Employees’ skill development is key to organizations’ competitiveness in a global, knowledge-based economy. Prior research in accounting, however, has mainly focused on the effects of management control instruments on the provision of transitory effort, thereby treating employee ability as...

This paper uses an experiment to investigate the effects of giving subordinates the possibility to return remaining budget to the organization on capital budgeting processes. We predict and find that when subordinates face no uncertainty when they submit their budget request, the possibility to...

Using an experiment, we investigate whether job candidates’ noncontractible effort promises increase their actual effort in the work relationship when the labor market is competitive. Due to promise-keeping preferences, individuals tend to keep promises even if doing so is costly. However,...

We investigate whether and under which conditions top management uses or commits to not use new information when deciding about intra-year bonus target revisions, and how this use or non-use of information varies contingent on firms’ organizational design. First, we analyze whether firms’...

This study investigates when and why intra-year bonus target revisions occur. This is important as intra-year target revisions occur regularly in practice but are not well understood. Specifically, we analyze two potential drivers of intra-year bonus target revisions: reduced managerial...

This study investigates how performance-to-target (exceeding vs. missing prior target) and task type (ability-driven vs. effort-driven) affect manager's target setting decisions in a setting in which a manager sets targets for multiple employees. We predict that target adjustments are greater...

We examine whether and how German and US investment professionals use corporate social responsibility (hereafter, CSR) information when making personal investment decisions and recommendations to clients. Using an experiment, we find that both German and US investment professionals use CSR...

While prior work in management accounting has mainly focused on results controls, this study investigates how accountability as an action control and the level of job autonomy are complementarily or substitutively used by supervisors in a setting in which results control are largely irrelevant....