Individual skill
jar-theory-development
Use when building the economic mechanism and deriving signed, falsifiable predictions for a Journal of Accounting Research (JAR) manuscript — grounding hypotheses in information economics, contracting, and disclosure theory rather than psychology-style construct chains. Builds the mechanism; it does not design the empirical test (jar-methods) or run it (jar-data-analysis).
Journal-of-Accounting-Research-Skills/skills/jar-theory-development/SKILL.md
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# Theory & Prediction Development (jar-theory-development)
## When to trigger
- Predictions are descriptive ("X is associated with Y") with no economic channel
- A referee asks "what is the mechanism?" or "why would a rational agent do this?"
- The sign of the effect is ambiguous and needs an explicit argument
- You need to motivate an empirical prediction from an analytical/agency model
## How JAR theorizes: economics first
JAR's dominant tradition is **positive, economics-based** accounting research. Predictions are derived from the behavior of informed economic agents — managers, investors, analysts, auditors, regulators — under asymmetric information, contracting frictions, and proprietary costs. The relevant toolkit is **information economics** (signaling, disclosure, adverse selection), **agency/contracting theory** (incentives, monitoring, debt covenants), **market price-formation** logic (how information enters prices and expectations, in the Ball-Brown lineage), and **standard-setting/political-economy** arguments. This is *not* the latent-construct, mediator-moderator style of psychology-based fields: a JAR mechanism is an economic argument about incentives and information, often disciplined by a simple model.
## Build the mechanism