By What Criteria Do We Evaluate Accounting? Some Thoughts on Economic Welfare and the Archival Literature
探讨会计制度如何通过影响企业和家庭行为来提升经济福利，并评述档案文献中三种主要研究路径（实际效应、价格效应和成本契约）作为福利代理变量的局限，提醒研究者勿忽视会计对总体福利的根本贡献。
ABSTRACT The economic role of an accounting regime is to increase welfare through its effects—in conjunction with complementary institutions—on firm and household behavior. I review three major streams of the archival literature (real effects; price effects, including value relevance; and costly contracting), in terms of what they can and cannot reveal as proxies for welfare effects. One conclusion is that the partial correlations and average effects that predominate in this literature have provided valuable insights into the role of accounting in the economy, but provide limited and misleading proxies for welfare effects. A major concern is that teachers, students, and researchers—indeed, regulators and standard setters—raised on this literature could lose sight of, and underestimate, the fundamental contribution of accounting to aggregate welfare.