Individual skill
car-theory-development
Use when building the conceptual engine of a Contemporary Accounting Research (CAR) manuscript — the economic or behavioral mechanism, predictions/hypotheses, or the formal model — adapted to whether the paper is archival, experimental, analytical, or qualitative. Builds the argument; it does not run estimation (car-data-analysis) or frame the contribution (car-contribution-framing).
Contemporary-Accounting-Research-Skills/skills/car-theory-development/SKILL.md
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# Theory & Prediction Development (car-theory-development)
## When to trigger
- Predictions are descriptive ("X is associated with Y") with no mechanism
- An analytical paper has equations but no clear economic intuition
- An experiment lacks a theory that pins down the predicted direction and the process
- A reviewer says "this is atheoretical" or "the predictions don't follow from the framework"
## CAR develops theory differently by tradition
Because CAR is method-agnostic, "theory development" means different things across its traditions, and a reader should never be able to swap in a generic management-theory template:
- **Archival / capital-markets.** Ground predictions in economics-based frameworks (information asymmetry and disclosure, agency and contracting, market efficiency and the properties of accounting numbers). Derive *directional, falsifiable* predictions and, critically, predict **cross-sectional variation** — the moderators that make the effect stronger or weaker are where the theoretical content lives. State the maintained assumptions linking the accounting construct to the market outcome.