Managers use management accounting and control systems (MACS) to monitor and detect deviations from earnings targets. We examine an unexplored side of MACS: its effects on earnings management. We predict and find evidence that managers interactively use MACS to focus the attention of the whole...

Recent research in accounting suggests female directors exert more stringent monitoring over the financial reporting process than their male counterparts. However, an emerging literature in finance and economics provides mixed findings and questions whether females in leadership roles...

We predict that accounting conservatism influences insiders' opportunities to speculate on good and bad news, and thus, insider trading profitability. We find that greater conditional (unconditional) conservatism is associated with lower (higher) insiders' profitability from sales. We find...

We examine the role of accounting conservatism in alleviating the agency problems of overvalued equity. We predict that by imposing asymmetric timeliness of good versus bad news reporting, conservatism limits the incidence of earnings expectation games. According to Jensen (2005), these games...