In agency theory, offering a flat salary contract under unobservable effort creates a moral hazard problem because the agent is motivated to shirk and provide less than a previously agreed-upon level of effort. We examine a moral solution to this moral hazard problem. In particular, we present a...

Hannan, Rankin, and Towry (2006, HRT hereafter) propose that an information system is capable of affecting honesty in the manager's budget report by reducing information asymmetry between the manager and the owner regarding the level of honesty in the budget. They find that going from no...

Policy makers and corporations have recently emphasized a code of ethics as an effective aspect of corporate governance. The corporate governance literature in accounting, however, provides little empirical or theoretical support for this emphasis. We address this gap between public policy and...

Growing calls for expanded disclosure on managerial stewardship raise important questions about how finer (i.e., disaggregated) reporting, when paired with discretion over classification, will influence managerial behavior. To study this question, we develop an investment game in which, if the...

We argue that participative budgeting experiments designed to test agency theory predictions reveal the effects of responsibility, transparency, and accountability. We define these accounting constructs and present two experiments designed to isolate their main and interactive effects. In...

We examine the effect of endogenous contract selection on budgetary slack using two slack-inducing contracts found in the literature: a trust contract where the superior must accept the subordinate’s budget and a discretion contract where the superior can accept or reject the budget. Because...

Prior archival studies of analysts' forecasts have found evidence for systematic underreaction, systematic overreaction, and systematic optimism bias. Easterwood and Nutt (1999) attempt to reconcile the conflicting evidence by testing the robustness of Abarbanell and Bernard's (1992)...

Prior archival studies of analysts' forecasts have found evidence for systematic underreaction, systematic overreaction, and systematic optimism bias. Easterwood and Nutt (1999) attempt to reconcile the conflicting evidence by testing the robustness of Abarbanell and Bernard's (1992)...