The research has been built, then, within a framework where stock price (or some other stock price base metric, such as abnormal returns) appears as a dependent variable with contemporaneous accounting data and other data treated as explanatory variables. The paradigm is one that can serve well if we are satisfied with a positive view of research where we seek only to discover what is already "known" in the marketplace about the relation between accounting data and firm value. However, it comes at a potentially important cost. Specifically, it precludes from the outset the possibility that researchers could ever discover something that was not already "known" by "the market.