In this paper, we study a setting where a firm (principal) is privately informed of the firm's potential and contracts with an agent to supply unobservable effort. We show it can be optimal for the firm to have loose monitoring in the sense that the monitoring system is less perfect than what is...

The discussion on value-based performance measures is centered around the concept of residual income. The main property of residual income is its connection to capital budgeting and the net-present-value-rule. This property is, however, not sufficient to guarantee strong goal congruence between...

This explorative study contributes to the limited body of knowledge on the financial impacts of using multiple forms of controls in managerial performance evaluations. The study explores (1) how short-term profitability is affected by headquarters' emphasis on financial, nonfinancial, and...

This paper studies the role of conservative accounting standards in alleviating rational yet dysfunctional unobservable earnings manipulation. We show that when accounting numbers serve both the valuation role (in which potential investors use accounting reports to assess a firm's expected...

Contemporary studies on cost behaviour find that costs increase more with activity increases than they decrease in response to equivalent activity decreases. This sticky cost behaviour contradicts the traditional model which assumes that costs behave symmetrically for activity increases and...

European clearing houses are facing competition on their home markets for the first time. In order to meet this new challenge, the management of a clearing house needs to identify its stakeholders and their interests and must define a strategy including financial and non-financial aims. We...

Vertical integration is often proposed as a way to resolve hold-up problems, ignoring the empirical fact that division managers tend to maximize divisional (not firmwide) profit when investing. This paper develops a model with asymmetric information at the bargaining stage and investment returns...

This paper reviews and proposes additional research concerning the role of publicly reported financial accounting information in the governance processes of corporations. We first review and analyze research on the use of financial accounting measures in managerial incentive plans and explore...

Using data from FTSE 350 firms, we examine factors influencing explicit relative performance evaluation (RPE) conditions in performance-vested equity grants. We provide exploratory evidence on whether the use or characteristics of RPE are associated with efforts to improve incentives by removing...

In this paper, I examine issues relating to managers' ability to influence their performance evaluation. In contrast to conventional wisdom, I show that such influencing is not necessarily deleterious to shareholder welfare, despite the fact that it is aimed at maximizing the managers'...