The goal of this course is to provide an overview of accounting research in the area of unregulated entities and transactions. Specifically, the first half of the course will cover accounting choices and consequences by privately held firms. The second half of the course will cover the usefulness of accounting information for stakeholders of the firm that are not equity investors or lenders (non-investor stakeholders), with a focus on suppliers and customers as well as employees. The focus of the course will be to expose students to the existing literature in each of these areas, but we will also discuss the challenges of exploring unregulated transactions and entities, notably accessing data and settings. The course will also contrast the findings in the private-firm space to much larger body of work that uses public firms and investor transactions as a setting. Lastly, we will also discuss the appropriateness of different research designs and statistical methods in this space.
