Putting an end to the “earnings game” requires that CEOs reclaim the initiative by avoiding earnings guidance and managing expectations in such a way that their stocks trade reasonably close to their intrinsic value. In place of earnings forecasts, management should provide information about...

We examine how the threat of litigation affects an entrepreneur's reporting behavior when the entrepreneur (i) can misrepresent his privately observed information, (ii) pays legal damages out of his own pocket, and (iii) is optimistic about the firm's prospects relative to investors. We find...

While some of the modern performance measures used in managerial accounting rely on cash flow based figures others try to take advantage of the information content of accounting figures. However, whether the additional information content in the accrual components of earnings improves the...

This paper will look at management control from the viewpoint of enhancing human cooperation within an organization. As control is about human behavior a perspective on control will be founded on a view on human agency. A general framework of cooperative control will be built based on two-stage...

This paper studies the effect of an internal control problem on a firm’s disclosure policy where firms compete in non-cooperative investment game, with each firm deciding to invest in its current technology or to invest in a non-proprietary innovation. By adopting the innovation, a firm earns...

This paper examines the role of multiple measures of performance in a principal-agent model incorporating both moral hazard and adverse selection. The outcome of interest to the principal depends stochastically on the agent’s unobservable ability and effort, while the principal implements a...

The call for disclosure of non-financial information has grown in response to the aware-ness that financial statements omit salient information about the company (Adams et al. 2011). This study follows earlier studies of non-financial disclosures of governance and corporate social responsibility...

This study offers empirical evidence of the principal top management styles in the emphasis of multiple forms of controls. In particular, it analyzed the principal styles in how top managers emphasize financial, nonfinancial and selected behavioral (action accountability) controls in the...

The value added statements' (VAS) literature has been overwhelmingly normative and generally strongly suggested companies should produce a VAS, as did the Nigerian Accounting Standards Board in its Statement of Accounting Standards (NASB, 1984). This study investigated whether the perceived...

We investigate cost-based access pricing in regulated network industries. Building on recent progress in the accounting literature, we show that a regulator must choose a particular depreciation schedule, namely, relative replacement cost depreciation in order to prevent the network provider...