“Evidence-Based” Management Accounting Research

Abstract

The term such as “evidence” and “evidence-based” is becoming one of the most important keywords in any area of recent academic research. In the “evidence-based” research, it is stressed that academic research should provide scientific evidence that contributes to solving the problems. This paper discusses the impact of the idea of “evidence-based” research on management accounting research from the following two points of view: the effect of management accounting systems and the way of exploring causality and/or new variables to be examined empirically. I suggest that we, management accounting researchers, recognize financial outcomes as an economic consequence of management accounting systems and devote our efforts to finding causality between management accounting systems and their financial outcomes.