Doing archival research in management accounting

In this chapter, I discuss archival research in management accounting, where “archival” is narrowly defined and “management accounting” broadly. Given these definitions, I address the literature's excessive focus on one specific research area, i.e., executive compensation, and its use of publicly available data to answer the dominant research question. I argue that the easy access to databases has led to an uncritical use of the data, which begs the question of what we have learned. I conclude that, relative to the size of this field, we know very little about the design of incentive contracts for CEOs and propose two broad directions for future research.