This paper studies the role of voluntary disclosure in crowding out independent research about firm value. In the model, when inside firm owners make it easier for outside investors to obtain inexpensive biased information from the manager, investors rely less on costly unbiased research. As a...

This paper studies the role of voluntary disclosure in crowding out independent research about firm value. In the model, when inside firm owners make it easier for outside investors to obtain inexpensive biased information from the manager, then investors rely less on costly unbiased research....

This study investigates the impact of delegation structure of the top management team upon the quality of corporate voluntary disclosure on financial outcomes. The paper develops two competing hypotheses pertaining to the functional relationship between the degree of delegation and the...

Early empirical studies find a negative association between firm performance and shareholder activism, whereas more recent studies document a positive association. We argue and theoretically show that this change in behavior results from mandating executive compensation disclosure. We develop a...

This paper make four important contributions to the accounting literature. First, it shows that discretionary accruals are associated with CEO cash compensation, but that the coefficient is significantly less than that on nondiscretionary accruals. Second, a differential reaction is found to...

We examine the economic consequences of the recent adoption of SFAS 123(R) in the United States. Consistent with the conjectures of prior research, our results show that the removal of favorable accounting treatment for stock options post SFAS 123(R) results in a switch from stock options to...

This paper attempts to use agency theory to understand issues of governance and accountability in the public sector. It contributes to the debate about good governance in Ethiopia and by extension to the rest of Africa. The contributions are fourfold. First, using the microeconomic theory of...

We consider a single-principal/multi-agent model to investigate the principal's preferences over delegated contracting. The analysis extends the single-agent/multi-task LEN model in Feltham and Xie (1994) to a multi-agent/multi-task context. We consider full-commitment contracts, i.e., the...

A common means of incorporating non-verifiable performance measures in compensation contracts is via bonus pools. We study a principal-multi-agent relational contracting model in which the optimal contract resembles a bonus pool. It specifies a minimum joint bonus floor the principal is required...

This paper examines how the centralization of loan decisions affects decision making in a bank. To that end, we combine field data with a lab experiment to study how loan officers change their effort to collect and share soft information about small to medium-sized applicants when their decision...