THE SCIENTIFIC PRODUCTION ON INFORMATIONAL ASYMMETRY ON INTERNATIONAL ACCOUNTING JOURNALS

Abstract

The main objective of this study was to analyze the scientific production in the area of asymmetric information published in international accounting journals. The work, described as empirical-analytic, with documental and content analysis, relied on techniques of bibliometrics and social network analysis. It turned out that the 9 journals, three published 70% of the analyzed content. The United States of America was the country that received the most nominations of the bond, which implies that also produced a greater amount of work. For not being a directly observable variable, the information asymmetry need proxies, and among the works analyzed the most important were the bid-ask spread, coverage, forecast and forecast error of investments analysts, probability of informed trading and accounting quality. The average age of the works used as reference was 13 years and the basic theory used dates from to the 1980s and early 1990s, with an emphasis on disclosure. The most cited authors in the sample were Ross L. Watts, Ray Ball and Paul M. Healy. We also detected the presence of 14 “invisible colleges”, 3 of which stood out from the others by the size and geographic and linguistic characteristics.