ABSTRACT
Philip Wilkes Bell was the co-author, with Edgar O. Edwards, of one of the most notable contributions to accounting thought in the 20th century, The Theory and Measurement of Business Income. This chapter discusses Bell’s early background and subsequent career as an economist and examines the origins and content of the Edwards and Bell book. The marrying of economic theory with accounting was an essential ingredient in the Edwards and Bell book. Their common intellectual equipment as economists must also have contributed to the apparently seamless nature of the collaboration. The chapter provides an account of the final stage of Bell’s research career, which he devoted substantially to the extension and application of the ideas in the earlier work. The main area of application that preoccupied Bell was the policy debate on price change accounting. The most notable extension of the original model that Bell adopted was the introduction of “deprival value” reasoning.
