Examining test statistics from articles in six leading accounting journals, we detect discontinuities in their distributions around conventional significance thresholds (p‐values of 0.05 and 0.01) and find an unusual abundance of test statistics that are just significant. Further analysis reveals that these discontinuities are more prominent in studies with smaller samples and are more salient in experimental than in archival studies. The discontinuity discrepancy between experimental and archival studies relates to several proxies for researcher degrees of freedom. Nevertheless, this evidence does not imply that experimental research is more prone to questionable research practices than archival studies. Overall, our findings speak to the concern of whether accounting researchers could exercise undisclosed discretion to obtain and report statistically significant results. Based on our results, a healthy skepticism of some just‐significant test statistics is warranted.

中文翻译：

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实证会计研究中检验统计量在显着性阈值附近的不连续分布


通过检查六种主要会计期刊文章中的检验统计数据，我们发现它们在传统显着性阈值（p 值为 0.05 和 0.01）附近的分布存在不连续性，并发现异常丰富的检验统计数据只是显着的。进一步的分析表明，这些不连续性在样本较小的研究中更为突出，并且在实验研究中比在档案研究中更为突出。实验研究和档案研究之间的不连续性差异与研究人员自由度的几个指标有关。然而，这一证据并不意味着实验研究比档案研究更容易出现有问题的研究实践。总体而言，我们的研究结果引起了人们的担忧，即会计研究人员是否可以行使未公开的自由裁量权来获取和报告具有统计意义的结果。根据我们的结果，对一些刚刚显着的测试统计数据抱有合理的怀疑是有道理的。