Even though financial reporting primarily falls within the scope of the CFO responsibilities, there is considerable evidence for the CEO's influence on corporate misreporting. Regulatory initiatives such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 have therefore increased the CEO's responsibility in the...

We study whether relative power in the CEO-CFO relationship influences CEO compensation. To operationalize relative power of a CEO over a CFO, we define CFO co-option as the appointment of a CFO after a CEO assumes office. We find that CFO co-option is associated with a CEO pay premium of about...

This paper presents a model in which the CEO generates productive output while the CFO oversees a reporting system that provides information useful for monitoring, decision-making, and contracting, but is also subject to costly manipulation. Because the reporting system serves multiple roles,...