type="main" <title type="main">ABSTRACT</title> <p>We develop a cost–benefit tradeoff that provides new insights into the frequency with which firms should be required to report the results of their operations to the capital market. The benefit to increasing the frequency of financial reporting is that it causes market...</p>

<heading id="h1" level="1" implicit="yes" format="display">ABSTRACT</heading>In this paper we examine how accounting conservatism affects the efficiency of debt contracting. We develop the statistical and informational properties of accounting reports under varying degrees of conditional and unconditional accounting conservatism, consistent with Basu's [1997]...

<heading id="h1" level="1" implicit="yes" format="display">ABSTRACT</heading>We examine how outsiders rationally interpret a reported loss on derivatives when the application of mark-to-market accounting to cash flow hedges creates a mixed attribute problem. We find that because of the mixed attribute problem, the information content of mark-to-market accounting...

In this paper I advocate and illustrate a new approach to the study of accounting measurement and disclosure that is strikingly different from the usual studies of disclosure in pure exchange economies. This new approach studies the "real effects" of accounting disclosure, arguing that how...

This paper studies sample design for process control in principal-agent settings where deterrence rather than ex post detection is the main issue. We show how the magnitude of gains from additional sampling can be calculated and traded off against sampling costs. It is shown that the optimal...

Economic rationality dictates that only incremental costs and benefits should affect decisions. Observed behavior often seems to violate this principle, resulting in unwarranted commitment to past choices and their escalation. In this paper, we present experimental results that show that...

Accounting measurements of firms' investments are usually imprecise. We study the economic consequences of such imprecision when it interacts with information asymmetry regarding an investment project's ex ante profitability, known only by the firm's managers. Absent agency and risk-sharing...

We examine the effect of higher order beliefs on the ability of decentralized decision makers to coordinate and take advantage of improvements in information transparency that can increase welfare. Theories that address this question have not been empirically explored. We study coordination in a...