A review of research on the negative accounting relationship between risk and return: Bowman's paradox

Abstract

A cornerstone in finance theory continues to be the positive relationship between risk and return in spite of Fama and French (The Journal of Finance 47(2) (1992) 427–65) and several later papers finding no relationship between the two variables. Twelve years earlier, Bowman (Sloan Management Review 1980, pp. 17–31) studied the same relationship from organization theory, achieving similar results with accounting data, and developing a whole research stream known as “Bowman's paradox”. This stream has contributed to some curious and interesting ideas that could also be applied to other different streams: new risk measures, managerial goal selection, response to the decline in the organization, diversification strategy on risk and return, among others. Similar to the financial stream, a number of researchers have tried to study this issue from the strategic management perspective. Their inconclusive results have generated a considerable controversy, keeping this research stream alive. In this work, we describe and explore this phenomenon from “Bowman's paradox”, theoretical explanations, criticisms and future orientations.