The rise and Significance of Modern Analytical Methods in Accounting. Part I.

Abstract

This is Part I of two review essays dealing with the development of analytical accounting and, part icularly, the application of information economics to accounting, This perspective tries to substitute the notions of probabilistic information for the deterministic notion of valuation. It deals with both financial as well as managerial accounting (the latter in form of agency theory). After a concise survey of the earlier (deterministic) phases of accounting, the present paper reviews the book by J. A . Christensen and Demski [2003], one of the two prominent introductions for advanced and graduate students to the “information content perspective”. While this book offers a host of examples and illustrations, the other work (to be reviewed later in this journal, i.e., in Part II), the two volume work by O. P. Christensen and Feltham [2003-2004], though also designed for graduate students, is a more complete survey and overview of the pertinent literature, offering a host of propositions (theorems with rigorous proofs) of this perspective. Despite the excellence of those books, it is regrettable that they do not sufficiently integrated this relatively “new” material with the conceptual apparatus of traditional accounting—as do, for example, two German texts by Ewert and Wagenhofer [1997/2003] and Wagenhofer and Ewert [2003].