Conventional wisdom suggests that giving monitored agents an oversight role may blunt the effectiveness of the monitoring process. In contrast, I show that less independent boards can sometimes be more effective at monitoring. Fully independent boards have incentives to shirk monitoring ex post,...

This supplement is a companion piece to NeuroAccounting: Consilience Between the Biologically-Evolved Brain and Culturally-Evolved Accounting Principles. We provide brief summaries of five studies from neuroscience along with key aspects of the findings that are cited in the NeuroAccounting paper

This paper reports the results of experiments designed to examine whether investor selection of auditors enhances auditor independence. The experimental design enables us to explore the effect on independence of different institutional rules over who hires and fires the auditors and to directly...

This paper reports on an empirical study concerning the stipulation that detailed financial information is more useful for lending decision making. Prior research and other evidence assert that the utility of more detailed data is greater than the utility of (condensed) aggregated data. Since...

Carrizosa and Ryan (2017) explore the use of private information covenants, which contractually oblige borrowers to provide their lenders with private information: projected or intra-quarter financial statements. The authors offer evidence that creditors acquire private information about...

We study the intertemporal properties of accounting conservatism with a focus on managerial incentives. In our main model, conservatism results in smaller expected payouts to the manager (agent) in early periods and larger expected payouts in later periods. Conservatism shifts (ambiguous)...

Using a sample of firms experiencing exogenous CEO departures, we investigate whether firms with overconfident CEOs avoid more tax. We find robust evidence of a positive relation between proxies for corporate tax avoidance and CEO overconfidence. Because our empirical tests use a panel of...

We explore the theoretical relation between earnings and market returns as well as the properties of earnings frequency distributions under the assumption that managers use unbiased accounting information to sequentially decide on real options their firms have and report generated earnings...

We investigate the role of board directors from financial institutions (financial interlocks) on the relationship between ownership structure and the cost of debt. In Italy, ownership is largely concentrated often in families, and financial institutions are the primary source of funding for...

We introduce the German Business Panel (GBP), a novel large-scale survey of German firms. The GBP periodically surveys executives and key decision-makers in a representative sample of German firms, taking stock of their perceptions, views, and expectations. A particular focus of the survey is on...