This study examines the associations between the Chief Financial Officer's (CFOs) short- and long-term compensation and discretionary current and non-current accruals. The CFO's cash bonus is used as a measure of short-term incentives and shares plus options is used as a measure of long-term...

Purpose: This study examines the moderating impact of corporate governance quality on the relation between CEO bonus compensation and accounting conservatism. Design/methodology/approach: We use market-based and accrual-based measures to estimate accounting conservatism. According to prior...

We contribute to the extensive literature on earnings management by examining the impact of earnings management behaviour on executive compensation conditioned on managerial ability. We find that managers with better abilities are associated with more accrual earnings management, less real...

An extensive literature examines whether senior executives’ contractual incentives influence their financial reporting decisions. However, little is known about whether— and how—the incentives of lower-level (or “rank-and-file”) employees, who are perhaps even more directly involved in...

Meeks and Meeks (2022, MM for short)* has a question in its subtitle, Why spend ever more on mergers when so many fail? There are three interwoven strands in the book’s answer:First, contracts (explicit and implicit) often reward key players in the M&A market — executives and advisers —...

The literature examining the relation between CEOs’ total compensation and earnings management is inconclusive, likely due to unobserved determinants of executive compensation. Our study provides new conclusive evidence on this relation by exploring abnormal compensation, the proportion of pay...

In this study, we find that the average cash flow risk (CFR) of United States firms shows a significantly increasing trend over the past four decades or so. This does not portend well considering the significance of cash flows in maintaining a firm’s financial health and going concern status....

Insiders have private information and often disclose non-GAAP earnings metrics with the claim that such metrics inform investors about earnings persistence. However, because insiders have private information about earnings persistence, they have opportunities to take advantage of this...

Corporate ethical behavior is influenced by the social context in which a corporation operates. The social context consists of legal rules, law enforcement as well as shared norms (culture). Prior literature explores the effects of legal rules and law enforcement on private control benefits and...