The pandemic has had a huge impact on actual economic activity. By the end of March 2020, more than 100 countries/regions around the world have implemented partial or full lockdowns. Compared with March 2019, air and inter-city travel in major world cities that affect billions of people has been reduced by 70% to 90% (Dunford et al., 2020). The national response to this disease has never been seen in previous occurrences. In this case, the government takes two-sided action. First, the government is taking emergency measures, including closing social quarantine areas and investing in testing and isolating suspicious cases and treating confirmed cases to deal with the disease. On the other side, some support and stimulus were also carried out by the government, from the Ministry of Finance to the Central Bank, to overcome economic damage.
Currently, many accounting researchers are conducting research that is included in accelerated special editions or academic conferences related to COVID-19 as it spreads (Kells, 2020; Lapsley, 2020; Mather, 2020). Research related to COVID-19, especially in the accounting field, has increased (Aguinis et al., 2020; Ashraf, 2020; Broadstock et al., 2021; Hyndman, 2020; Izzeldin et al., 2021; Kraus et al., 2020; Lapsley, 2020; Shen et al., 2020). This makes it an opportune time to offer an initial assessment and indication of emerging themes and challenges, particularly in accounting research. This study provides a literature review of COVID research in accounting. We discuss what areas are most challenging to investigate in the future.
Research method and result
Nadia Klarita Rahayu and Iman Harymawan use the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to provide an overview of existing research topic knowledge and insights into its development (Khan et al., 2020; Khlif & Chalmers, 2015). According to Fink (2005, p. 3), SLR is a systematic, explicit, comprehensive, and reproducible method for identifying, evaluating, and synthesizing the existing body of completed and recorded work produced by researchers. SLR provides a summary and understanding of the development of a topic gap (Khan et al., 2020) by gathering evidence from the most relevant data (Rafi-Ul-Shan et al., 2018).
This research examines a variety of research and studies identified by a systematic process that combines electronic research. These various studies were obtained from international databases (Scopus) and libraries by searching for certain keywords. After collecting previous research related to these keywords, an analysis will then be carried out to draw conclusions about the development of research trends regarding COVID-19. The sources of literature used in this review were Scopus, and studies published between January 2020 and February 2021 were retrieved.
According to the obtained data, most research was done using global data as COVID-19 impacted all over the world. Furthermore, topics that are mostly taken up are related to financial markets, such as stock prices. This cannot be denied because much data related to financial markets are available.
As a possible explanation for this finding, we propose future research to develop research with a focus on a country. Each country has different impacts and different inherent factors. By focusing on one country, the discussion will be more in-depth and can provide specific suggestions for that country. In addition, ESG is also a new topic that can still be developed in the future, considering that many countries continue to pursue sustainable development goals.
Author: Iman Harymawan, S.E., MBA., Ph.D
View more of our research:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23311975.2022.2116798
