Chief Executive Officer Turnover and Accounting: a Strategic Repositioning Perspective.

This paper presents evidence on the association between chief executive officer (CEO) turnover and discretionary accounting choice. The findings suggest at least two important ways in which routine and nonroutine CEO turn overs might have different effects on financial statment numbers. Nonroutine turnover CEOs in particular do seem to make income decreasing decisions shortly after coming to power. The other important difference between routine and nonroutine CEO turnover relates to R&D spendings. These results support the argument that accounting earnings are used to signal that a strategic repositioning of the firm has occurred following a changein CEO.