This paper studies the influence of a manager's pre-decision use of an information system on the central office's decision to provide such a system in the first place. At the outset, the manager is ignorant about the cost of an investment project. Higher effort when using the information system...

We consider a two-period LEN-type agency problem. The principal needs to implement one out of two accounting systems. One emphasizes relevance, the other reliability. Both systems produce identical inter-temporally correlated signals. The relevant system reports an accounting signal in the...

Economic theory suggests that a commitment by a firm to increased levels of disclosure should lower the information asymmetry component of the firm’s cost of capital. But whi le the theory is compelling, so far empirical results relating increased levels of disclosure to measurable economic...

Armstrong et al. (2022) review the empirical methods used in the accounting literature to draw causal inferences. They document a growing number of studies using quasi-experimental methods and provide a critical perspective on this trend as well as the use of these methods in the accounting...

The primary role of equity compensation is to provide incentives to an effort-averse agent. Here, we show that the chosen level of equity incentives, when publicly disclosed, will also convey information about future earnings, causing two-way linkages between incentive compensation and financial...

This paper examines how financial reporting regulations affect, and respond to, macroeconomic cycles by exploring a positive framework in which regulators subject to political pressures respond to cyclical demands by borrowers and lenders. We establish that, as economic conditions initially...

Seemingly self-serving attributions either attribute favorable performance to internal causes (enhancing attributions) or poor performance to external causes (defensive attributions). Managers presumably provide such attributions in earnings press releases to heighten (dampen) investors'...

The notion of awareness is introduced to study Regulation Fair Disclosure, a rule implemented by the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission in 2000. The regulator aims to reduce information asymmetry among investors, and expects public forums to subsume the forbidden information channel of...

Timeliness of financial reporting is one of the attributes of good corporate governance identified by the OECD and World Bank. Shareholders and other stakeholders need information while it is still fresh and the more time that passes between year-end and disclosure, the more stale the...