This monograph presents three variants of the neoclassical investment model and characterizes the firm's optimal investment policy, equity value, and the desirable properties of accrual accounting rules in each setting. Two main questions are considered: (1) What accounting rules result in the...

A fundamental question in accounting is whether and to what extent financial reporting facilitates the allocation of capital to the right investment projects. Over the last two decades, a large and growing body of literature has contributed to our understanding of whether and why financial...

I address the interaction between accounting conservatism and real options in both a staged investment and abandonment model. An accounting policy biased towards classifying a Good (Bad) project as Bad (Good) is conservative (aggressive). The accounting signal is optimally conservative when the...

This paper examines the extent to which the rise in U.S. market-to-book ratios over the period 1980-2000 is due to expenditures on R&D becoming more profitable versus simply becoming more prevalent. More profitable R&D increases the numerator of the market-to-book ratio, while the biased nature...

For some privately-held firms, the costs of providing high-quality accrual-based financial statements may outweigh the benefits of accommodating the demands of their stakeholders who may rely more on cash flows or have direct access to management. For other private firms, greater stakeholder...

The increasing importance of accounting narratives in corporate communications creates the need to find new investigation tools that enrich extant research in the field. This paper explores the potentialities of Corpus-Driven Linguistics (CDL) integrated with discourse analysis, an approach...

Using the transition of US firms from annual reporting to semi-annual reporting and then to quarterly reporting over the period 1950-1970, we provide evidence on the effects of increased reporting frequency on firms' investment decisions. Estimates from difference-in-differences specifications...

Accounting measures are traditionally considered not significant from an economic point of view. In particular, accounting rates of return are often regarded economically meaningless or, at the very best, poor surrogates for the IRR, which is held to be “the” economic yield. Likewise,...

This paper examines the link between managerial overconfidence, conservative accounting and investment. Using Japanese firm data, we estimate a q investment model incorporating real options effects. Consistent with prior studies, we find that managerial overconfidence increases investment--cash...

Accounting measures are traditionally matched against economic measures. For example, accounting rates of return (ARR) are usually considered poor surrogates of the “economic rate of return” and the residual income is sometimes criticized as being periodically inconsistent with the net...