[...]A fundamental objective of governance research inaccounting is to investigate the properties of accountingsystems and the surrounding institutional environmentimportant to the effective governance of firms. Bushman andSmith (2001) provide an extensive survey and discussion ofgovernance...

Focusing on a key CEO characteristic, materialism, we investigate how the prevalence of materialistic CEOs in the banking sector has evolved over time, and how risk management policies, the behavior of non-CEO executives and bank tail risk vary with CEO materialism. We document that the...

We investigate corporate transparency, defined as the availability of firm-specific information to those outside publicly traded firms. We conceptualize corporate transparency within a country as output from a multi-faceted system whose components collectively produce, gather, validate and...

Motivated by extant finance theory predicting that insider trading crowds out private information acquisition by outside investors, we use analyst following data for 100 countries for the years 1987-1998, to study whether analyst following increases following adoption of or the initial...

We posit that limited transparency of firms' operations to outside investors increases demands on governance systems to alleviate moral hazard problems. We investigate how ownership concentration, directors' and executive's incentives, and board structure vary with: 1) earnings timeliness, and...

We develop an agency-based model that provides a direct theoretical connection between compensation-earnings sensitivities (CERCs) and value-earnings sensitivities (ERCs). The model predicts that CERCs are increasing in ERCs. This relation between valuation and stewardship derives from the fact...

An important, unresolved issue in finance is whether the sensitivity of capital investment to internally generated cash flows reflects the impact of binding financing constraints on firms' investment decisions. We contribute new insight to this debate by providing systematic evidence that...

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...

Audited financial statements along with supporting disclosures form the foundation of the firm-specific information set available to investors and regulators. In this paper, the authors discuss economics-based research focused on the properties of accounting systems and the surrounding...