Financial Accounting and Equity Markets

Invited Remarks

Ball and Brown [1968]

Philip Brown*

1. Introduction

It is a great honor for me to be at this conference and speaking to you today.

Nick Dopuch was not all that explicit when it came to a topic for this last session. Nick said, “Talk about anything you like.” I interpreted that to mean I should talk in general terms about my early work with Ray Ball and its influence on the accounting literature; and in particular, about a paper we wrote about 20 years ago, which is now commonly referred to simply as “Ball and Brown [1968].”

I begin by covering the paper itself: the antecedent conditions, why the paper was written, what we attempted to do in the paper, and what was novel as far as we were concerned. Next, I give my view of the ...