[Publication of the October 1985 issue of The Accounting Review marked the culmination of the journal's first 60 years of contributions to the profession. This study identifies and summarizes the contributing authors, their academic affiliation, and where they earned their doctoral degrees. The authors, academic employers, and doctoral degree-granting institutions appearing most frequently in the journal are ordered for the entire 60-year period and for three 20-year subperiods.]

This article presents a comparative analysis of the earnings characteristics of firms electing to make an accounting change and a similar group of firms not electing to make a change during the same period. The manipulative aspect of alternative methods of accounting for the same events has received significant attention in recent years. The apparent increasing frequency of reported accounting changes, or switching methods, has raised the question of potential abuses by company managements of the opportunity to switch to alternative accounting methods. In the present study, the reported earnings of a sample of 80 companies electing to make accounting changes in a year are contrasted with those of 80 companies not disclosing any accounting changes during the period. A dual analysis is presented. First, the pattern or trend of the companies' earnings per share is examined. The second approach is to compare the magnitude of the reported return on common stockholders' investment of the firms in the two groups.

Publication of 'the October 1985 issue of The Accounting Review marked the culmination of the journal's first 60 years of contributions to the profession. This study identifies and summarizes the contributing authors, their academic affiliation, and where they earned their doctoral degrees. The authors, academic employers, and doctoral degree-granting institutions appearing most frequently in the journal are ordered for the entire 60-year period and for three 20-year subperiods.

Reviews the book "Quality Control and Peer Review: A Practice Manual for CPAs," by James W. Pattillo.

Reviews the book "Financial Strategy, Studies in the Creation, Transfer and Destruction of Shareholder Value," by William E. Fruhan.

This paper reports on an attitudinal survey of accounting department chairpersons and college of business deans from AACSB schools. The questionnaire focused on the most crucial issues that have emerged from the debate about schools of professional accountancy. These issues were classified into four categories--autonomy, identity, relationships with practitioners and deterring factors. The deans viewed the deterring factors as being the most important issues; the chairpersons ranked autonomy as the most significant. Considerable disagreement over the specific issues was discovered. Overall, few deans seem to favor the professional school concept.