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 study examines whether CEO equity incentives have an impact on audit pricing. Prior studies investigate whether CEO equity incentives motivate executives to manage earnings for personal financial gains. Our focus is on whether auditors perceive CEO equity incentives to be associated with...

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...

The incentive effect of CEO portfolio delta (i.e., the sensitivity of CEO wealth to changes in stock price) on financial misreporting is inconclusive given a complex reward-risk tradeoff faced by CEOs (e.g., a positive “reward effect” versus a negative “risk effect”). We propose that the...

When designing incentives for a manager, the trade-off between insurance and a "good" allocation of effort across various tasks is often identified with a trade-off between the responsiveness (sensitivity, precision, signal-noise ratio) of the performance measure and its similarity (congruity,...

Baker (2002) has demonstrated theoretically that the quality of performance measures used in compensation contracts hinges on two characteristics: noise and distortion. These criteria, though, will only be useful in practice as long as the noise and distortion of a performance measure can be...

The objective of CEO compensation is to better align CEO-shareholder interests by inducing CEOs to make more optimal (albeit risky) investment decisions. However, recent research suggests that these incentives have a significant down-side(i.e., they motivate executives to manipulate reported...