MEAFA's inaugural meeting took place on April 4, 2007 for determining the structure, orientation and scope of this research cluster. The significance of MEAFA was further discussed in terms of originality, contribution and impact in academia and professional life, in Sydney, Australia and beyond.
MEAFA acknowledges the seed-funding of $5,000 provided by the Research Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences (RIHSS).
MEAFA consists of nine full faculty members from the University of Sydney, three from each participating disciplines (Accounting, Econometrics and Business Statistics, and Finance), and of a number of externally affiliated members from Australia, New Zealand, and Europe.
From the meeting, MEAFA's strategic aims were defined as follows: (i) promote cross-disciplinary research in financial analysis, (ii) implement a programme of joint research, (iii) mentoring of early stage researchers, (iv) communicate results through national and international events, and on-line exposure, (v) attract higher research degree students, (vi) establish visible links and facilitate the exchange of relevant research expertise with individuals and other established research networks in Australia, New Zealand, and beyond, and (vii) secure competitive funding.
MEAFA members have long looked at the suitability of traditional methods of analysis in their application to accounting and finance questions. This research network will critically review existing methodologies in financial analysis, and propose suitable alternatives found in contemporary econometric and statistical methods. MEAFA's research topics are organised under two interlinked categories:
(i) investigation of properties of underlying financial measures, by means of panel data methods of analysis, analytical modelling of financial statement information, examination of direction and degree of causality between accounting and stock market information, identification of a likely range of variation for financial measures and the creation of common-size financial measures, construction of probability density functions for accounting variables and financial ratios, and
(ii) the use of financial measures in an analytical decision context, for examining questions related to corporate restructuring transactions, two and three state classification problems, statistical decision models in the practice of financial analysis, economic models of the dynamic behaviour of the firm for discovering the drivers of financial performance, and for development and evaluation of Bayesian forecasting and quantile estimation methods for Value at Risk (VaR).
MEAFA members have agreed upon a number of activities including scheduled research workshops with international exposure, cross-disciplinary seminars, visits to and from international institutions, participation and presentation of research output in seminars, workshops and conferences, training of higher research degree students.