This paper examines why CFOs become involved in material accounting manipulations. We find that while CFOs bear substantial legal costs when involved in accounting manipulations, these CFOs have similar equity incentives to the CFOs of matched non-manipulation firms. In contrast, CEOs of...

This paper examines the effect of Chief Financial Officers' (CFOs') individual philosophy or ldquo;stylerdquo; on corporate accounting choices. We track 359 CFOs across different firms over time and investigate whether CFO-specific factors explain a firm's accounting choices. We find that,...