This paper argues that academics, politicians, and the media have six commonly held but misguided beliefs about corporate governance. While Armstrong, Guay, and Weber (2010) discuss some of these misconceptions, a wider recognition that these beliefs are actually “myths” is important. They...

We examine which independent directors are held accountable when investors sue firms for financial and disclosure related fraud. Investors can name independent directors as defendants in lawsuits, and they can vote against their re-election to express displeasure over the directors'...

We examine changes in firms' discretionary accounting accruals around the commencement of activism by hedge funds. We argue that hedge funds have the potential to provide increased monitoring of earnings management behavior and we predict and find empirically that average discretionary accruals...

In this study, I summarize the current state of executive compensation, discuss measurement and incentive issues, document recent trends in executive pay in both U.S. and international firms, and analyze the evolution of executive pay over the past century. Most recent analyses of executive...

This study contributes to the understanding of Corporate Governance term by using content analysis on twenty two definitions, dated from 1992 to 2010. We developed a six-dimensional framework and we calculated the frequency count using Internet search engine. Our results reveal that the more...

Performance-based pay is an important instrument to align the interests of managers with the interests of shareholders. However, recent evidence suggests that high-powered incentives also provide managers with incentives to manipulate the firm's reported earnings. The previous literature has...

The U.S. equity compensation landscape continues to evolve. Recent innovations have improved the linkage between pay and firm-specific performance, but have added complexity. Against that backdrop, this Article urges reconsideration of the accounting rules for equity pay. Under current rules,...

Section 304 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (hereafter, SOX), commonly known as the clawback provision, entitles the SEC to sue the CEO and CFO in an attempt to recover their incentive compensation based on misstated financial reports. While a stream of literature investigates the effects of voluntary...

While the social and economic impacts of how disclosures are presented are well-understood, it is less clear how disclosure decisions unfold throughout the annual reporting cycle. We study this issue by exploring the experience of interpreting and implementing corporate reporting rules, focusing...

We test for changes in investment efficiency around a shock to financial reporting quality—the adoption of SFAS No. 123R, which requires that employee stock option (ESO) costs be recognized rather than disclosed at fair value. We predict and find a reduction in underinvestment for firms...