At the fundamental level, the key challenge to a theory of income measurement is to resolve the problem caused by soft information, which leads to incomplete preferences within the entity (i.e. some alternatives are not always unambiguously ranked). This paper presents a formal axiomatic...

Two complementary sources of information are studied in a multiperiod agency model. One is an accounting source which partially but credibly conveys the agent’s private information through accounting recognition. The other is an unverified communication by the agent (i.e., a self-report). In a...

In 1914, an accounting professor named Arthur Andersen founded a public accounting practice that became the world’s largest professional-services firm. For years preceding the Enron debacle and Andersen’s collapse, the firm had struggled to create incentives within the organization for...

In this paper, we model earnings management as a consequence of the interaction among self-interested economic agents -- namely, the managers, the shareholders, and the regulators. In our model, a manager controls a stochastic production technology and makes periodic accounting reports about his...

In this paper, we model two drivers which underlie the economic trade-off shareholders face in designing incentives for optimal effort allocation by managers. The first driver is limited managerial attention, by which we mean that performing one task may have an adverse effect on the...

In this paper, we investigate how the accounting measurement basis affects the capital market pricing of a firm's shares, which, in turn, affects the efficiency of the firm's investment decisions. We distinguish two broad bases for accounting measurements: input-based and output-based...

This paper studies the accounting treatment of uncertainty and how it affects a firm's capital structure. We distinguish two sources of uncertainty that raise reliability concerns: inherent uncertainty and incentive uncertainty. By inherent uncertainty, we refer to uncertainty about the quality...