<heading id="h1" level="1" implicit="yes" format="display">ABSTRACT</heading>This paper studies the role of conservative accounting standards in alleviating rational yet dysfunctional unobservable earnings manipulation. We show that when accounting numbers serve both the valuation role (in which potential investors use accounting reports to assess a firm's...

At first glance, executive stock options with reload provisions appear to be more complicated than conventional options, and thus the valuation of such options would appear to be more difficult. But, as the authors demonstrate in this article, such reload options provide the employee with a...

In this paper we study when it is advantageous to improve corporate transparency by allowing shareholders direct access to corporate information and when it is preferable to rely on a reporting system in which shareholders only gain access to information that management chooses to disclose. We...