| name | revacc-methods |
| description | Use when research design and identification are the bottleneck for a Review of Accounting Studies (RAST) manuscript — choosing the setting, shock, and design that credibly identify an accounting effect, or fixing the primitives and solution concept of an analytical model. Designs the study; it does not run the estimation and robustness (revacc-data-analysis) or frame the contribution (revacc-contribution-framing). |
Research Design & Identification (revacc-methods)
When to trigger
- Your treatment (a disclosure, a standard adoption, an audit/tax regime) may be endogenous
- Adoption is staggered across firms/years and you need a defensible DiD
- You have an association and a referee will ask "is this causal or just correlation?"
- You are designing an experiment to isolate a channel archival data cannot separate
- You are building an analytical model and must fix primitives, timing, and the equilibrium concept
Identification for archival accounting at RAST
Accounting treatments — disclosure choices, conservatism, auditor selection, tax positions, standard adoption — are rarely random, so RAST referees expect a credible identification strategy, not kitchen-sink controls. Pick the design that breaks the endogeneity for your accounting setting.
| Identification threat / setting | Design |
|---|
| Regulation / standard adoption with a clean date (e.g., a reporting mandate) | Difference-in-differences; event study around the adoption date |
| Staggered adoption across firms/states/countries | Staggered DiD with modern estimators (avoid naive TWFE bias) |
| Endogenous accounting/auditor/tax choice | Instrumental variables / 2SLS with a defensible exclusion |
| A threshold rule (covenant, index inclusion, size or regulatory cutoff) | Regression discontinuity |
| Selection on observables | Matching (PSM/entropy) as a complement, not the main claim |
| A plausibly exogenous shock to the information environment | Natural experiment; pre-trends shown |
| Information content of an accounting signal | Short-window event study with a clean benchmark and confound check |
State the estimating equation, the unit and level, the fixed effects (firm, year, industry-year), and the identifying variation explicitly. The design section must make a skeptic believe the variation is as-good-as-random conditional on controls. RAST's first-round-decision culture means a weak design is more likely to draw a reject than a "fix it in revision."
Measurement design is part of identification
For contested accounting constructs (discretionary accruals, earnings quality, disclosure indices, audit quality, information asymmetry), the proxy choice is a design decision. Pre-commit a primary measure with precedent and plan the alternative proxies you will use to show the result is not proxy-driven (carried out in revacc-data-analysis). A clean design on a fragile proxy still fails.
If the lane is analytical
- Fix the information structure, players, timing, and payoffs before solving; state the equilibrium concept (PBE, sequential, etc.).
- Show the model is the minimal structure that generates the accounting result; defend each assumption as load-bearing.
- Plan the comparative statics that become testable or normative accounting implications.
If the lane is experimental
- Manipulate the focal accounting construct with realistic stimuli and a fit-for-purpose pool (investors, auditors, managers); IRB documentation is expected.
- Pre-register where feasible; include manipulation and attention checks; power the design for the interaction, not just the main effect.
Design hygiene
- Show parallel pre-trends for any DiD and report dynamic (event-time) effects.
- Defend the exclusion restriction for any IV in words — relevance alone is not enough.
- Pre-commit the main specification; relegate alternatives to robustness.
- Plan the data provenance trail now (Compustat/CRSP/I/B/E/S/audit-data vintages and screens).
Execution bridge (StatsPAI / Stata MCP)
For the empirical / causal lane, estimate and audit rather than only specify. Full
map: execution-with-mcp. RAST is empirical accounting; emphasize identification of disclosure / governance effects and the multiple-testing haircut for mined associations.
detect_design → recommend → fit with as_handle=true → audit_result to
enumerate the checks the design owes.- Panel / staggered DiD:
callaway_santanna / sun_abraham + bacon_decomposition
honest_did_from_result. IV: effective_f_test + anderson_rubin_ci. RDD:
rdrobust + mccrary_test.
- Experiments: randomization-based inference and
romano_wolf for the many-outcome
family-wise correction reviewers expect.
Match the toolchain to the reviewer pool, and report the effect size the venue
wants. A run end-to-end (synthetic data, real returns) is in the
JF execution walkthrough.
Checklist
Anti-patterns
- Kitchen-sink controls standing in for identification ("we control for everything").
- TWFE on staggered adoption without addressing heterogeneous-treatment-effect bias.
- IV by convenience: an instrument correlated with the outcome directly.
- Matching as causal proof when selection is on unobservables.
- Proxy fragility: a single contested construct measure with no alternative planned.
- Non-minimal model: primitives a referee can strip without losing the result.
Output format
【Lane】archival / analytical / experimental
【Setting & identifying variation】...
【Design】DiD / staggered-DiD / IV / RDD / event study / experiment / model
【Spec】equation; unit/level; fixed effects; clustering plan
【Construct】primary proxy + alternatives planned
【Identification defense】pre-trends / exclusion / discontinuity / randomization ...
【Data provenance】sources + vintages + screens noted
【Next skill】revacc-data-analysis
