We examine the effects of performance measure properties on incentive system design, using data on incentive contracts for auto dealership managers. The data include information on five properties: two indicators of risk; two indicators of distortion; and one indicator of potential manipulation....

This study examines the predictive power of comprehensive income and its individual components within the homogenous institutional setting of German IFRS firms. The results could be relevant for the standard setters IASB and FASB and their joint project “Financial Statement Presentation”. We...

This paper examines how the quality of firm information disclosure affects shareholders' use of dividends to mitigate agency problems. Managerial compensation is linked to firm value. However, because the manager and shareholders are asymmetrically informed, the manager can manipulate the firm's...

Contracting parties, such as the firm and its supplier, have cost-reducing incentives to make investments which support the unique transactions between them. However, to the extent that one party may renege on its contractual obligations, the other party incurring the cost of the...

This paper examines the effect of income smoothing on information uncertainty, stock returns, and cost of equity. I show that income smoothing through both total accruals and discretionary accruals tends to reduce firms' information uncertainty, as measured by stock return volatility, analyst...

Commonly used Jones-type discretionary accrual models applied in quarterly settings do not adequately control for nondiscretionary accruals that naturally occur due to firm growth. We show that the relation between quarterly accruals and backward-looking sales growth (measured over a rolling...

Contracting parties (e.g., the firm and its supplier) have cost-reducing incentives to make investments which support the unique transactions between them. However, to the extent that one party may renege on its contractual obligations, the other party incurring the cost of the...

The questions of whether there ever existed excessive risk-taking incentives from executive compensation in the financial industry, and whether top executives of financial services firms actually responded to such excessive incentives that eventually led to the crisis remain unanswered. The...

In this paper, we assess the effects of CEO stock options on three key corporate policies for banks: investment choice, amount of borrowing, and level of capital. Using a sample of 549 bank-years for publicly traded banks from 1992 to 2002, we find that stock option grants lead CEOs to undertake...

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...