I develop an agency model in which performance measurement and compensation contracts are jointly used to shape incentives. When an agent has extensive control over firm value, there tend to be many optimal measures — each implying a unique optimal contract with a strikingly simple closed form...

I explore the theoretical properties of earnings, prices, and compensation contracts under the assumption that strategic managers are evaluated based on audited financial reports of their own making. If auditors require managers to provide verifiable evidence substantiating the contents of their...

We revisit foundational questions in agency theory while assuming that the agent can fine-tune the joint distribution of all contractible and non-contractible performance measures. Under this assumption, optimal contracts behave as if the principal were making inferences about the outcome she...

Using a principal-agent model in which shareholders care about financial as well as environmental and social (ESG) outcomes, we provide a theoretical framework for regulating and measuring ESG outcomes. We show that when ESG cannot be reliably measured, regulators can improve ESG outcomes by...

Using a principal-agent setting in which the agent has a rich action space, we provide a novel framework for studying accounting measurement and aggregation. We show that the optimal contracting process can be decomposed into three stages: constructing unbiased estimates of items that the...