerial accounting set of researchers in Canada, both financial economics and experimental based, good to world class capital markets research, and some very good to excellent audit and tax research. In many ways what I saw at the CAAA, after being away for six or seven years, mirrored what I saw in Australia and New Zealand after a similar absence. A strong increase in the average quality quality of the academic research on offer!

The next generation of Canadian doctoral students appears to be at least as diverse as the last one. We saw strong quantitative ( lead by the crew at Rotman and their students), experimental ( lead by Waterloo and their alumni) and qualitative ( lead by Queen’s and Queen’s Alumni). But the key was the diversity of the hotel me grown research, both in subject matter and method/methodology.

Overall, I am impressed with the increase in the quality of academic accounting research around the globe. And I continue to note how much more diverse the body of research is outside the AAA, especially after considering much of the AAA’s diversity comes from the international crowd, and much of the sameness we see abroad comes from the USA!