Footnote and Citation Style Guides 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Accounting

Economics

For departments other than Accounting or Economics, please contact your professor for his/her preferred citation style.

The Department of Accounting recognizes a variety of footnoting styles. They recommend the following:

1. Consult with your professor for their preferred style.
2. Use the Chicago Manual of Style. .
3. Use the format of The Accounting Review, examples of which are given below.
4. Link to American Accounting Association Style Guide Page (Accounting Horizons, Accounting Review, Issues in Accounting Education).
5. When submitting a paper for publication, consult the editorial pages of the journal to which you are submitting for their preferred style. (often located on the inside front cover)

The following are some basic examples of the style used by The Accounting Review. These examples are taken from the first article of the January, 1993 issue. They are slightly condensed and may not make sense out of context. Journals and books should be italicized. The punctuation and spacing is exact.
 

The Accounting Review uses the author-date system within the text and the author's explanatory notes are in standard footnote style - i.e., superscripts in numerical order and the footnote appearing at the bottom of the page; not in endnote form, which would place them at the end of the article.

The footnote may cite other relevant research, or give examples, or just provide more complete explanations.

EXAMPLE WITHIN TEXT:

          A survey of managers of firms declaring stock dividends
     (Eisemann and Moses 1978) indicates that such distributions
     are intended...and another may do so because it faces
     operating losses and a severe cash crunch.1

EXAMPLE OF ACCOMPANYING FOOTNOTE

     1 An example of the former category in Lakonishok and Lev
     (1987,923) is that of Braniff Airlines, which declared a 3
     percent stock dividend in 1971 "to conserve cash for
     investment in new airplanes."  An illustration of the latter
     is taken from a news story in The Wall Street Journal
     (21 October 1981, 38):  "The Board of Directors...which has been
     26 cents per share..."  Related news items indicated that
     Wickes was experiencing operating losses and cash flow
     problems.

Many tables have an accompanying "note" under the box of the table.

EXAMPLE OF FORMAT:

     Note:  The 7-day cumulative abnormal returns (CARs) represent
            the mean market reaction beginning with...

The reference list is in alphabetical order with the first line at the margin, and succeeding lines of each entry indented five spaces. If an author is cited for two or more articles, the entries are in date order with a blank line for the authors following the first listing. Titles of journals are italicized. Titles of articles should not have quotes.

EXAMPLES:

     Abdel-khalik, A. R. 1984.  A note on the validity of the WSJ
          as a source of event dates.  Journal of Accounting
          Research 22 (Autumn): 758-59.

     Belsey, D. A., E. Kuh, and R. E. Welsch.  1980.  Regression
          Diagnostics:  Identifying Influential Data Sources of
          Collinearity.  New York:  John Wiley & Sons.

     Das, S. 1988.  Differential information content of stock
          dividend announcements.  Ph.D. dissertation, Carnegie
          Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.

     _____.  1992.  Concurrent discretionary and routine
          disclosures:  Evidence from earnings, dividends and stock
          distributions.  Working paper, University of California
          at Berkeley.

The Economics faculty acknowledges that a variety of styles are used in this field. They suggest:

1. Consult with your professor for his/her preferred style of footnoting and bibliography.
2. Use the APA Style Manual.
3. Use the style found in the American Economic Review or the Journal of Economic Literature.
4. When submitting a paper for publication to a specific journal, review that journal to determine the style used.

The following are examples taken from The American Economic Review, June, 1993 article, "Mergers and Market Power: Evidence from the Airline Industry," pp. 549-569. These examples are not comprehensive. See the journal for more varied examples.
 

NOTE: The article uses footnotes with superscripts for explanatory information and the author-date system for citing of specific research articles.

EXAMPLES:

"...firm value in successful tender offers increases significantly,
by 7-8 percent (Michael Bradley et al., 1988)."

OR:

"The existence of these potential wealth transfers remains a 
contentious issue.2

NOTE: In the reference list authors are written in boldface, the name of the article is in quotes, and the name of the journal is italicized. Punctuation and indentation, etc. remain the same. Note that the second example is also by the author, Asquith.

EXAMPLES:

Asquith, Paul and Kim, E. Han,  "The Impact of Mergers Bids
   on the Participating Firms' Security Holders,"  Journal of 
   Finance, December 1982, 37, 1209-28.

_______ and Wizman, Thierry A., "Event Risk, Covenants,
   and Bondholder Returns in Leveraged Buyouts,"  Journal of 
   Financial Economics, September 1990, 27(11), pp. 195-213.

Edwards, Corwin D., "Conglomerate Bigness as a Source of Power," in 
   Business Concentration and Price Policy, National Bureau of Economic 
   Research Report, Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 1955, 
pp. 331-52.

Okun, Arthur. Equality and Efficiency: The big
   trade off.  Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution 1975.