Discontinuous Distribution of Test Statistics Around Significance Thresholds in Empirical Accounting Studies

实证会计研究中检验统计量在显著性阈值附近的非连续分布

XIN CHANG, HUASHENG GAO, WEI LI

DOI: 10.1111/1475-679x.12579

期刊: Journal of Accounting Research

摘要

ABSTRACT Examining test statistics from articles in six leading accounting journals, we detect discontinuities in their distributions around conventional significance thresholds ( p‐ values of 0.05 and 0.01) and find an unusual abundance of test statistics that are just significant. Further analysis reveals that these discontinuities are more prominent in studies with smaller samples and are more salient in experimental than in archival studies. The discontinuity discrepancy between experimental and archival studies relates to several proxies for researcher degrees of freedom. Nevertheless, this evidence does not imply that experimental research is more prone to questionable research practices than archival studies. Overall, our findings speak to the concern of whether accounting researchers could exercise undisclosed discretion to obtain and report statistically significant results. Based on our results, a healthy skepticism of some just‐significant test statistics is warranted.

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期刊信息

期刊:

ISSN: 0021-8456

国际分区

类目分区
BUSINESS, FINANCE1

国内分区

类目分区
管理学2
管理学, 商业财政与金融1
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