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.

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我们根据什么标准评估会计？关于经济福利与档案文献的一些思考

会计制度的经济作用是通过其与补充制度相结合对企业和家庭行为的影响来增加福利。我回顾了档案文献的三个主要流派（实际效应；价格效应，包括价值相关性；以及昂贵的合同），根据它们可以和不能揭示什么作为福利效应的代理。一个结论是，该文献中占主导地位的部分相关性和平均效应为了解会计在经济中的作用提供了有价值的见解，但为福利效应提供了有限且具有误导性的代理。一个主要的担忧是，根据这些文献提出的教师、学生和研究人员（实际上是监管者和标准制定者）可能会忽视并低估会计对总体福利的根本贡献。