This paper reviews recent evidence analyzing the link between earnings management and corporate tax avoidance and considers the implications for how policymakers should evaluate the financial reporting environment facing firms. A real-world tax shelter is dissected to illustrate how tax shelter...

This paper develops a model of the causes and consequences of misreporting of corporate performance. Misreporting in our model covers all actions, whether legal or illegal, that enable managers of firms with low value to make statements that mimic those made by firms with high value. We show...

By employing the theoretical template provided by agency theory, this paper contributes a detailed clinical analysis of a large multinational Canada-headquartered telecommunications company, Nortel. Our analysis reveals a 21st century norm of usual suspects: a CEO whose compensation is well...

The practice of reporting manager-adjusted 'pro forma' earnings numbers in quarterly earnings press releases has attracted considerable attention in recent years. Prior research suggests that while some managers report these adjusted numbers to better reflect core earnings, others may use these...

We document that accrual-based earnings management increased steadily from 1987 until the passage of the Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX) in 2002, followed by a significant decline after the passage of SOX. Conversely, the level of real earnings management activities declined prior to SOX and increased...

This paper investigates the decision by top-level executives of more than 1,200 public corporations to exercise large stock option awards in the period 1992-2001. We hypothesize and find that abnormally large option exercises predict stock return future performance. We then hypothesize that this...

This study examines firms accelerating the vesting of stock options prior to FAS 123(R) becoming effective. A central tenet of this research is that the firms electing to accelerate do so to take advantage of the opportunity to get option expenses written off in a one-time footnote disclosure....

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...

The pressure to meet/beat analysts' expectations is often blamed for the recent onslaught of accounting scandals. We investigate changes in the meeting/beating phenomenon post-scandals and find that the stock market premium to meeting or just beating analyst estimates has disappeared while the...

The analysis in this paper extends the single-agent/multi-task LEN model in Feltham/Xie (1994) to a multi-agent/multi-task context. A key feature of the paper is that we consider both full- and limited-commitment contracts. The former apply to settings in which the principal can specify the...