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.

Given the idea of the level of evidence that expresses the plausibility of causal inference, there is what we can call a certain “form” in management accounting research. This is the main thesis of this paper. In order to make this argument, I will develop the argument in the following three stages. First, I will identify the patterns of causality found in past studies of management accounting research. Second, I introduce the evidence-level perspective and identify what kind of research design would allow us to make a causal claim. Third, I propose a “form” for improving the level of evidence for management accounting research.

Evidence-based management accounting research discusses relationships between variables. When discussing relationships between variables, especially in empirical studies, hypotheses are constructed based on predictions of relationships between variables. In this paper, we argue that theoretical studies are useful in predicting these relationships. In particular, this paper discusses the relationship between theoretical research and evidence-based management accounting research, focusing on a model that is used in industrial organization research. We suggest that theory, empirical research, and case studies each have a role to play, and it is important to utilize each other to accumulate management accounting research.

Making decisions in management practice based on the findings of academic research is referred to as evidence-based management (EBMgt). Recently, EBMgt has been of interest to practitioners. Then, this paper discusses evidence offered by management accounting research from the perspective of its usefulness for EBMgt. Specifically, it is presented that useful evidence in practice is required to have two viewpoints: valid range and economic consequences, and the background and issues of these viewpoints are discussed. In addition, recent studies on sticky cost behavior are taken up as an example subject to investigate the practical concerns based on those viewpoints when applying the findings of such studies to EBMgt.

Apart from external factors affecting corporate financial results, there exist a number of internal issues which may result in downturn of its financial performance. For the first part, this paper will discuss what situations corporate management has to consider as a “yellow signal” of the company’s performance. “Yellow signal” here means qualitative state of company’s operations which may lead to further deterioration of its performances. The later part proposes hypothesis that gives levels of financial indices which need to be considered as “Yellow signal.” This hypothesis was tested against five Japanese corporations which recently requested lenders to refinance and/or forgive its debts. The results indicated those hypotheses are found generally correct.

In order to recover from slumping business of Kameyama Electric Co., Ltd., the management team including the author in the company have repeatedly changed the management strategy to find out the most suitable one. As a result, Balanced Scorecard is thought of it as the axis of management. This company currently has 2 kinds of BSC, company-wide BSC and departmental BSC. Also, they are now planning to add one more kind of BSC, individual BSCs. By introducing BSC, not only it makes them possible to improve efficiency and rationalization in terms of management and accounting, but also it makes them possible to gain various awareness. However, since there are still some discrepancies in recognition with employees as points for improvement, Kameyama Electric needs to continue to develop BSC to better match its own characteristics.