Private firm accounting: the European reporting environment, data and research perspectives
为私营企业会计研究提供指南，重点介绍欧洲的财务报告监管环境、数据来源及生成过程，并回顾文献以指出未来研究方向，帮助学者理解私营企业研究中的样本选择问题。
This study provides a guide to accounting research on private firms with an emphasis on the European setting. We start by providing an overview of private firm financial reporting regulation in Europe and indicate how this institutional framework can be used to identify promising research settings that in part generalise beyond the European setting. Next, we discuss the availability of private firm accounting data and the underlying data generating process that involves private firms’ original reports, governmental and private data aggregators, and commercial data providers. We show how this process generates insightful data, but at the same time causes complex sample selection issues that researchers should take into account when assessing prior findings and developing new research projects. Finally, we identify potential areas of future work by reviewing the extant literature along the three main motivations for conducting private firm work: (i) to learn more about private firms per se, (ii) to learn more about what distinguishes private firms from public firms, and (iii) to obtain insights from private firms that generalise across all firms.