Prof. John Barrios Wins Peter Easton Best Paper Award at Notre Dame Accountancy Research Conference
Barrios and his co-author won the inaugural prize for research on how academic journals’ transparency requirements impact research production.
John Barrios, associate professor of accounting at Yale SOM, and Roman Chychyla of the University of Miami have received the inaugural Peter Easton Best Paper Award for their paper “Mandated Transparency and the Production of Research: Evidence from a Data- and Code-Sharing Policy.”
The award was presented at this year’s Notre Dame Accountancy Research Conference and honors Peter Easton, the university’s Alumni Professor of Accountancy and director of its Center for Accounting Research and Education.
Barrios and Chychyla’s research focuses on the role of transparency requirements in the academic research process. Such research occurs in something like a marketplace: Scholars compete to produce ideas, and journals, readers, and policymakers decide which ones to trust and amplify. That market depends on credibility. Readers have to judge findings they may not be able to verify, and authors have room to present results in their most favorable light. Transparency rules aim to close that gap, but critics have worried they impose costs that could discourage ambitious or risky work.
The prizewinning paper examines these claims directly. In January 2015, the Journal of Accounting Research (JAR) began requiring authors of empirical papers to document their data and share the code used to construct their samples, while its closest competitor journals did not. Studying roughly 4,600 articles from six journals, they found that JAR papers published after the mandate were easier to read, relied less on hedging language, and reported results more comprehensively. When authors knew their work could be checked, they had less room to massage how their findings were presented.
Barrios and Chychyla also found that the policy changed who submitted to the journal and what it published. JAR shifted toward more novel work from scholars at top research universities, with papers on rarely studied topics rising from 4.8% to 19.2%. Its articles drew fewer citations overall, but the citations came from more prominent outlets.
Barrios joined the Yale SOM faculty in 2025. He is also a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He earned his PhD in business administration and MPA in accounting at the University of Miami. His research explores questions at the intersection of labor economics, entrepreneurship, and accounting, with a focus on how regulation and market dynamics shape the choices individuals and firms make.
