We examine whether executive compensation contracts affect conservative accounting. Managers, on the one hand, may increase conservative accounting as a defensive strategy to avoid ex post penalties from clawbacks upon financial misstatement (manager incentive perspective). Stakeholders, on the...

To provide insight into how CEOs aggregate information from different sources to accurately forecast earnings, we examine the relation between CEO network size and management forecast accuracy. We find a negative relation between the size of the CEO’s network and management forecast error and...

We examine how the level and structure of CEO pay is influenced by the characteristics and past experience of the members of the compensation committee, and also how these characteristics and experiences affect the probability of committee appointment. Our main findings indicate that (1) CEO pay...

Managerial incentive plans often combine objective measures of performance relative to beginning-of-year targets with ex post subjective evaluations. We argue that one of the roles of subjectivity is to offset the limitations of target-based rewards and strengthen managerial incentives when...

Recent studies have shown that the congruence (i.e. value relevance) of accounting earnings-based measures of performance (e.g., earnings, residual income) has been declining significantly over an extended period of time. We confirm this prior finding, and examine the implications of poor...

Performance evaluations are typically based on a formula that specifies in advance all performance measures, their relative incentive weights, and targets to be met. However, beginning-of-year performance targets can become outdated due to unforeseen events, which calls for ex post adjustments...

This paper examines whether shocks to less visible product market network peers explain industry level post-earnings announcement drift (IPEAD). On the real-side, we find that peer earnings shocks propagate slowly through the peer network, creating a complex and conditional autocorrelation...

This paper examines how and when CEO debt-like compensation (i.e., “inside debt”) affects debt contracting terms and corporate investment levels. We find a negative relation between inside debt and both R&D and capital expenditures for firms with low financing constraints, but this...