engleski

Accounting research in Croatia

Research activities in accounting are predominantly conducted at state-run universities either in departments of accounting or within departments of finance (and accounting). As of October 2010, there were around 40 active accounting researchers at all state universities in Croatia, combined. Faculty at state universities are divided into four ranks: docent (assistant professor), izvanredni profesor (associate professor), redovni profesor (professor) and redovni profesor u trajnom zvanju (professor with tenure). Faculty is tenured only at the rank of full professor. The criteria for advancement are research based (number of publications) and teaching based (the number of hours of teaching) and are set by the National Council for Science. The ministry in charge of oversight of universities is the Ministry of Science, Education and Sports. Predominantly, Croatian accounting scholars focus on financial accounting, with managerial accounting research being less developed. During the 1990s accounting research was mainly focused on transition to International Accounting Standards (IAS) in Croatia. As a result of low investments in science by the government in the 1990s, the main constraint in conducting accounting research was either limited or even non-existent access to financial databases and published journal papers. Since 2000, however, Croatian accounting researchers diversified into other research topics, and are making continuous efforts to improve the quality of their research, based on the newly acquired access to journal databases that provides them with an insight in past and current research conducted internationally. The constraint that still remains is access (or lack thereof) to financial databases, which limits the ability to perform research on non-Croatian data. Together with the development of capital markets in Croatia after 2000, the number of studies in that area of research has increased significantly. It has, however, remained limited to Croatian capital markets and focused mostly of information content, value relevance, earnings management and voluntary disclosure.

accounting; research; Croatia

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