Introduction: accounting matters

I am merely preaching to the choir in my preface when I say that accounting matters. As you can read inside this issue, Hans Hoogervorst, Chairman of IASB, recounted several areas in his public lecture at LSE where indeed accounting mattered, and matters, a great deal (pages 8-9). Many of these areas are the subject of our research at LSE, and not only from a technical perspective, but quintessentially also considering how accounting standards are shaping, and being shaped by, their contexts, including their behavioural impacts as well as their economic rationales and political impetuses.