This paper examines the provision of managerial investment incentives by an accounting based incentive scheme in a multiperiod agency setting in which an impatient manager has to choose between mutually exclusive investment projects. We study the properties of accounting rules that motivate an...

Capital rationing is an empirically well-documented phenomenon. This constraint requires managers to make investment decisions between mutually exclusive investment opportunities. In a multiperiod agency setting, this paper analyses accounting rules that provide managerial incentives for...

We study moral judgments regarding budgetary slack made by participants at the end of a participative budgeting experiment in which an expectation for a truthful budget was present. We find that participants who set budgets under a slack-inducing pay scheme, and therefore built relatively high...

This monograph presents three variants of the neoclassical investment model and characterizes the firm's optimal investment policy, equity value, and the desirable properties of accrual accounting rules in each setting. Two main questions are considered: (1) What accounting rules result in the...

I analyze a manager's decision to disclose private information when the stock market is a source of information for corporate investment-making. A manager with long-term incentives discloses her private information only if it crowds-in informed trading and increases the manager's ability to...

This paper provides a rational explanation for earnings discontinuity in the context of the agency model. A company manager often possesses private information about the project's expected return. This information is valuable to the firm because early warning that a project is unlikely to...

This paper develops a multiperiod principal-agent model in which a manager must be given incentives to undertake investments and to exert personally costly effort. Investments are soft (e.g., intangible assets) and therefore entail measurement errors for the accounting system as it seeks to...

Accounting measurements of firms' investments are usually imprecise. We study the economic consequences of such imprecision in a setting where accounting imprecision interacts with information asymmetry regarding the ex ante profitability of the project that is privately known by the firm's...

The use of fixed capital budgets is an empirically well-documented phenomenon in business practice. Whensoever some profitable investment opportunities cannot be realized, managers have to make investment decisions between mutually exclusive investment opportunities. In a multiperiod agency...

This study examines how accounting quality relates to firm-level capital investment efficiency. Our first hypothesis is that higher quality accounting enhances investment efficiency by reducing information asymmetry between managers and outside suppliers of capital. Our second hypothesis is that...