We examine differences in CEO achievement of EPS goals set separately through analyst forecasts and firm bonus plans. Having different goals for the same performance metric enables us to assess their relative importance in incentivizing CEOs. We find CEOs frequently achieve analyst forecasts,...

As firms evolve, the tasks required to generate firm value change, as does the ability of earnings to reflect changes in that value. To the extent earnings differentially captures managers’ effort toward desire tasks, contracting theory suggests its role in incentive pay should also change....

Prior research shows that firms generating earnings growth by improving profitability create shareholder value, while firms generating earnings growth through investment destroy value. This paper examines whether compensation committees consider this while determining CEO compensation. We first...

Compensation committees face special difficulties when setting pay in the last years of a CEO's tenure. For example, incentives to manipulate earnings for the purpose of enhancing earnings-based compensation are greater in CEOs' terminal years. We predict that compensation committees are aware...

The state of the art in the analyst forecasting literature is that analyst earnings forecast ability is only firm-specific (Chen, Francis, and Jiang (2005); Chen and Jiang (2006)). This view is based on Park and Stice's (2000) finding of the absence of a “spillover” effect, i.e., investors...

Using a large sample of earnings press releases by Australian firms, we compare multiple attributes of non-GAAP earnings measures with their closest GAAP equivalent. We find that, on average, non-GAAP earnings are more persistent, smoother, more value-relevant, and have higher predictive power...

We investigate the extent to which market participants use compensation payouts released in the DEF 14A proxy statement (DEF14A) to assess future firm performance by examining sell-side analysts' earnings forecasts. Consistent with prior work, we confirm that CEO compensation unexplained by...

We study whether mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) is associated with changes in the sensitivity of CEO turnover to accounting earnings and how the impact of IFRS adoption varies with country-level institutions and firm-level incentives. We find that CEO...

Does a company's stock mispricing influence its decision to issue an earnings forecast? Does executive compensation affect the nature of the forecast? How does the market react to these forecasts? I address these questions using cross-sectional and time-series variation in stock mispricing...

Compensation committees face special difficulties when setting pay in the last years of a CEO's tenure. For example, incentives to manipulate earnings for the purpose of enhancing earnings-based compensation are greater in CEOs' terminal years. We predict that compensation committees are aware...