This study explores the evolution of accounting research by utilizing an unsupervised machine learning approach. We aim to identify the latent topics of accounting from the 1980s up to 2018, the dynamics and emerging topics of accounting research, and the economic reasons behind those changes. First, based on 23,220 articles from 46 accounting journals, we identify 55 topics using the latent Dirichlet allocation model. To illustrate the connection between topics, we use HistCite to generate a citation map along a timeline. The citation clusters demonstrate the “tribalism” phenomenon in accounting research. We then implement the dynamic topic model to reveal the dynamics of topics to show changes in accounting research. The emerging research trends are identified from the topic analytics. We further explore the economic reasons and in-depth insights into the topic evolution, indicating the economic development embeddedness nature of accounting research.

This paper studies the role of social connections in shaping individuals’ concerns about climate change. I combine granular climate data, region-level social network data and survey responses for 24 European countries in order to document large information spillovers. Individuals become more concerned about climate change when their geographically distant friends living in sociallyconnected regions have experienced large increases in temperatures since 1990. Exploring the heterogeneity of the spillover effects, I uncover that the learning via social networks plays a central role. Further, results illustrate the important role of social values and economic preferences for understanding how information spillovers affect individual concerns.

This paper investigates whether managers’ personal connections help corporate productivity to recover after a negative economic shock. Leveraging the heterogeneity in the severity of the financial crisis across different sectors, the paper reports that (i) the financial crisis had a negative effect on within-firm productivity, (ii) the effect was long-lasting and persistent, supporting a productivity-hysteresis hypothesis, and (iii) managers’ personal connections allowed corporations to recover from this productivity slowdown. Among the possible mechanisms, we show that connected managers operating in affected sectors foster productivity recovery through higher input cost efficiency and better access to the credit market, as well as more efficient use of labour and capital.

We observe that public firms are more likely to issue seasoned stocks rather than bonds when theirs boards are more socially-connected. These connected issuers experience better announcement-period stock returns and attract more institutional investors. This social-connection effect is stronger for firms with severe information asymmetry, higher risk of being undersubscribed, and more visible to investors. Our conjecture is this social-network effect is driven by trust in issuing firms. Given stocks are more sensitive to trust, these trusted firms are more likely to issue stocks than bonds. Trustworthiness plays an important role in firms’ security issuances in capital markets.