We study how corporate taxation interacts with intra-firm incentive conflicts between shareholders and managers and how this interaction impacts the firm’s economic decisions and outcomes. In our model, investment under asymmetric information facilitates entrenchment and rent extraction by the...

We incorporate fixed and variable costs into a cash flow based CAPM to investigate how each type of cost affects the cost of equity capital. A decrease in fixed costs always reduces cost of capital. With positive fixed costs, a decrease in the variable cost rate reduces cost of capital despite...

This paper studies, in a dynamic agency setting, how incentives and contractual efficiency are affected by leading indicators of firms' future financial performance. In our two-period model, a leading indicator variable provides a noisy forecast of the uncertain return from the manager's...

This paper investigates the impact of earnings management on incentives and welfare in a two-period agency setting. Managerial performance measures are positively correlated because of a time-invariant productivity component that aff ects earnings in both periods. The firm and the manager learn...

We study the optimal accounting policy when a firm can control the information quality through costly and noncontractible action. It is shown that the desirable accounting has two features: (i) the accounting report aggregates, rather than reporting directly, the underlying information; (ii) the...

To investigate how the possibility of earnings manipulation affects managerial compensation contracts, we study a two period agency setting in which a firm's manager can engage in "window dressing" activities to manipulate reported accounting earnings. Earnings manipulation boosts the reported...

We study a setting wherein a divisional manager undertakes personally costly effort to improve the profitability of an investment project. The manager's choice of innovation effort is subject to a holdup problem because of the ex post opportunism on the part of headquarters. We analyze and...