Submit-to-Accept Delays in Accounting: Determinants, Comparisons to other Business Disciplines

We use hand-collected data to analyze submission-to-acceptance (STA) times in the top-tier accounting journals relative to other top-tier business journals from 1993 through 2021. We find that, vis-à-vis other business disciplines, STA times at top-tier accounting journals were shorter in the first half of our sample period, and significantly longer thereafter. We also observe shorter STA times for articles with authors from more highly-ranked institutions; this effect exists only in top-tier accounting journals and has increased over time. In additional analyses, we find that our primary inferences are unchanged when considering maturity of initial journal submissions, journal-level democratization, and review-process improvements related to paper quality. Our results should be of interest to researchers, journal editors, reviewers, provosts, deans, and tenure and promotion committees.