Abstract The article presents the author's opinions on corporate accounting and economics. Accounting and economics go back a long way. I am not a historian of thought nor am I sufficiently versed in the history of thought in either subject to trace their relationship properly, but it certainly goes back to the prehistory of economics and, perhaps, to the origins of accounting as well. The traditional data of the economist comes from the study of markets where information on prices and quantities sold can be observed. The prices that the markets place on securities issued by firms and the changes in these values over time provide an ongoing assessment of the value of such firms. Accounting data, on the other hand, provide an alternative view of the same firms. The information on the balance sheets and in the income statements provides a historical record of where the firm has been and where it currently stands. One way to view the accounting data is to think of them as providing information on the resources used by the firm and on its performance.
Stephen A. Ross (1983) studied this question.